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A key change at iCommons
If you're not part of the iCommons mailing list, take a look at the letter that Heather Ford, Executive Director of iCommons, sent to the list yesterday:
Dear friends,
At the 2 August iCommons Board Meeting, the board decided to make some difficult but necessary changes at iCommons. It has become clear over the past months that our vision for iCommons is different from the... more
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Who will put learning onto mobile phones?
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As practitioners in the realms of the Internet and digital culture and education, we need to ask ourselves: What are we waiting for? When will we use the devices that are now in the hands of 3 billion people to deliver learning: literacy, knowledge, education?
The 3 billion people who already have a mobile phone make up nearly one half of the world's population. When lessons are made available on mobile phones, it will be half of the people on earth who could look into their own hand and see the little window where learning could reach them. We know that little window is opening with particularly great speed and global coverage for the young generations for whom learning is crucial.
Places where nearly everyone has at least one mobile phone includes Japan, South Korea, Finland, Hong Kong, Norway and the UK. China and India's enormous markets are absorbing the devices by the millions. In the United States the mobile phone market is not far behind leading European and Asian sectors. Even with all of that mobile ownership in more technologically advanced countries, the largest number of subscribers to mobile services are in developing countries.
Every village in Tibet now has mobile service. In Peru and neighbouring Latin American countries the telecoms are competing to see which can supply mobiles most effectively to remote countrysides. The African miracle of mobile access seems to predict that the installation of wired desk computers will be skipped in some places there. The Arab mobile market multiplies and multiplies.
Wherever you may live, you are able to watch your own teenagers and pre-teens using mobile phones. Just about everywhere, too, we worry about education not measuring up to the future these kids will move into all too quickly. Changing education has been a very a slow process, and making education more effective has been a hard and frustrating endeavour.
Mobile learning is a completely new opportunity. It is a perhaps the most meaningful gift of the digital age, and as a creature of the digital age, mobile learning is naturally at home in the global commons, for one wonderful reason: the common nature of wireless communication and delivery through the little window in your hand, means we can all learn from the same digital page.
Literacy levels are already being nudged ahead just by the need to learn to read enough to use mobile phones. Images have already spread virally from phone-to-phone. We have heard the most about how mobile cameras are capturing images of world events, to be reproduced by 'big' media. Increasing information about weather, crops, business, sports and other areas is showing up in the little windows. Learning has a place here too.
What are we waiting for? Where is a digital tutor to teach arithmetic? How about an animation that describes cell division and another for the definition of DNA? Where are the speeches of the world's greatest leaders and thinkers - that we could read on, or listen to, from our mobile phone? When will drawings and paintings be there to study? How about a timeline of the history of your country?
Think of how powerful the commons will be when this knowledge is made available on our mobile phones. Arithmetic lessons will be learned by children from all over the planet, they can study within their little windows from the same page on the commons: 2+2=4 is the same for all. That will be true too for cell division and DNA. Students will be able to choose from a commons pool of more than just their own culture's great speeches. They will all be able to browse everyone's paintings and timelines.
Mobile learning is a vision we should all be sharpening - and we should all be working towards putting knowledge onto the little windows which are being held by the hands of our new generation.
tags: international education mobile-phones learning knowledge wireless-communication information media
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