Calls are frequently heard for improving schooling by closing the gap between children’s life out-of-school and traditional learning styles, and by broadening the space and span for life-long learning opportunities. The Math4Mobile development endeavors to engage all students with mathematical ideas. It provides a collection of tools that could be included in a variety of activities to support students’ mathematical skills, conceptual understanding, and creative mathematical thinking.

Computerized tools have been shown to provide important support for achieving these goals. Three decades of using technology in mathematics education provide clear evidence that the tools designed to support a well-defined educational agenda were the most successful ones. In general, technology achieves its most important gains in settings in which it is available for long periods of time, and when it is designed to be incorporated regularly into the learning process. I suspect that an important reason for the slow pace of change in this area is that ubiquitous, long-term access to technology is yet to be achieved in most learning environments.

Given the high rate of increase in the number of mobile phone owners worldwide, the computational capability of most phones, and the widely available communication infrastructure, we have been looking for ways to turn the available and relatively cheap personal mobile technology into a relevant learning tool in and out of school.

Meeting the challenges of computation, communication, and usability

Understanding the computing potential: The Math4Mobile project has been developed based on VisualMath, which was found to be a successful technology-based curriculum for changing the ways students learn geometry, function-based school algebra, and calculus. The Math4Mobile project started as yet another cycle of development of already existing WEB tools, but working under the constraints of the new hardware and enablers has led us to ideas and challenges beyond hardware-related problems. To support cognitive empowerment for the learning of mathematical content, our first challenge was to plan a variety of well-recognized useful applications. Design decisions were to focus on:

1. Applications that have already been recognized as successful in using technology for learning: Graph2Go, a graphing calculator that serves a wide range of users at different levels and in various fields of learning; Quad2Go, a dynamic geometry environment that allows constructing and analyzing while dynamically changing the various available quadrilaterals, mostly supporting primary school geometry.
2. Applications that could be useful in motivating learning out of the classroom: Sketch2Go and Fit2Go, which support recording and mathematically analyzing temporal processes that students might face in a task out of class.
3. Design applications supporting scientific inquiry; all applications designed to include embedded feedback in a variety of representations, to encourage observation of multiple examples, and at the same time to support the development of mathematical skills through intensive practice (for example, Solve2Go).
4. Applications that first and foremost can be easily operated “on the go,” with a numeric keypad being the only necessary requirement, although navigation keys can also be used. Because typing mathematical signs and expressions can be extremely tedious, our design strategy is to provide ready to work but easy to alter mathematical objects such as expression or equation clusters, iconic graphs, geometric shapes, etc.
5. Applications that are appropriate to use by children and that comply with hardware, resources, and infrastructure constrains. Our intention is to develop for everyone, closing rather than widening the social gaps in the process. Thus, we plan for minimal air time and the lowest possible end, and for widely used hardware that does not require compromising on essential learning goals. We chose J2ME as the development language because it supports the visual mathematical representations assumed to be essential for conceptual learning and design that works for users of small screens.

Understanding the communication potential: According to social-cultural theories of learning, collaborative thinking is an essential component of scientific inquiry. Whereas the social studies and humanities are better known for providing opportunities for sharing, mathematics is assumed to be practiced and developed individually. The choice of mobile phones provides an opportunity to create incentives for collaboration that are authentic learning processes for a community of math learners at all levels. We examine designs of three types of communication:

1. Each Math4Mobile application includes Phone 2 Phone collaboration via SMS center. Students can use it to share their work, post it to receive critical comments from their peers, analyze and propose improvements of others’ work, and submit their work to the teacher.
2. We identified two challenges for our future development work: multi-user communication, where users can share their work interactively, and communication between phones and computers. Advancing in this direction, we developed the Click2Go Classroom Interaction System, currently piloted in schools. Click2Go allows students to use the local communication infrastructure to respond to teachers’ prompts and present the collated students’ responses to promote whole-group discussion.
3. Another channel of communication, the Augmented Textbook, works with the Math4Mobile application to augment paper textbooks with mobile applications that include interactive diagrams, a counterpart to printed diagrams.

Understanding the Usability Potential: Pilot experiments involving teachers in schools and pre-service teachers were part of our development work. In each experiment we designed activities relevant to the curricular agenda. The learning was recorded and analyzed, and usually the results showed the direction of required improvements of the application. After analyzing the learning and teaching opportunities, we design scenarios that can be relevant to the following pedagogical and technological variables:

• Space: activity suited for use in class, in and around school, or anywhere
• Size: to be used by an individual student, in collaboration in a small group, in the course of a whole-class discussion
• Learning mode: exploring, practicing skills, or solving problems
• Teacher’s role: teachers could use the tools and the activity to deliver instruction, moderate group collaboration, assess individual performance, or observe student activities out of the classroom
• Means of use: online, offline, asynchronous, synchronous
• Infrastructure media components available (ubiquity): the ideal setting for the activity also includes, in addition to the personal mobile phone, a “smart board,” a website, a desktop application, and an augmented textbook
• Phone resources: camera, calculator, stop watch, dedicated applications

Educational impact: Patterns, scalability, and sustainability

Since 2008/2009, downloads range from hundreds to thousands monthly, the more frequently downloaded being Graph2Go and Solve2Go. Most applications can be downloaded from the site free of charge. There are many options to download the applications from a variety of sites that adopted them as favorite educational resources. The applications also spread virally. We therefore assume that the above figures are only partial.

