La donna e mobile

Spent much of this week alternately gritting my teeth & feeling Deeply Inadequate. Nothing new there......

We were doing 'mobile learning'. Activity 1 was a big quiz about how we use our handheld mobile devices for teaching, work, learning, social interaction & entertainment. My handheld mobile device ownership extends to one phone, decidedly un-smart, vintage c.2005 (at least that's the date of the oldest saved text message). I use it for occasional voice calls & to text my family & friends. After considerable thought I remembered that I also use it to tell the time in tutorials, since I don't wear a watch & the local venue hired by the OU doesn't have clocks in the rooms. Not working ones, anyway. But I had a sneaking suspicion that this wasn't quite what was expected of educators in the brave new world of Mobile 2.0.

Then I read an article by Sharples et al. from 2005 (the same age as my phone!) Towards a Theory of Mobile Learning & that started me thinking. The authors confidently state their objective:

to offer an initial framework for theorising about mobile learning, to complement theories of infant, classroom, workplace and informal learning

Where, I wondered, was 'traditional' distance learning, of the sort offered by the OU for over 40 years now, in their list? Could it be that in the excitement about mobile learning, this had been overlooked? It certainly looks that way. Here's one of the major findings:

The control and management of learning can be distributed: In a classroom the locus of control over learning remains firmly with the teacher, but for mobile learning it may be distributed across learners, guides, teachers, technologies and resources in the world such as books, buildings, plants and animals

Replace 'mobile' with 'distance' & we've been doing that since the 1970s!

Here's another example of over-inflated claims. Sharples et al. appear shocked by the way mobile technology conflicts with traditional ways of learning:

children can subvert the carefully managed interactions of a school classroom by sending text messages hidden from the teacher

How dreadful! But wait... Did the authors never pass notes in class, or sneakily read a comic, or get on with their homework for another lesson?

So maybe much of the rhetoric about 'mobile learning' can be filed under 'true, but not new', along with other bits of myth & moral panic, & I don't need to be scared of it at all.

I know, I should stop being such a diva. Here's Pavarotti to put it all in perspective.