Making use of the intimacy of cells – for intimate purposes

This is an interesting way to look at using txting to teach. The BART (Be A Responsible Teen) project is trying to use txting because:

“Right now, with the face-to-face method we have been using, kids come in for one and a half to two hour long sessions,” Cornelius [Judith Cornelius, Assistant Professor of Nursing at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte] noted. “Using the format of the text message, we can take the most essential pieces and send the material to them individually and have them text back a response. That simply, we get an individual interactive response and then we can follow up and continue the interaction.”

Text messaging offers the personal intimacy of cell phone contact and the convenience of user-controlled access and it also has another dimension that may make it especially useful for teaching – text messaging is naturally interactive. Teens in particular are socially conditioned to not just receive information in text messages, but also to interact with them, which can potentially make text-delivered content far more meaningful to the recipients.

This study is also looking at the “dosage size” (a nice term for Nursing) for the messages.

In the end, this kind of work will certainly help not only those courses that are trying to connect with teens when they are not in the classroom but also with students of all sorts. I’m sure there is all manner of bloat that could be cut out of classes today. Much of that bloat bores some students and acts as noise to others, if the bloat was cut and the students were given the vital nuggets that they need to start exploring content through interaction, things might just change in the traditional sphere, not only the mobile one.