The geographic breadth spans the globe and includes India with thousands of downloads yearly, and African countries (Cote D’Ivoire, South Africa, Ghana, Nigeria, Mozambique), South American countries (Argentina, Mexico), and Asian countries (Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Philippines) with hundreds of downloads a year. Clearly, the development is attractive, sought after, and useful in rural locations and in less developed communities.

Users: We suspect that the applications are being used by students in a wide range of ages and settings. We learn from teachers around the globe who occasionally write to us about their use of the applications in their schools, from teachers’ centers using the applications for professional development at teachers’ workshops, from secondary and higher education students reporting and asking for further improvements, and from resources being created for Math4Mobile independently by users.

Development challenges

The lack of standards has been a major difficulty. Several years ago Symbian and J2ME were supported by the majority of mobile phones. This is not the case anymore, and since 2010 the market share of Android and iPhone systems keeps growing. This continuing fragmentation is a major obstacle for the scalability and sustainability of the development. It requires constant investment in parallel development (different languages and mathematical packages) for a variety of systems and hardware, that have different capabilities even when operating under similar system. It also requires software verifications and quality assurance that are not easy to do in educational environments.

Developing high-quality applications is relatively expensive. Math4Mobile, an innovative experiment, has been developed in an academic R&D center by faculty and students. To scale it up, it requires economical models that would support free personal use and also provide sustained support for further development and implementation.

Designing human-computer interfaces that take into account the yet unknown health effects of extensive use of mobiles by children. For example, current design is aimed at maximizing offline use.

Investing in a variety of application types such as games and location-based applications that have been shown to be important for learning.

Pedagogical challenges

At present, educational systems own the hardware and software required for learning. Mobile personal phones are a different ball park, in which the centralized models do not seem to work well.

Taking into account the new meaning of students working with their own personal tool is a challenge. A major threat to teachers is the misuse of the communication tools during school time. Another threat is use of applications that students upload to their mobiles (or of resources such as video clips) that interrupt class work. Yet another popular use that can be interpreted as misuse of a cell phone in a classroom setting is recording with the camera and mailing paper resources. It requires imagination and creativity to turn these affordances into constructive learning situations. Projects that involve children in the design could be important in establishing new learning norms.

Tools should support teachers in managing the load of students’ personal work. Following the first design experiment, a full archive system was developed for each application. It was required because the traffic of work sent by SMS between students and the teacher was enormous. The development of Click2Go, which collects and organizes personal data on a server that can be accessed by the teacher, is another model for organizing assessment. Further enhancement of ubiquity that would easily make the same applications work with a variety of media is essential.

Math4Mobile provides and updates activities and teaching ideas at its site. We hope to create professional development models using new means that assume the active involvement of such media as blogging, mobile communication, and sharing mLearning scenarios used around the world throughout social networks. We continue developing instructional materials to be used with existing curricular standards and platforms that allow phone users to communicate with colleagues and mentors worldwide, even when they have no access to computers (as we recently prototyped in India with www.mobilegurukul.org).

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Mobile digital devices rocketed to popularity around 10 years ago with the release of the iPod. Mobile computing went mainstream with the release of the iPhone in 2007. With the release of the iPad just one year ago, we are now seeing a significant shift in the dynamics of computer purchase and practice – moving away from desktops and laptops to iPads and other mobile devices. Their cost relative to laptops along with the promise of mobile computing has raised tremendous interest in iPad use in education.

I don’t believe Apple anticipated the demand for iPads as educational devices. When they were first released, more than one Apple sales representative suggested that iPads were designed for personal media consumption and laptops would be a more appropriate investment for schools. In response to overwhelming interest among educators, I started our online community – iPads in Education – within weeks of the iPad’s release.

The site is an online network that provides guidance on educational usage, allowing users to ask questions and gain from others’ experiences. In the past several months we’ve learned a significant amount about how mobile tablet computing may impact education now and into the future.

