Digital Directions - Spring/Summer 2012 - (Page 49)

intelligence with technology—and, make no mistake, we are enhancing our intelligence when we lean on our phones to fill in gaps in our knowledge—resembles an arms race. Sticking with swords when the other side is transitioning to muskets is not really a choice. And even if a treaty exists that asks all sides to keep muskets out of their armories, when one party defects, the others are suddenly under pressure to defect as well, lest they fall behind. This innovate-or-die instinct applies to education as well: When one university makes the contents of its library searchable from any digital device with an Internet connection, others are obligated to follow. And when one school figures out how to teach students to use, rather than shun, ubiquitous and extremely powerful technology toward constructive ends, other schools must follow suit as well. Education may be notoriously slow to change, but it is hardly immune to the laws of creative destruction. individual abilities to critically evaluate the relevance of data. Thus far, schools have failed to provide a counterweight to the unthinking algorithms of Google and Yahoo because, too often, they turn a blind eye to the technology students are using to access information. To be sure, in the wrong hands, a mobile phone can be the intellectual equivalent of a cigarette. A teacher’s job is to show students how it can also be educational broccoli— something that builds healthy minds. Mobile devices need not be threatening to educators. They can help both teachers and students work smarter and faster and in contexts that better approximate the Banning mobile devices in an era literally saturated with them is no longer a viable option, not for individual schools or for larger education systems. Engage we must. The harder question of how to use the devices to enhance learning will probably take years to sort out, but that task needs to begin in earnest. And educators, not technologists, are the ones who should blaze the path forward; they are the experts in learning and development. The Nokias, Apples, and Samsungs of the world have provided us amazing tools at affordable prices. It is now our job to figure out how these tools—the ones we use every day—can further and deepen not only the education of students around the W “Current projections suggest that you will be very hard-pressed to find anyone without a working mobile phone by 2015.” technologically enhanced and, yes, sometimes technologically laden world waiting outside the classroom. A primary task of teachers is to help students know the difference: to evaluate when technology is a genuine tool and when it is a flashy distraction. Teachers are wellplaced to help students learn how to leverage the technology that is increasingly converging inside mobile devices to accelerate learning. world but, indeed, our own educations. Mobile phones need not be an educational cigarette; they carry a vast and unrealized potential to make learning more accessible and more effective everywhere. The time to seriously explore this potential is now. n The views expressed here are those of the authors and not UNESCO. Mark West and Steven Vosloo are specialists in information and communication technologies for education at UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. They are currently investigating how mobile phones can be used to expand student access to education, primarily in developing countries. Recently, UNESCO published a 12-paper series that describes and analyzes different mobile-learning projects around the world. The organization is now consolidating findings from those projects to create a set of mobile-learning guidelines that will help governments effectively integrate mobile technologies into existing education plans and policies. Later this year, UNESCO will also launch mobile-learning projects in Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Senegal. SCAN this tag with your smartphone for more information about UNESCO’s involvement in mobile learning or see: www.unesco.org/new/en/ unesco/themes/icts/m4ed. hile “disruption” is often a word that gets tagged to efforts to integrate technology in education, the idea that learning facilitated by mobile devices will suddenly make teachers and perhaps even schools extraneous relics of a pre-digital age couldn’t be further from the truth. Knowing how to use technology in ways that foster healthy intellectual and social development is not self-evident at all. Study after study has revealed that despite knowing the basics of how to thumb through mobile applications, students are ill-prepared to skillfully navigate the oceans of information available to them. They can find websites and download software, sure, but filtering, organizing, using, and learning from myriad resources is a different matter entirely. Experiments have shown, for example, that very few students know how to use electronic databases to help them identify high-quality content. More recent investigations suggest that even advanced university students will rarely consider information beyond the top four or five Web pages returned by an Internet search engine when formulating answers to complex questions. Increasingly, students appear to be putting more trust in machines than in their M ake no mistake, mobile devices are here to stay. They assist in tasks of every type, from finding and securing jobs, to learning the market prices of commodities, to sending pictures, to checking account balances, to bringing down corrupt governments. If you can think of a project, more often than not there is a way the phone in your pocket can help you do it. Today, there are more than 5.9 billion mobile-phone subscriptions worldwide, and for every one person who accesses the Internet from a computer, two do so from a mobile device. Current projections suggest that you will be very hard pressed to find anyone without a working mobile phone by 2015. From Burma to Bangalore to Baltimore, we are a world united in our embrace of this transformative technology. Spring/Summer 2012_ Digital Directions >> 49  http://www.unesco.org/new/en/unesco/themes/icts/m4ed http://www.unesco.org/new/en/unesco/themes/icts/m4ed

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Digital Directions - Spring/Summer 2012

Digital Directions - Spring/Summer 2012
Contents
Editor's Note
DD Site Visit
Bits & Bytes
Game On
Applicable Knowledge
Digital Badges
Lessons From Higher Education
Competitive Edge
Recognizing Online PD
Ready or Not
Q&A
Opinion
Data Delivery

Digital Directions - Spring/Summer 2012

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