Nora Young and Marie Bjerede have an interesting conversation (14min approx) on Spark. It starts with the “fears” that students may use the phone to distract themselves in the classroom. Now, this is a K-12 discussion, but I’ve heard the same thing in higher ed. To that I have a couple things to say. First, in classes with older students (teens and up), the instructor might want to look at their lecture/lesson and figure out why they are not able to keep the attention of the students. Instructors also need to consider that there are some students who will never pay attention – and if they are distracted with a phone or other device, at least they are quiet (isn’t that the holy grail of our Victorian era classroom?). Second, even then most connected kid only has a finite number of friends and a finite amount of attention for the News Feed and chat in Facebook. Eventually, they will be sated and return their attention to your lesson. The more we try to limit this, the more kids will try to do it. But back to the interview.
The project (Project K-Nect) that the interview is about sounds really quite interesting and it shows how tools can help shape communication. The phone proved to be an enabler – just as other computer mediated communication tools have been shown – for kids who were quiet, it proved to be a social tool (even notice how people chimp around phones?) as teachers started to develop collaborative assignments. The phone also enabled students to connect after school as well – just as they have for farmers, students and health workers in Africa. Nora brings this last point up in the middle of the interview which Marie jumps on right away.
A small cynic in me suggests that even though there is lots of promise, the “magic bullet” has been seen before – Radio, TV, Desktop computers, laptops… and now phones – and failed to kill the apathy and stagnation that seems to be present in the school system. The difference this time however is that the full functionality of the device/technology is present just about everywhere, so the novelty factor can potentially refreshed all the time, the device is personal and is carried in the pocket and the use of the device is ubiquitous in the “real world”. Finally one other difference is that unlike say educational television which “grows up” into a documentary, which is a niche market, kids using phone tools to track finances, record and report their world are doing the same thing that other, “real world” users are doing. You know – reading, writing, sharing, calculating, logging, analyzing… school like stuff and they are doing it all the time.
Leave a Reply