Tom Greaves (@twgreaves) and I are working on this year’s Mobile Trends Report for the Software & Information Industry Association‘s Education Division.
Big issues this year include:
- The blossoming of Netbooks in the education market that was just beginning last year at this time.
- Millions of students now go to school with network-connectable mobile devices in their backpacks. When will schools begin to let them connect to school networks in large numbers?
- With Nokia, Android, Palm, and the wireless carriers all rushing to duplicate the success of the iTunes App Store, will any of them do anything in the education space, or will they ignore the hegemony of iTunes U.
- In a previous post, I mentioned structural problems with the App Store that make site-licensing apps for K12 harder that it should be. Will the newcomers duplicate those mistakes?
If you have thoughts on these, or think other issues are critical to the widespread adoption of mobile devices in education, leave a comment here. …or tweet with the hashtag #SIIAmobile.
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Copyright © 2008-2012 Richard A. Milewski
I am all for working with mobile technology in education but in specific ways. One post mentioned an issue with mobile technology use – assessment. For this and other reasons I would limit its use to activities in a course but not for the course itself. Examples like collaborating, researching, responding within a course as a part of many tools that are used.
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As the business model for academia changes, the platforms for communication will undergo radical adaptation to include the use of mobile devices as an integral part of the enterprise.
In my role as Chief Information Officer (CIO) at a mid-western university, I introduced “Smartphones” as a means of empowering the institution’s leadership to perform multiple tasks including web-surfing for on-demand information retrieval and real-time response to e-mails while travelling on university business.
As a cost reduction strategy, I negotiated to have all phones on the contract share in a “staggered minutes usage” program.
Regards,
Preston Williams III
Member, Global CIO Think Tank
Member, Internet Evolution
While assisting a trend, student response systems (clickers) is a fly-by piece of hardware that will become obsolete once districts realize that they can replicate their functionality through existing hardware infrastructure i.e. cell phones and student computers. The challenge of taking advantage of the student devices is building applications that are compatible with all the cell-phone operating systems “out there”. There is no gain from the district perspective, if money has been saved in hardware investments, but now the technology department is spending more time and money in getting technical platforms compatible. However as the mobile data connection bandwidth grows, you can accomodate more sophisticated webbased S-A-A-S applications, which is when this will be (from a hard- and sofware point-of-view) taking off.
I was working with ConnectED, a company who work on cutting edge technology for schools and they have been introducing Sony PSP handhelds to the classroom for a number of years. I have trained teachers and students alike to use the product in the classroom with great success. The technology is engaging and familiar for students, while completely secure and of course value for money. with the added “go cam” mounted to the top you basically have a £130 video camera for field trips etc. I do think that once we can attach relevent, curriculum based content to these platforms the perception of “gaming toy” to “multi function platform” will be realised.
I agree. It is a shame that we are not leveraging the power of the computing devices students are actually bringing into schools. Instead, we insist on ‘seat time’ and test scores for accountability, when right in students’ pockets and purses are powerful tools that could help. Fortunately, there is a growing number of teachers who are instigating grass roots ‘social’ efforts to do interesting and creative things with digital all kinds of devices and tools — in spite of bureaucracies that sometimes stifle their efforts. Notice the growing number of teachers using twitter, FB, gathering at WeAreTeachers (disclosure — my company). We are providing small grants to teachers, funded by corporate sponsors, to support their efforts to improve learning directly. I trust teachers to get it done.
To begin, it would make sense to look at what handheld heavy-hitter Wireless Generation is planning to do to integrate smartphones with wireless connectivity into its offerings. As the early leader in the space, they have an opportunity to do some great things with assessment-guided instruction.
I am increasingly interested in learning how mobile devices can be used for formative assessment data capture in lieu of expensive bubble sheets/scanning hardware or finicky plain-paper scanning solutions, both of which seem stuck in time. And a smartly-designed handheld device could help us learn so much more than whether a student responds “a”, “b”, “c”, or “d”. It could potentially record student work on an item, including steps use to research a response. We’ve seen that reporting/DW tools- such as NYC’s ARIS program (also developed by Wireless Generation) have taken huge leaps forward, while the data capture side of formative assessment still looks a lot like it did in 2001.
