One  Year or Less Horizon

This post is number two of a four-part series on the Horizon Report 2010. To start at the beginning visit the overview.

Mobile Computing

The first emerging technology as it regards education is the ubiquity of connected mobile computing devices among students.  At USC this is especially true among our students.  Middle school students that I casually poll often show near 100% own an iPod (brand) device, and increasingly they report owning an iPod Touch, and beg incessantly for the wifi password so that they can get online during (before and after) the school day.  Without any formal data on the subject, I would hazard a guess that over 90% of students have a cell-phone with a texting plan of some kind by 8th grade and more and more seem to report having a 3G internet enabled Smartphone like an iPhone or Android (Google) Phone.

The report considers mobile computing to include smartphones, netbooks, smartbooks, laptops and other more specialized devices  that can access the internet via WiFi or 3G Data networks.  “Users increasingly expect anytime, anywhere access to data and services that not very long ago were available only while sitting in front of a computer linked to the network via a cable.“  Additionally, as more and more services are moved into the “cloud”, students need regular access to the network to manage their personal data, share and collaborate with other students, all on the  move without having to check into a static workstation.

This increased ubiquity of mobile computing devices presents its own set of opportunities and challenges for K-12 and post-secondary institutions.  Just take a look at how many of my Top 13 Tech Tools are cloud-based or dependent on connectivity to the internet.

Opportunities:
One of the items in the strategic plan is to investigate the feasibility of a one-to-one computing environment in our school buildings.  I would argue that we are probably a lot closer than we think to one-to-one if we count all the devices that students are dying to use (for reasons both good and bad) but are prohibited.  In USC many of our students are blessed with the financial resources to own and use these devices at home.  Institutions of all kinds are doing all sorts of belt-tightening, probably not the opportune time to recommend the investment of many tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars on a new one-to-one initiative.  Perhaps it is time to investigate some of the benefits (and risks) that could come of changing the rules somewhat.

Challenges:
We are still the cell-phone police in our school. The kids are just getting better at concealing their phones, illustrating just how important a life-line that these devices are becoming.  It’s pretty obvious that kids are texting and using their phones during school. (How many parents walk in the office and say, “you don’t have to call her down, I texted her that I am here.”?)  By banning the use of cell-phones during school-hours, but tacitly approving their concealed possession, we set up an unwinnable challenge.  Obviously we don’t want kids yapping away on their phones in the hallways when they are en route to class, but just like we expect our staff to avoid playing Bejeweled during a staff meeting, there is an appropriate way to use these tools.  Maybe that needs to be taught explicitly.  For something like this to work we would need to actively educate students about the limits, etiquette and appropriate use of devices during the school day.

Additionally there are other technical, legal and equity challenges that present themselves.  First, allowing hundreds of student devices on the network presents infrastructure challenges from the bandwidth and capacity of the system, to the challenges of verifying users as they get onto the network, and protecting against malicious software and viruses.  Filtering traffic that we serve to students isn’t such an issue, but as wireless broadband access becomes cheaper and more ubiquitous we have no ability to filter the content viewed by students.  Who is responsible for illegal or unethical content that comes across the phone company’s 3G service into the school building?  Finally, the question of the haves vs. the have-nots.  Would allowing the use of private devices come across as a message that we expect students to purchase a device for use in school?  Would we be putting those that can’t afford, or don’t want to provide a device at a disadvantage?

Action Steps:
Lets get some good data. Ask kids:

• What classes of devices (and connectivity) do kids have access to?
• How would they see their learning change if they had access to the internet whenever they needed it?
• What would they suggest as reasonable controls on their use in the school?

Open Content

The Horizon Report’s definition of Open Content is pretty broad, the coming of age of the “Internet as a global dissemination platform for collective knowledge and wisdom.”  But in the K-12 world we know that there is “a lot out there.”  But as educators we struggle sometimes with finding, evaluating and implementing what we find.  Open Content means even more in the way it is presented in the report, including the use of open content for “learning for the sheer joy of discovery.”  Isn’t that one of the main things we want to instill in our students, life-long learning?

Opportunities:
For most many disciplines, the Internet has provided an explosion of content (some great, some not so great).  The problem is not the availability of the content, but rather the curation of that content.  Open Content repositories are available in all kinds of disciplines.  Some allow instructional resource sharing, evaluation, and commenting.

Challenges: Instructional materials are just the start.  Do our students know where to look if they have a passion about something and want to learn simply of the joy of it?  Do they know how to plan out and assess their own learning and truly be life-long learners?  Are we ready for an era where a student asks to design a customized course of study as independent study in the arts (MIT offers free photography lectures and coursework), languages (Free Resources in 13 languages available through the Allegheny Library Network), or even a specialized science course?

Action Steps: Actually, we are already doing some of this in small pockets — using a blackboard course we have been curating curriculum relevant materials – a decent, but not the most collaborative approach to the project.  I worry that our focus could get hung up on finding supplementary materials that back up the ‘sage on the stage’ instead of opening up venues for unexpected learning experiences.  We should ask ourselves what it would take for us to become more open in sharing our own content instead of just consuming content.  In today’s world we are all content creators, but just passive consumers.

Photo: CC Flickr – umpcportal

This entry was posted on Monday, January 25th, 2010 at 10:16 am and is filed under New Tech, Summary, education, teaching, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.