The Promise

• Form factor: Anyone that has used an iPad can attest to its compelling form factor. It just feels right. Light, portable and easy to hold or lay in your lap. As opposed to a laptop where the upright screen acts as a barrier between people in classroom settings, the iPad tends to be used more organically; it’s small, lays flat and is easily shared and passed around.
• Long battery life and instant-on: Continuous, transparent access to information is a key educational goal and these are two core requirements. The long battery life of iPads allows you to charge them overnight and use them throughout the school day without any need to pull out messy power cords or search for sparsely located electrical outlets. Additionally, they power up almost immediately. Teachers have little class time to meet increasing demands and don’t need to be wasting five or more minutes every lesson waiting for students to open laptops, power up and log in or shut down. The iPad simply flips open and it’s on. Importantly, as with other mobile devices, this also enables natural, almost transparent educational use. You’re more likely to just spontaneously turn to it for information in the course of a discussion. Students can carry it around easily and instantly access and integrate information and tools into discussions and educational activities.
• Price: The cost of computer implementations has been a stumbling block for many communities and countries. The advent of cheaper alternatives – netbooks, smartphones and iPads – are closing the digital divide and making computing increasingly accessible to more people.
• Touch interface: When combined with the simplicity of the screen layout, the touch interface is a key element of the iPad’s popularity. Most notably, you will observe how young children instinctively take to it without instruction – the web is replete with examples. From my own experience, I find that younger children adapt to the interface even more naturally than teens.
• Improved digital reading: The crisp quality of the display, especially when combined with the light weight and portability, enables a far superior reading experience than currently exists on desktops and laptops. Along with the iPad’s light weight and portability, this finally opens the door to the possibility of utilizing eBooks in education in place of their far heavier and more expensive paper counterparts.
• Integrating multimedia: We live in a society that increasingly expresses itself in images and video. There is an abundance of apps delivering high quality multimedia content to iPads, allowing for integration of fantastic media experiences into educational activities. This is especially applicable to news events where fresh, sharp video footage and images are easily accessible and can spark valuable class discussion.
• Special education: Increasingly we are hearing how the iPad has been a huge success within special education. The simplicity of the touch interface is making it an extremely popular device for students with special needs.
• Connecting: The educational value of social networking lies in its ability to facilitate the growth of impromptu virtual learning communities – connecting people around the globe to share opinions and experiences. Social networking applications are an integral part of iPad usage – whether connecting users to news events, industry experts or video-conferencing with students and classes in other countries.

Consumption or Production?

Much has been written about the opinion that iPads are great consumption devices but are less stellar at allowing students to express themselves creatively. I don’t entirely agree. Firstly, it isn’t simply a consumption device – it’s an extraordinary consumption device – and the role of information acquisition in education shouldn’t be under-valued.

Also, as the application market matures we’re starting to see an evolving depth in the creative opportunities. Music applications, digital storytelling, animation, mathematics … now with the addition of a camera to the second generation iPad and the hallmark release of core Apple applications such as iMovie and GarageBand, the creative possibilities are expanding rapidly.

Some Considerations

• Sharing: iPads are intensely personal devices that record your digital footprint – logins, preferences and more. There’s no login process. This makes them difficult to share. A 1:1 iPad implementation requires very different planning than an implementation that shares iPads among students. My hope is that educational app developers will see the obvious need for sharing in schools and add login layers to their apps.
• They aren’t laptops: You can’t manage iPads in the same way as laptops. Imaging and synchronization processes, content management, application purchasing – they all raise specific issues that require thorough discussion and planning.
• Keyboard: The touch screen keyboard is not popular with all users. I find that it’s more than sufficient for smaller typing tasks such as emails, notes, blog posts and more …. but I believe we’re approaching the end of qwerty typing in computing. The popularity of tablet computing may end up stimulating development of alternative, more efficient input methods that also utilize voice and video.
• eTextbooks: At this point, the promise of eTextbooks still exceeds the reality. There aren’t enough quality books available in digital format and frankly, most still stem from a model that is built upon their physical, paper counterpart. It’s not enough to simply translate textbooks to digital files – we need new models that utilize the media and interactivity capabilities available on iPads. A digital textbook should be cognizant of what the learner has mastered and where he/she needs assistance. It should customize the content to the reader’s strengths and weaknesses and report the student’s progress to the teacher. Effective use of multimedia – interactive multimedia – will become core elements of new eTextbooks and eCourses. There have been some excellent first attempts and eTextbooks and eCourses will improve as the market matures.

The Immediate Future

• The app market will mature and we’ll move from single task, short session apps to more sophisticated offerings. The release of GarageBand and iMovie are the first steps in that direction.
• The barrier to entry for creating and distributing eBook content will become lower. Increasingly, teachers and communities will create their own eBook content.
• Social reading is an imminent phenomenon that combines the reading of eBooks with social networking. When reading eBooks users can connect to friends and other readers, asking questions and sharing notes or opinions. Apps such as Inkling are a bold first step in that direction.
• While the iOS browser is adequate it still lags behind desktop offerings. As mobile continues to expand we can expect a consolidation of desktop and mobile systems and browsers resulting in better mobile web editing, more collaboration tools and support for a wider range of web technologies.

Finally, it’s still a free-for-all in the mobile tablet market. The huge popularity of the iPad is spawning a wealth of new applications and cultivating the development of a host of competitive products that will only serve to strengthen the overall educational value of mobile tablet computing.

Part 1. My Computing Journey through a PC World

I’m not typing this on a PC, but on a tablet. The screen on which the letters are appearing is the same one on which I am tapping. I’m not sitting at a desk, but on the couch while my 3-year-old plays balancing games. This location means I can still chat with and encourage her while getting work done.

The first computer my family owned was an 8086 running DOS. It was advanced with its 8 MHz processor, 3 colour screen and 512k memory, but had far less power than my current smartphone and took up a whole desk. It cost over $2000.

And so it remained for each subsequent computer I owned. An 80386 with 16 colour screen and 33 MHz processor; a Pentium 4 with thousands of colours, a 1700 mhz processor and 512 MB of memory – all cost over $2000, and … took up almost a whole desk. I next switched to a 12 inch laptop – so portable! and with a price tag of – you guessed it, over $2000.

