This thing isn’t interactive except in the most basic way. It’s basically Wikipedia TV, where you flip between the channels. No cut and paste. No annotations. No editing. No pictures and sounds. No current affairs.

And are we really saying kids don’t have these devices already? The killer feature of Wikireader is that it’s simple and the battery lasts forever. But kids really don’t care about either of those things, and they probably already have more powerful phones with bigger screens – particularly at GCSE+.

I hope I’m just being cynical, but this “wow! wikipedia in your pocket!” just doesn’t grab me. The first kid who walks into school with Microsoft Courier is going to ensure no other kid ever pulls out a Wikireader again though.

Remember how calculators changed maths for the current generation? This could do the same for every other school subject. And maths too.

Imagine most kids having this sort of device in their pockets. Suddenly the teaching paradigm moves from sourcing information to critical analysis of that information.

I hear too often about homework assignments that are “go and look up X on the internet and write a summary of what you’ve found”, which seems like total cop-outs by teachers and don’t do much to stimulate critical thinking. If you assume EVERYONE has this information in their pocket, you will raise the bar on the type of assignment that will be set.

Instantly we go from “here is how to use a slide rule” to “let’s talk about graphing equations”.

Wow.