Hey Reg,
Great post! Intelligent things are coming in a big way and by no means (like you and others have mentioned) will this technology be limited to a few industries. Intelligent things are inserting themselves into every aspect of our daily lives for the key purpose of simplifying routine (easy or difficult) tasks — from self driving cars, to virtual personal assistants. Thinking about education, I already see intelligent things in the infrastructure of schools particularly with respect to networking. Over the past few years, our school district has massively upgraded our network adding exhaustive security measures so that students and staff can bring up to 3 devices to connect with the network while at school/work. This allows for teachers to leverage the BYOD model to help further personalize student learning.
As always – a concern with “smart things” is security. My school (really the district” claims to have industry tight security on our networks to ensure that devices are safe from potential cyber related breaches, however, we have had issues with a few students accessing the “controls” and ultimately the data housed within the network. So that is, and always will be, a legitimate concern with smart things. While they are smart, they are also a window into the infrastructure of all things smart.