2:15 PM
santigo
For most people, the words "mobile phone" and "learning" are
antonyms. If Shakespeare's plays and Proust's novels are at one end of a
spectrum tracing intellectual rigor, mobile phones—brimming with
moronic Twitter feeds, emoticon-stained text messages, and absurd
games—are on the other, or so the thinking goes. Despite the fact that
mobile phones have become increasingly central to our day-to-day lives,
we continue to maintain that far from facilitating learning, the devices
tucked in our pockets actually thwart the development of analytical
thinking skills.
As a result, schools often ban mobile phones. In developed and
developing countries alike, a person is as likely to find a "no
cellphone" sign taped to a school wall as a "no smoking" sign. And the
similar design of the signs—an image of a phone or cigarette with a red
slash through the middle—is hardly an accident. They both communicate an
unambiguous message: cellphones, like cigarettes, provide a quick fix,
but ultimately they will hurt you and, therefore, have no place in
centers of education. Research collected at UNESCO indicates that phones are strictly prohibited in many schools around the world.
Fortunately, a small but growing number of school leaders have
realized that mobile phones, far from being a Marlboro encased beneath
an LCD screen, are devices of dizzying utility, and that they carry
enormous potential to empower learning, not only in schools but also
beyond them. Today, who among us has not used a mobile phone to solve a
problem, learn something about the world, or cooperate with others?
Whether it be reading a newspaper, geo-tagging photos, checking the
pronunciation of a word, translating one language into another,
exploring new music and videos, or composing something artful in an
email or, yes, even a text message, we are all already learning with
mobile devices.
To pretend that people cannot or will not leverage technology to
improve their productivity is naive and ultimately self-defeating. We do
not ask students to forgo word processors in favor of typewriters,
calculators in favor of slide rules, or Internet databases in favor of
card catalogs, and even if we did, students would ignore us. The
benefits of having instant access to communication and the largest cache
of information civilization has ever known are simply too great to
ignore.
Just ask the people of Africa: On that continent, people spend, on
average, 17 percent of their monthly income on mobile phones and
connectivity plans. People in Western Europe and North America spend
under 2 percent. Why are Africans willing to spend so much? Because the
cost of not having a mobile device is greater. Mobile phones have become
an essential ingredient of everyday life; they are more appendage than
tool, often the first thing we look at in the morning and the last thing
we see before going to bed.
Today, the question is not whether schools will engage with mobile
technologies, but when and how. To borrow a (perhaps crude) analogy,
the relentless push to enhance our intelligence with technology—and,
make no mistake, we are enhancing our intelligence when we lean on our
phones to fill in gaps in our knowledge—resembles an arms race. Sticking
with swords when the other side is transitioning to muskets is not
really a choice. And even if a treaty exists that asks all sides to keep
muskets out of their armories, when one party defects, the others are
suddenly under pressure to defect as well, lest they fall behind.
This innovate-or-die instinct applies to education as well: When
one university makes the contents of its library searchable from any
digital device with an Internet connection, others are obligated to
follow. And when one school figures out how to teach students to use,
rather than shun, ubiquitous and extremely powerful technology toward
constructive ends, other schools must follow suit as well. Education may
be notoriously slow to change, but it is hardly immune to the laws of
creative destruction.
While "disruption" is often a word that gets tagged to efforts to
integrate technology in education, the idea that learning facilitated by
mobile devices will suddenly make teachers and perhaps even schools
extraneous relics of a pre-digital age couldn't be further from the
truth. Knowing how to use technology in ways that foster healthy
intellectual and social development is not self-evident at all. Study
after study has revealed that despite knowing the basics of how to thumb
through mobile applications, students are ill-prepared to skillfully
navigate the oceans of information available to them. They can find
websites and download software, sure, but filtering, organizing, using,
and learning from myriad resources is a different matter entirely.
Experiments have shown, for example, that very few students know
how to use electronic databases to help them identify high-quality
content. More recent investigations suggest that even advanced
university students will rarely consider information beyond the top four
or five Web pages returned by an Internet search engine when
formulating answers to complex questions. Increasingly, students appear
to be putting more trust in machines than in their individual abilities
to critically evaluate the relevance of data. Thus far, schools have
failed to provide a counterweight to the unthinking algorithms of Google
and Yahoo because, too often, they turn a blind eye to the technology
students are using to access information.
To be sure, in the wrong hands, a mobile phone can be the
intellectual equivalent of a cigarette. A teacher's job is to show
students how it can also be educational broccoli—something that builds
healthy minds.
Mobile devices need not be threatening to educators. They can help
both teachers and students work smarter and faster and in contexts that
better approximate the technologically enhanced and, yes, sometimes
technologically laden world waiting outside the classroom. A primary
task of teachers is to help students know the difference: to evaluate
when technology is a genuine tool and when it is a flashy distraction.
Teachers are well-placed to help students learn how to leverage the
technology that is increasingly converging inside mobile devices to
accelerate learning.
Make no mistake, mobile devices are here to stay. They assist in
tasks of every type, from finding and securing jobs, to learning the
market prices of commodities, to sending pictures, to checking account
balances, to bringing down corrupt governments. If you can think of a
project, more often than not there is a way the phone in your pocket can
help you do it. Today, there are more than 5.9 billion mobile-phone
subscriptions worldwide, and for every one person who accesses the
Internet from a computer, two do so from a mobile device. Current
projections suggest that you will be very hard pressed to find anyone
without a working mobile phone by 2015. From Burma to Bangalore to
Baltimore, we are a world united in our embrace of this transformative
technology.
Banning mobile devices in an era literally saturated with them is
no longer a viable option, not for individual schools or for larger
education systems. Engage we must.
The harder question of how to use the devices to enhance learning
will probably take years to sort out, but that task needs to begin in
earnest. And educators, not technologists, are the ones who should blaze
the path forward; they are the experts in learning and development. The
Nokias, Apples, and Samsungs of the world have provided us amazing
tools at affordable prices. It is now our job to figure out how these
tools—the ones we use every day—can further and deepen not only the
education of students around the world but, indeed, our own educations.
Mobile phones need not be an educational cigarette; they carry a
vast and unrealized potential to make learning more accessible and more
effective everywhere. The time to seriously explore this potential is
now.
