As a child I remember watching the original series of Star Trek, and enjoying the freedom provided by the computer on board the USS Enterprise. Whenever confronted with a new species, or stuck with a difficult problem, or seeking information about any topic what so ever, the crew would interrogate the ship’s computer and get a clear answer to their question. This would either come through via a voice interface, or be pulled up as pictures or moving images on the screen on the bridge. This was the large plasma television screen in front of Captain Kirk’s La-Z-Boy chair (one of the many amusing ways in which this television programme was at heart about the experience of watching television itself).

Daft science fiction, right? Except that yesterday I came in to find my son and wife playing a game based on a classic Tom and Jerry cartoon they’d just seen on telly. It was the one in which Jerry’s Texan uncle comes to visit. He constantly plays his guitar until the strings break, whereupon he blithely pulls out one of Tom’s whiskers to use as a replacement string. My wife had been letting my son pull her whiskers out, and it was all very funny, but I wanted to join in myself and hear the uncle’s singing for myself. So I opened the laptop beside our sofa and typed in “You tube tom and jerry uncle whisker” and the first link that appeared was to the correct cartoon. It’s called Pecos Pest. And we watched it again, without missing a beat. The lesson for my son was clear: want pretty much anything, go to the computer.

Next day I was given a tour of a nice local primary school in our area. In a crowded room full of terrified parents I sat on a tiny stool while the school’s headmistress stood on a chair and sold the school’s many benefits. She didn’t have to sell very hard: last year 300 people applied for 60 places, sigh. However, she did grow animated when she started talking about the school’s electronic whiteboards. These essentially turn the white board into a large, touch-sensitive computer screen, which can also be used to show DVDs or television. I’ve heard mixed things about electronic whiteboards, but this head teacher was clearly a believer – she said they had revolutionised classroom teaching.

I’ve heard another teacher describe using Google Earth on an electronic whiteboard as part of a geography lesson. This allowed all the children to watch as they ‘flew’ from their precise coordinates to different cities around the world, drawing them into an intuitive and yet very personal understanding of their place on the planet that would be pretty much impossible to do any other way. As a schoolboy I remember writing my address, followed by “England, Europe, The Earth, The Milky Way Galaxy, The Universe.” Google Earth lets a child feel that sudden change of a scale in a way no paper map can do. And the lesson for the children in that classroom, staring like Captain Kirk on his hot seat on the bridge of the Enterprise: want pretty much anything? Go to the computer.

Schools are in some ways pretty conservative places. I like the quote from one US academic who said that educators are the people who took thirty years to move the overheard projector from the bowling alley to the classroom. Schools are also slightly mysterious: unless you work in education or have children in schools yourself, your ideas about what should or could go on in schools are probably twenty years out of date and filtered through whatever tricky emotions you went through at the time.

So, apologies to all you experienced whiteboard veterans out there, but as a newbie parent I was struck this week by how rapidly ubiquitous computing power has become the reality for even very young children, forming a seamless web that surrounds them at home, on the bus with their mobile phones, and in the classroom on whiteboards and shared laptops. I wonder what it will be like to grow up as Captain Kirk. I suppose I’ll read about it on their blogs: as Google’s own blog points out, Captain Kirk practically invented blogging anyway.

---

Michael Parsons, now editor of CNET.co.uk, was once European correspondent for The Red Herring magazine, and spent five years working in Silicon Valley and worrying about technology. He can be reached at michael.parsons@cnet.co.uk

Times recommends

• Hackers target Apple Macs
• From joystick to helmet: it's all in the mind
• 'Maniacal' engineer takes city computers hostage