Something changed in 2006. I bought a high end, top of the line Personal Digital Assistant (PDA). With a 200 MHz processor and 16 MB of memory, it could do some of the things that the computers I’d had so far could do, but it also had a touch screen and, as one of the first ‘converged devices’, a digital camera. It cost $1700, a huge amount still, but a price that was the beginning of a trend.

Two and a half years later and my first Smartphone (a PDA with a phone built in) cost $1100 and had 64 MB of memory and a dual-core 200 MHz processor. Then my first iPhone 3G cost $900 and had a 412 MHz processor. Finally in this history of my personal computing journey came the iPad, an $800 device with 512 MB of memory and a 1000 MHz processor.

So what’s the point of all this historical conceptualising? It’s fairly obvious that as computing power has increased, size and price has decreased. At some point however, the primary computing platform changed from a central, ‘one computer does all’ model to a multiple mobile device model that builds on the existing desktop computing network to enable computing applications never possible before.

To paraphrase Mr Jobs, CEO of the world’s largest technology company that now sells ten mobile devices for every one laptop or desktop computer, this is like the first phase of automobiles, which consisted almost entirely of trucks. Now trucks still form the backbone of our transport infrastructure, but the average automobile today is far smaller and more efficient. Similarly, car buying has long passed the stage where the absolute top speed or revs per minute was all important; we now look for efficiency and usability, and the same thing is occurring with computing.

Once a certain threshold of computing power was reached where all computers by default could have enough memory and processing speed to perform all basic functions required, other factors have come into play. Is it easy to use? Does it fit to my needs or desired location? Does it require me to learn complex commands and file systems or help me just start on the tasks I need done?

Other questions may join these ones shortly as the extra abilities of the emerging class of devices in this field become more familiar; questions not just based on what we could do with PCs but now in a new mobile way, but questions relating to what new things they can do which PCs never could. Can it tag my geo-location (GPS)? Does the device know where it is in 6 dimensional space (Accelerometer and Gyroscope)? Can it overlay information on a live view of the scene in front of me (camera and Augmented Reality)?

Part 2. A Market Analysts Useful Summary

This era then in which such new questions may be asked has recently been labeled ‘Post-PC’. Horace Dediu, a Market Analyst with Asymco (March 8, 2011) has defined what Post-PC means better than I could:

The first post-microcomputer tablets are used alongside microcomputers for tasks such as presentations and entertainment. They depend on PCs for data backup and software updates. They do not require IT support. They do not require a keyboard or a desk. They are cheaper and simpler to operate… new products rely on new input / output methods and allow a new population of non-expert users to use the product more cheaply and simply.

Before we ask then what the Post-PC era may mean for education, I also want to list Dediu’s consequences of such a generational shift so that we can discuss what they may mean for learning:

• Skill required decreases
• Support required decreases
• There are new applications and use cases
• The economics are not favorable for incumbents
• The economics are favorable for new entrants

Part 3. What Does it Mean for Education?

Let’s start with the potentially bad news. Only one of the consequences listed by Dediu is negative, that being that generational shifts in computing are not favourable to incumbents. How does this relate to education? One might say that as a sector found to be the least IT intensive off 55 major US industries (Dumagan, Gill, Ingram, 2003), it’s highly likely that Education is still driving around in trucks.

As an industry that traditionally was focused on centralised knowledge, the stable, fixed model of computing of the PC era was much easier to integrate than the mobile and agile model emerging in the Post-PC one. Whether this means that Education as it stands today will suffer the same fate as the technology company Bell Labs did (hint, they went bankrupt) during the transition from pre-PC, vacuum tube mainframe computing to the microchip PC era (as Heppell, LWF Talk, 2011, thinks likely), is yet to be seen. But there would appear to be plenty of potential for ‘new entrants’ to appear. We wait and see what these may be.

On the positive side however, if the entry level barriers of initial skill level and the amount of IT support required are reduced by tablet and smartphone devices, educational institutions that have struggled to:

1. Find the time to provide basic technology skills training to staff or
2. Get past the time intensive ‘learn menus and file systems’ lessons or
3. Keep technology repaired and working so that it’s available in the first place.

- may instead be able to:

1. Spend staff training time on improving pedagogy.
2. Spend valuable student lesson time on using technology not just learning to use it.
3. Spend less money on supporting existing technology and more on supporting its use in classrooms.

Most important in helping to cut through the either/or arguments that often dominate definitional discussions such as this one is another of Dediu’s statements that “The older generation slowly fades through diminished growth but never disappears”. Post-PC devices do not mean that Desktop and Laptop PCs will go away. They may replace them numerically at some point, but larger more powerful computers will not be extinguished by mobile devices any more than cinema replaced radio, or television replaced cinema, or video tapes, discs and downloads replace television.

The work of Australian schools such as Hambledon State School in Queensland, or St Aloysius College in Tasmania provide acknowledgement of this by providing students a blended selection of computing devices that spans PCs, laptops, converged mobile devices and stand-alone mobile devices. The emphasis in both of these schools is on avoiding a one-size-fits-all solution and instead expect students to understand the learning process enough to make the choice of the best computing tool for specific tasks themselves.