From the point of view of the relationship between teacher and student the potential that mobile devices offers is enormous but has barely been touched yet.
Increasing mobility, increasing offerings of data within mobile phone packages by providers, increasing access to social computing by means of mobile devices and the trend away from downloading ringtones in favour of socialising all point towards the importance that mobile devices are starting to play in a sutdent life.
Computers continue to offer more power in smaller handsets and this, combined with increasing cloud computing, means that there is less and less need for big laptops with lots of memory. The demand is for small but fast devices with universal connectivity whereby students can access anything they want, anytime they want. Where mobility, a couple of years ago, meant mobile phones, it now means any device that is portable enough…
I spend a considerable amount of time with teachers helping them understand this changing environment and finding them the tools to help them into the confusing array of options that they may use to connect with their students. Five years ago I had them doing digital storytelling so that they could offer lessons that could be seen on any device and now I am showing them how they can build their own mobile websites with information, questionnaires and reports. All with free software and something that they can do at their desks with little need to call upon IT departments.
The even present constraint remains the control that education providers feel they need to maintain over wireless, access, social sites and more. I recently ran a project where students were provided with mobile phones to communicate with the project computer. We went to enormous lengths to restrict these phones so that the students could only use them to make the calls to the single contact number of the computer. That each and every one of those students had their own phones with their own access to whatever they wanted seemed to be something that slipped below the radar altogether!
With more learning happening in the workplace from apprentice to life change students the importance of a mobile device, be it PDA, iPhone, Blackberry or smartphone will increase the pressure on educators to use those channels to reach their students.
This is not to say that this is the only way in the future as a blended approach is always going to offer more variety and option but the balance is certainly shifting and it is a wonderful thing to see the way in which students will help teachers use their technology so they can get their learning on the devices they use the most.
Anyone who thinks that mobile devices are not the future of education is kidding themselves! Rather than fight the future we need to embrace it and find the value for our children.
I should have specified that I was interested in the iPhone Dev University material… I think there are some truly free materials up on iTunes U as well. Still – limiting that information to University Students alone is a mistake in my opinion. Lots of us out there (working developers in other languages) who would like to go through that on a self-study basis
I note that iTunes U has a dependency on using a Mac Server. Do the other players in this space have as compelling a financial motive for entering the educational space? Perhaps Google… I also note that as an individual, I cannot access the “free” educational material without paying a university or educational institution’s fees. Interesting use of the word “free”…
Apple has great penetration into educational space already, don’t they… Many more Macs in the educational system – at least before college. No one else can say that. Again, via the web, Google could close that gap in weeks…
I think (in the end) it will be the open source and individual developers who decide this, but that is several years off. The iPod and iPhone are not an ideal platform – too small. Netbooks are another matter… A netbook running the Android platform would be really interesting, but sans Mac-type eye-candy it won’t make it in my opinion. I love Linux, but there’s no way my kids would use a Linux mobile device over a Mac of the same type… The eye-candy is too compelling.
I’m not waiting… I have 4 children and have written two iPhone applications to help them with their homework on an iPod. Grades improved dramatically. Eye candy made playing the “game” interesting.
I see the mobile space as a huge opportunity for education, but I believe that “free” educational material should be available to individuals (not just educational institutions) for free. In the end, that kind of freedom will probably have to come from motivated individuals or non-profits rather than any corporate agent.
You can see the future of mobile devices today in Europe and Asia. Students have been using their mobiles to catch up on assignments, download content and even take tests for two to three years in Europe. They see no difference between mobile and PC access to content except the size of the keyboard. My company (it’s learning, inc.) has been supplying an LMS with mobile access for almost three years. It’s a standard feature.
The situation in the US is the usual – administrators are afraid that students will do something non-academic on their mobiles, so they ask them to be turned off at the door of the school. When the adults get over their fears, our children will be able to use the same technology as their peers all over the world.
Unfortunately, that may take a few more years!