When the Internet began to grow in the mid-1990s a bad mistake was made for education. While adults in businesses and in homes got "personal" computers at school the kids were required to share computers. For college students that began to change and now most of them have laptops and campuses are rapidly moving to complete wireless coverage.
But when K-12 students use a computer at school it is almost never their own. Meanwhile, children and teenagers are rapidly all getting a mobile phone. A mobile phone is a computer that is already powerful and getting more so every day. Many youngsters also have laptops, ipods, and other handheld computers. Essentially all of these devices the kids have are mobile, receiving and sending information wirelessly.
The schools have responded by largely not allowing students to use their own computers at school. GoldenSwamp in part blogs the ongoing saga of schools, kids, and the emerging mobile learning potential.
Idea #94
Use Cell Phone Screens Now
Many members of the young generations are already connected by their cell phones. These connections are still primarily to networks created by phone companies, not to the internet. For a cell phone to be an adequate device for learning broadly from the open content forming the virtual knowledge ecology, the phone needs broadband access to the entire open internet.
No one knows if cell phones will morph into the primary mobile internet devices or whether laptops will continue in the leading role and be modified to do it better. What the device of the future will be is unknowable now. What we do know is that kids have cell phones and cell phones are able to receive and transmit digital materials. To reach the young generation right now the cell phones is an obvious way to go right now. All the pieces necessary to provide digital learning assets through cell phones are in place. Someone just has to start making in happen. In fact they are: the trickle has begun.
For reading, it is already happening in Japan. Although still a niche market as I write this, there are Japanese cell phone companies that provide novels, classics and the ever-popular downloadable e-book smut that people are embarrassed to be seen buying in hardcopy in public. This niche market in Japan has shown that reading books on cell phones is doable—and though hard to believe, there are people who prefer to read on the little screens that can only display a few lines at a time. Entire libraries have been put into cell phones in Japan and users are reading books the phones display at home, in the office and on the train. Classics are popular, along with the leisure reading. Here is an action to take: Find a way to get JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings books digitized and available to download into a cell phone for reading.
As I write this in the spring of 2005 an avalanche of multimedia programming is bearing down on the cell phone market. The next months will see a growing gamut of games, videos and other interactive materials available to download into the phones. In February 2005, Nokia and Macromedia signed a deal to integrate Macromedia’s Flash animation software into Nokia phone screens.
The way is wide open to create digital displays, tutors and practice animations for learning useful knowledge. Someone just needs to build them and get them into the hands holding a cell phone of one child at a time.
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