Interestingly though, there are some sectors who don’t have to choose a blended environment because mobile computing is their first computing experience. Only in the West has affluence been wide spread enough to afford $2000+ computers. Third-World nations, not having had the same opportunities to develop either the level of electricity supply required by larger computing devices, or the economic base to purchase them in large numbers, is well known for embracing cheaper mobile devices such as cell phones which require less infrastructure, support and skill. Indeed, the One Laptop per Child organisation that has delivered over 2 million education-focused XO devices worldwide was inaugurated primarily to target the low power and low cost needs of such nations.

Similarly there is a movement of consumers who are embracing Post-PC devices due to their simpler, more personalised nature. Generally these are older users such as the 99 year old Virginia Campbell of Oregon, USA, for whom an iPad was her first ever computer, and one she was able to use unaided. She has been writing limericks as well as reading books again after having not been able to for ten years due to poor eyesight.

So what does this mean for education? If Virginia can overcome encumbrances older than the PC era to take advantage of the lower entry level of skill and IT support that Post-PC devices provides, as well as go on to explore new applications and uses suited to her personalised needs, then anyone, including Education can.

So, what is next on the computing journey? How long until the race of increased computing power and shrinking size does lead to a world even beyond tablets of embedded, ubiquitous computing? Today’s students will find out. And they will master it, if we’ve trained today’s teachers well enough in harnessing the potential of the current generational shift in computing to give them the education they deserve.

Disclaimer:

While some references are supplied, this article acknowledges its non-academic nature and is intended to simply be a beginning, not end of discussion on this topic. In addition, all opinions are my own and not that of my employer.

References:

• Cairns school transforms for tech-savvy kids. (27.10.2010).
• What’s a Post-PC device? Dedui, H. (8.3.2011).
• Steve Jobs: Let the post-PC era begin. Fried, I. (1.6.2010).
• Apple Reports First Quarter Results. (18.1.2011).
• Stephen Heppell Learning Without Frontiers Talk. Stephen Heppell. (26.1.2011).
• How Bell Labs Missed the Microchip. Riordan, M. (December 2006).
• 99 year-old loves her first computer – an iPad. (7.4.2010).
• Digital economy report, U.S. Department of Commerce. Dumagan, J., Gill, G., Ingram, C. (2003).
• Who says Technology can’t change Africa? Hersman, E. (12.3.2006)

If ICT means the use of computers in schools and classrooms and if learning means what academic content, skills, and behaviors students can perform in and out of school, then the massive investment over the past 30 years in wiring schools, buying computers and the latest hand-held device has fallen far short of being a “revolution” in students’ learning and teachers’ teaching (Failure of computers PDF 1995). While not a fruitless mission – a fool’s errand – the idea that ICT would revolutionize schooling was, at worst, sloppy thinking and, at best, ardent wishfulness.

Note I said “use” of ICT, not access to it. For access to ICT has been an unvarnished success. From a national average of 125 students per computer in the mid-1980s now there are about 4 students, on average, per computer in the U.S. (2009 tech survey). In fact, many districts and a few states now give each student a laptop. Moreover, the digital gap between high poverty and low poverty schools in having ICT and Internet access is nearly closed.

So while access has been a success, actual use by most (but not all) teachers and students in classroom lessons has disappointed ICT champions. Without regular use in classrooms, then ICT advocates cannot even hope for increases in student academic achievement, transformed teaching, and technologically proficient students entering the job market.

Instances of falling far short of “revolution”:

• After spending $30 million on computers in Louisville (KY) schools, two-thirds to three-quarters of the teachers did not regularly use computers in their lessons in 2006. Subsequently, new technologies have been purchased and improvements have been claimed (Tablets for Teachers 2010).
• When researchers directly observed classrooms rather than relying on teacher reports of use, they have found a distinct minority of teachers integrating the use of computers into daily lessons. Most teachers, however, used computers occasionally for instruction. They also found that even now with abundant access, large numbers of teachers never use ICT in their classrooms.

These patterns of classroom usage occur in spite of the easily observable fact that nearly all teachers use their home computers daily and administrators swear by their Blackberries, iPhones, and iPads . (2009 tech survey).

Why in the face of abundant access to machines at school and home is there such limited student use of ICT for instruction in schools?

The reason is that technology-driven policymakers, educators, reformers, and vendors err in their thinking about the role of schools in a democratic society and the nature of classroom teaching and student learning.

1. Technological enthusiasts overestimate the importance of students’ access to technology in schools and underestimate teachers’ influence on students’ learning.

Most policymakers, parents, and reformers assume that availability of machines is the same as using them. That error in equating access to use has bedeviled decision-makers for decades. The crucial link between any announced policy, deployment of machines, and classroom learning is not the devices, but the teacher.

In fact, the current Utopian hype about “disruptive innovations” and “Liberating Learning” transforming teaching and learning through online instruction and hybrid schools tries to outflank teachers by focusing on parents and students as home consumers rather than upon teachers using devices in schools regularly with students.

