Education Week Article on Mobile Learning

This week is rather busy for me (aren't they all) in that I am having to prepare drafts of two papers for my courses. One is for a course called Planned Change, where we discuss Roger's Diffusion Theory. In this course my paper is focused on ways to leverage mobile learning in a learning system. The idea I am contemplating involves ways to implement change from a systematic level. Mobile learning should not so much be about injecting an intervention into classroom, lesson, unit, or subject, but instead should be about broader.

This means designing mobile learning devices that work to guide learners in both formal and informal learning, or among and between classes in the K-12 context.

This article from Education Week's Digital Directions reports on some examples of systemic level change: thinking about infrastructure, policy, and the stakeholders.

But superintendents and technology directors must consider what students are learning about technology use when they reshape mobile-device policies, ed-tech experts say. They must reach out to teachers and parents to explain how those policies forward students’ learning. And, most importantly, they must revise their thinking about resources to conceive of school-owned hardware and student-owned hardware as one fleet.

 In response to the article I wrote:

We are living in the age of mobility, with these mobile technologies becoming more and more common. However, what has occurred in school policy is restriction of a the devices, justified by perceiving a lack of control.

One solution, of creating mobile based instruction, works to a certain extent, but what can work better is adapting our ideas of teaching and learning towards this concept of mobile learning. This means focusing on systemic change among all the stakeholders and having conversation that can address issues such as classroom control and misuse.

Its nice to read how schools are exploring mobile learning from this level.

Thanks to Ian Quillen for the article.