5.4: Mobile Learning - A Tentative Step Towards Utopia?
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During Spring 2007, I was invited to the 16th International World Wide Web Conference in Banff, Canada. I was there to take part in two separate tracks, although the topic was the same—how the mobile phone might help close the digital divide in the developing world. My talk on the first day was more general, discussing the delivery of targeted information—health messages, wildlife alerts, or market prices, for example—via text message (SMS)—and the importance of understanding the complex cultural issues which surround technology adoption in places like sub-Saharan Africa, where I have done most of my conservation, development and technology work. On the second day I sat on an expert panel discussing something a little more specific—access to the Internet via mobile devices under the conditions faced by a developing country.
I started my panel discussion with a short description of what I considered to be Utopia, the ideal conditions under which we’d all like to be working. It went something like this: “Everybody, everywhere wirelessly communicating and accessing a whole range of personally relevant information whenever they like, using a wide variety of compatible devices at high speed and low cost.”
This, of course, isn’t realistic anywhere, let alone in many developing countries, at least not yet. But the specific problems of web delivery in these places are not dissimilar to those faced by anyone looking to work with mobile technologies in the developing world. And, as you would expect, the m-learning community is not exempt. Ageing handsets, limited functionality, lack of bandwidth, issues of literacy and cost are just some of the barriers, and there are many. It is these barriers that I propose to discuss a little later in this chapter.
But for now let’s imagine that we are living in Utopia and almost anything is possible. The sky’s the limit! What would that look like? Given a high-end mobile device—mobile phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), pocket PCs, and even things like iPods—what could we do? More to the point, what would students require it to do to make their learning experience more engaging, enjoyable, and productive, assuming these are key objectives? Would their mobile learning experience be largely based on video lectures? Collaboration with other students via online blogs and wikis? Playing games and “learning by doing”? Schooling in a virtual world with virtual classmates, teachers and desks? Pitting students against one another through online spelling and math competitions? Mobile-delivered examinations? All of these? More?
Some of these things, of course, are already happening. The University of California in Berkeley recently began posting entire lectures on YouTube and, of course, YouTube content is accessible via mobile devices. A lecturer at Bradford University in the UK early last year went as far as abolishing traditional lectures altogether in favour of podcasts, in his words “freeing up more time for smaller group teaching”. And children can learn to count, spell or even play guitar using Javabased mobile games, downloadable from the Internet or directly onto their phones via a carrier portal.