2. Technological enthusiasts see public schools as only about learning.

Surely, learning concepts, facts, and skills are a central task of tax-supported public schools. Preparing students for college and the workplace is important. But voters, taxpayers, and parents expect more of their public schools. They want schools to socialize the young into the workplace and community, provide for their personal well-being, and produce civic-minded, engaged adults. As multipurpose and compulsory institutions that serve the community, schools, then, do far more than teach content and academic skills. Utopian claims that bringing new technologies into schools—laptops, iPads, etc.—will transform both teaching and learning fail to consider the all-important social and political tasks that teachers and principals face every day.

3. Technological enthusiasts indulge in magical thinking.

Researchers have failed again and again to show that students using computers in classrooms will improve test scores, lift graduation rates, and reduce dropouts. The lack of evidence-based practice in students using computers in classroom lessons, however, has seldom stopped policymakers, reformers, and vendors from promoting even more devices for teachers and students. These Utopian fantasies have the virtue of spinning out beautiful scenarios of individually tailored lessons for students but are divorced from current school and classroom realities.

Not a revolution or fool’s errand, just careless ICT policy

These three errors add up to sloppy thinking about ICT in schools. Sloppy thinking leads to careless policymaking about technology’s link to learning. While no “revolution” has yet occurred in schools, a “fool’s errand,” technology is not.

Why? Because schools are political and social institutions that have to be responsive to voters and parents who provide funds to build schools, hire educators, and insure that children get taught what the community expects. What every U.S. community now expects from its schools is for their children to be technologically literate, college-educated, and skilled to step into the labor market upon graduation. With these expectations, public schools, dependent upon voters and parents, must make some effort to buy and deploy the most recent technological tools even as school boards and superintendents know that they cannot keep up with constant technological changes.

So no “revolution” yet and not a “fool’s errand.” Just more muddling through as ardent educators, decision-makers, and entrepreneurs wrestle with the complexities of using new technologies to implement abiding political, social, and economic goals in highly vulnerable but essential public schools.

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The Universal Platform Problem

Each nation, developed or developing, has its own context of technology and technology availability. While I am an advocate of use of mobile technology, it would be foolish to assume that all mobile phones are created equal and that access to mobile phone technology is equal across the world. Socioeconomic divides combined with technology cost accounts for striations within a nation itself – the disparity between techno-haves and techno-have-nots is arguably greater in the developed countries due to the greater variance between economic classes within a society.

In the United States, someone may walk into class with a pristine iPhone or Blackberry where another may have a very basic phone and another may not have one at all. In developing nations, the same divides exist though perhaps at a lesser level – and the advantage within such a nation is that a curriculum can be more easily adapted to an accessible platform. It is far from perfect.

Attempts to create a universal platform haven’t necessarily met with success or failure. The OLPC advocates will hold up their successes to the world like a proud parent and yet the metrics for such successes do not in and of themselves aren’t definitive. In fact, it is hard to state that eLearning even in developed nations has had a positive effect – and if so, how much.

So what, exactly, is a universal platform? Internationally there does not seem to be one but there are advocates for each platform. Lobbyism in education must make way for reality in education. Where mobile phones in use can provide platforms for a curriculum, mobile phones could be a good platform. For nations willing to spend money on the OLPC instead of a more modern infrastructure rivaling developed nations, the OLPC may be the right option. No option is perfect – but the core of the problem remains adapting the curriculum to the device(s). That the devices are often seen as largely incompatible is one issue that, when considered, answers the Universal Platform Problem.

The Universal Platform Solution is not a hardware solution. It is not a software solution. It is an issue of standardization across hardware and software platforms. Educational materials consisting of text, video, images and all possible combinations are the basis for any transmission of material. Fortunately, the Internet has provided tools that handle this quite well – XML and HTML. Technology problem solved, use whatever hardware and software you want that complies to the standards of the world wide web.

So there is no technology platform problem. There is simply an implementation problem created by advocates of specific technologies.

But that doesn’t solve the problem. A curriculum must be adapted, and for a curriculum to be adapted there have to be educators that adapt the material to the universal platform. Since educational systems and their related curricula vary across the world, the options are to make standard curricula around the world or to have specific adaptations of curricula across the world.

With specific adaptations of curricula across the world, the global incompatibility of education becomes extended. If there is any doubt about this, go to the Wikipedia and research any topic in two or more languages: the results vary on language alone (something that both advocates and critics of Wikipedia typically fail to realize). Do we wish to extend these differences in education? In information? In knowledge? Yet there is a freedom to be found in specific adaptations that cannot be argued.

Internationalization standardization of curricula comes with heavy bureaucracy, will (at least at first) be slow to adapt and will have a lag time. There will be claims of bias in education; in the United States alone the science of Evolution is an issue for a culture that disagrees with it. ‘Teach the conflict’, some say, but do we want to teach how to be in conflict or how to resolve it? The point is that international standardization seems very far off when even a developed nation cannot resolve its own internal conflicts of a curriculum. To extend that debate internationally seems counterproductive.

