Main areas of interest are HCI in education and safety-critical systems. He served for a large number of conferences and journals. He is an author of more than publications, among them 7 books. He worked as a consultant and director for industry and government for more than 30 years.
The question about further meaningful and effective progress in the next decades is openly discussed. Many expect strong influences and changes from artificial intelligence systems that generate contextualized information from various sources. Some see interactive virtual worlds expanding and partially replacing the physical world. Many believe in the further development of learning management and communication platforms.
Others do not expect much valuable change at all due to the slow pace of complex educational systems with recent studies even showing a decline in the quality of educational outcomes during the last five years as a result of even too much digitalization in education.
This paper discusses these positions with an emphasis on the roles of humans and computers and their interfaces, i. If so, what are the major changes? Even when I use my smartphone the situation is completely different to the past because I have more information at my fingertips than ever before. Let us look at the current situation and start with an imaginary walk through a pedestrian zone.
Many people there stare down, not at the ground, but at their smartphones. Hardly anyone of them knows or wants to know how long the Amazon is without consulting Wikipedia or similar Internet information sources.
