This week’s readings proved to be fascinating in the breadth of geography covered. The amount of information my brain is attempting to absorb and dissect is overwhelming, which is where a face-to-face class meeting time would come in handy right about now. But that is a discussion for another day, haha! A few themes really stuck out to me, and two of them include the future success of mobile learning and access and use of mobile technology in underdeveloped countries.

The first idea I’d like to pull apart is the future success of mobile learning, as discussed in “Innovation in Mobile Learning: A European Perspective”. Kukulska-Hulme states that “future success of mobile learning in school settings will depend on the preparedness of teachers to adopt mobile technologies in the classroom” (Kukulska-Hulme, 2009, p. 2). He later adds that “an obvious factor influencing teacher perception and adoption of mobile technology as a tool for learning, is ready accessibility of devices (p. 14). There seems to be a contradiction here, that if the future success of mobile technology rests with teachers’ adoption in the classroom, should the teachers not have devices at their disposal?

I wanted to extend this idea to a more current and local example, Huntingdon, PA. My fiancé is a second grade teacher at a Title I elementary school in the Huntingdon school district. The majority of these students do not have their own devices and the in-school technology is limited. There is an iPad and Chromebook cart that the whole school shares, so reserving the cart is a feat of its own. She has opted to bring in her personal iPad and has designed “optional” learning activities for her students. She has to call these optional because if they were mandatory, she would be required to provide a device to each child. A lot of these “optional” activities are completed during free time and a few “privileged” kids have been working on these actives at home, even on the weekends! But not all kids can do this because they do not have access to an iPad or computer at home, but the kids that do are so engaged that they are choosing to do this on their own time, using their school account.

This can be traced back to the generational shift that Warschauer and Matchniak (2010) mentioned. “The generational shift of teachers, with more people now entering teaching careers with substantial computing experience, can result in improved pedagogical use of computers…A crucial advantage of one-to-one laptop programs is that they potentially allow all students to work on technology-based research assignments and projects at home, thus helping extend learning time for all beyond the 30-hour school week, a major goal for educational improvement” (p. 214). This idea is not lost to my fiancé. She has expressed her frustrations several times and has been actively seeking out grants to get iPads for her classroom. Game changer?

The second idea, access and use of mobile technology in underdeveloped countries, actually developed in my other class last Wednesday — INSYS 549, Digital Media and Learning, and the readings this week for this class built upon that. We were discussing learning ecologies and watched Sugata Mitra’s TED talk, “Kids can teach themselves”. It’s a fascinating video and if you haven’t checked it out, I highly recommend it! Basically, Mitra placed computers in walls all around underdeveloped countries, and left. Young kids, usually kids that society has forgot about, figured out how to use the computer and taught themselves things such as audio recording and even started Googling their homework after several months. However, not all countries are going to have a “hole in the wall” computer. According to McKay (2009), “as little as 10 percent of the world’s population is actually online…these newer technologies of communication principally remain the privilege of rich countries” (p. 187). What constitutes being “online”? Is it a wireless connection to a computer? Owning a mobile phone? Pachler (2010) references a report published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation that proposes “that owning at least a pre-pay mobile/cell phone is a prerequisite to adequate participation in society” (p. 79). If this is the case, that means that only 10 percent of the world’s population is “adequately participating in society”. That’s 6.3 billion people. That doesn’t seem fair.

I have done a bit of traveling in the past five years throughout South America. I’ve been to Peru, Bolivia, and Nicaragua to name a few. In each one of these trips, I spent time at an elementary-level equivalent school or setting: in Bolivia, an orphanage; in Peru, an extremely poor mountain school in the Andes mountains; and in Nicaragua, an after-school program that teaches English to elementary children. Now these are pretty extreme examples, but in each location I thought of the possibilities if there were technology available to these children. As Traxler (2013) pointed out, “mobile technologies and mobile networks can reach deep into remote rural regions and deliver learning to isolated communities” (p. 135). However, Pachler (2010) acknowledges that “a critical point here is that should society decide to use mobile/cell phones for learning, access to the network and internet services needs to become ubiquitous” (p. 75). What if we are closer to this than we realize? I argue that we are. Facebook and Google are trailblazing paths to connecting the whole world to the internet. Now granted, they may have ulterior motives, but nonetheless, it’s happening right now with Facebook’s internet.org and Google’s Loon for all project.

Connecting the world is one thing, powering the world is another. I wish I could say that it boggles my mind that “between 60 and 96 per cent of rural schools [in Kenya] were without any source of electrical power” (Traxler, 2013, p. 131). We can put balloons in the sky and build satellites to deliver wireless internet to remote countries, but how are they going to utilize this without a source of electrical power in their schools? Just the fact of learning that cassette players were still being selected as viable educational resources for teachers opens my eyes to just how large the digital divide is and how major of a problem it has become. I laughed when Kukulska-Hulme (2009) made it point to the reader how many A4 pages could be stored on 128MB of memory on a PDA (HP Compaq iPac 5500) (p. 7). Memory should not be worth mentioning. Why are cassette players still a thing? I really connected with Traxler’s statement that the work of the m-learning community started in an era when mobile devices were expensive, fragile, rare and difficult…it ends in an era when mobile devices are cheap, robust, universal and easy” (2013, p. 138).  Well, I hope it’s not going to end. But he is right that we are now living in a time where mobile devices are cheap, robust, universal and easy. I wonder what research done in today’s world would look like, taking into account everything that we already know. There’s been a lot of talk about PDAs and older Sony mobile phones, but no talk of the powerhouse iPhone or any Android smartphones. How would these technologies impact mobile learning?

References

Kukulska-Hulme, A., et al. (2009). Innovation in mobile learning. (pages 13 through 35).

McKay, S., et al.. (2005). Wired whizzes or techno-slaves?  (pages 185 through 203).

Pachler, N., et al. (2010). Mobile devices as resources for learning. (pages 73 through 93).

Traxler, J. M. (2013). Mobile learning  . . . . distance, digital divides, disadvantage, disenfranchisement (pages 129 – 141).

Warschauer, M., & Matuchniak, T. (2010). New technology and digital worlds. (pages 179 through 225).

Yardi, S., & Bruckman, A. (2012). Income, race, and class: exploring socioeconomic differences in family technology use. In Proceedings of the 2012 ACM annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 3041-3050). ACM.