Specific Adaptations of Curricula

Who then will adapt curricula for eLearning? It must be the local educators that adapt the local curricula; communication and work with other educators around the world will be useful in implementations but cannot define them. And the trouble with adapting the curricula is that it will require more than knowledge of tools and knowledge of material – it will require the foresight and imagination to combine the two.

And it must have metrics. To have metrics, there must be goals. And this, for better or worse, is where eLearning inherits from traditional education. Maybe the core of the problem is exactly that – and maybe we need to redefine some of the goals, and thus metrics, of education as a whole before we can do it properly with eLearning.

So the debate we’ve been asked to participate in is to posit which computing model is better suited in the developing world to proliferate computers to enhance learning and education.

Intel's Classmate PC

Back in 2006, when I was co-General Manager of the computer division at Intel that was developing the Classmate PC, Intel was heavily promoting notebooks (which had higher average selling prices and higher margins than desktop CPU’s).

It may surprise some given my involvement with the Classmate PC, and Intel’s overall strategy, that I was not a proponent of 1:1 computing in the developing world. My passion for significantly increasing the access to computers for those in the under-served markets ultimately brought me to the role I have now at NComputing.

Access to fully functional, ultra-low cost, highly energy efficient connected computing is a critical component of enhancing and enabling the learning experience. My belief continues to be that shared access continues to be the best starting point for developing countries that are introducing computers to their schools for the first time.

First and foremost, if mature markets have not adopted 1:1 computing in any great degree beyond higher education, how can we realistically expect emerging markets with more limited budgets to adopt 1:1 computing?

The math is simple. Is it better to have 1.8M students share access to 50,000 computers for the first time vs. wait until the government can afford to proliferate notebooks to the same 1.8M students.

In the 1:1 model, who get’s these computers first? This particular example is from the state of Andra Pradesh in India:

The government saved $20M by deploying the shared model in acquisition, maintenance and electricity costs. They were able to

1. deploy more computers and
2. purchase generators to keep the computers running during power outages.

The $100 target price of the OLPC laptop was originally only the purchase price, regardless of being able to achieve it or not. There are other significant costs occurred during the life of a single computer, including maintenance and electricity. Secondly, where is the point of diminishing return where the farthest extreme is having a computer at a student’s fingertips 24/7?

As a longtime professional in the IT industry, I would be lost without my notebook by side. Blackberry’s, iPhone’s, etc. have reduced that dependence. But what about the kindergartner or sixth grader. I would agree that having increased access to shared computer model (more than one hour a day) would be better, but surely these students don’t need a computer with them all the time?

You could argue by digitizing textbooks you reduce their backpack load, but I have not heard of an outbreak of K-12 student back problems.

The portability aspect is another challenge, especially in developing economies. Kids drop and lose things in general. They have not developed their judgment skills to a point where they can be responsible for a notebook. I finally broke down and got my son a mobile phone – he lost it within six months, and if you looked at its shell, it is considerably marred.

I am not entirely against 1:1 computing, and in the subsequent debate we will discuss hybrid models that could work, but when it comes to primary and secondary schools, I do feel strongly that economic realities strongly support shared usage. I try to illustrate this in the chart below:

This is not a hybrid model. This is an evolutionary model. As students’ age/mature/progress, the need for a computer all the time becomes more critical. In addition, everyone has different needs, abilities, talents and skills. Some will gravitate towards the computer as if it is an extension of their body. Others will find it mildly useful but will prefer paper, pencil, books, etc.

This is where “try” vs. “buy” comes in. I would argue that 99% of people in the developed and developing world over the last 30ish years since the PC was introduced “try” before they “buy.” Whether it is a parents PC, a school lab, a cyber café, telecentre, or work place, they will be exposed first then build the interest and knowledge.

This is why, at Intel, before the Classmate PC “creosote bush” squashed all other projects (Rural Community PC, Amazon Kindle… yes, we were partnering with Amazon and e-Ink on a text book replacement product, and more), we had a significant push towards “shared access.”

In conclusion, I laud the efforts of Intel and OLPC who have significantly increased awareness of the importance of computing in education. The question and debate remains, though, as to how computing is deployed. The most economical and scalable solution is shared access computing.

But is this change beneficial to the educational objectives of school systems, especially when compared with the capabilities of computers, a technology only just recently embraced? We had Mike Trucano argue that mobile phones are a real alternative to computers and they’ll Inspire inevitable educational change, but most commenters disagreed. They were more aligned with Bob Kozma’s assertion that computers are more capable than mobile phones and to be useful, phones need to converge into computers.

And all parties were smart to take J Tim Denny’s lead with this comment:

[W]e tend to chase the technology, there are all sorts of exciting devices for the geek in us, but what is better for teaching and learning is the crux of the argument

To begin with, many educators are thinking that mobile phone usage in the classroom can be detrimental to educational goals. Why? Let’s have Weziwe Sikaka explain the basic issue:

I agree, mobile phone technology is quite advanced but these are not designed for educational purposes. The distructive nature in the design of a mobile phone makes it nothing more than a communication accessory. The accessibility and affordability of phones has in fact adversely affected the educational environment in schools whereby you find students heavily immersed in conversations through phones during classroom sessions which is quite distructive.

In addition, often the term “mobile phone” is confused with “smart phone”. While mobile phone penetration is soaring, these are basic phones, not high-end iPhones, and Alan argues it will be a long time before we see a switch from one to another:

While mobile phones’ usage may outnumber PCs in terms of ownerships, most are non smart phones like what Shabani said. To have the general population to have smart phones with latest gadgetry would be a long long time or never will. Phones have their main uses mainly for communication. In a way, this is a form of learning. But to equate or even think that using mobile phones to impart knowledge, the way a PC is able to do, is wishful thinking.

Bob Kozma gave thought to the ways in which computers are more capable than mobile phones, and listed a number of learning applications are not adequately supported by mobile phones. While the list was not exhaustive, Shabani highlighted Bob’s basic argument:

The advantage of computers is their complexity. They are complex and use complex applications that allow teachers and students to work on complex projects in science, math, etc. More often this advantage is hurting computers in education as complex applications require complex training. Teachers, both in developed and developing countries are not learning fast how to use these complex applications, student are.

Don’t count smart phones out of the long-term educational mix though. And do not think there is a binary choice between mobile phones or computers. As Mike Trucano points out, we should be more holistic in our technology thoughts than that:

With few exceptions, education ministries have done a poor job of changing to support the kind of learning enabled by PCs today. If and where ‘phones’ are relevant learning tools to students in developing countries, let’s hope that policymakers don’t (belatedly) orient themselves to plan on how to take advantage of just the PC. Learning-centric, device-agnostic – that should be our aim.

Especially when Alex Twinomugisha tells us the major difference between smart phones and computers, this ability to run complex applications, is shrinking fast:

The problem, in my view, is that the (web-based) applications that mobile phones are supposed to access were designed for computers. This is changing quickly with many of the new web applications having mobile versions. In Nairobi ( I know this is a far cry from rural Africa or Asia but nevertheless offers interesting insights), scores of secondary and university students can be found rapidly clicking away on their mobile phones: chatting using Google Talk, exchanging emails via Gmail and constantly interacting on Facebook (which I am told is the latest mobile addiction in this city!). All these applications can be harnessed for education.

Luckily, some teachers are already exploring how they can integrate mobile phones into the classroom, in a positive way. They’ll have help from the likes of Chansa:

Being a teacher myself I have been using my laptop and my mobile phone to do on line research and exchange information with friends in other parts of the country this has helped to alleviate the problem of lack of text books. This facility has benefited my fellow teachers and students. as well.

Better yet, smart phones can empower teachers to move from phones as basic teacher aids to empowering a whole new vision of the classroom, according to Todd Diemer:

As educators, if the Smartphone era is coming, and coming soon (or already here), now is the time that we need to be preparing for it. The lack of quality resources that scaffold learning is one of the biggest challenges that smartphones can address. Tools that allow for the distribution of materials, collaborative learning between students, feedback between teacher and student, and communication to the outside world need to be developed. Teacher training programs need to be developed, for this change will amount to a complete rethinking of where the physical focus of a classroom will be (from teacher in the front to student groups spread out).

In fact, Shabani shares a viewpoint that is almost universally held in the education and technology fields:

The biggest beneficiaries of these technologies will be students, not really teachers, because the youth tend to learn fast when it come to technology-related applications and devices. This gives me an idea of reverse capacity building: When will students start teaching their teachers? We should think about this and not limit students’ capacity to share their knowledge. There are millions of kids who can help their teachers in how to use technology-related devices and applications.

And that’s a great egalitarian answer to the original question, “Are mobile phones better learning tools than computers?” In a collaborative learning environment, where teachers, students, and technology co-exist, its not the technology, its education that’s the focus.

For me, there are two issues that need to be addressed if such a convergence will improve education in the developing world. First, smart phones should have the features that are needed to support education. Among them are:

• The ability to communicate with multiple people simultaneously would allow teachers to communicate with multiple students and students to communicate with each other. This would support group discussions.
• The ability to access multimedia content. More and more educational content is multimedia—audio, video, graphics—this is increasingly important in helping students understand complex concepts and principles.
• The ability to run simulations and other applications. Learning is so much more than just accessing content. Students must be actively involved in their learning. Games, simulations, and other applications allow students to engage with complex ideas and apply them in creative ways.
• The ability to create and post text and multimedia content. It is important for students to also be able to generate content, not just access and use it. Tools will be needed that allow students to generate and post their own online contributions.
• The ability to collaborate on these tasks. Students learn most when they interact with each other, as well as the content. Tools that allow students to generate content should support their ability to work with each other—to contribute to joint products, to edit, to comment.

This is a pretty powerful set of capabilities. Sounds a lot like a computer, right? It’s a lot to ask of a phone. But this is what is required of technology if it is to contribute to educational improvement. Are we going to see these on an inexpensive handset in the near future? Beyond the “$100 laptop”, are we going to have a “$20 iPhone”?

Even if we have a “$20 iPhone”, will these powerful features by themselves sufficient to improve education in the developing world?

No, not when teachers are still focused on teaching and assessing rote learning. I continue to insist that we need a significant realignment in curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, and teacher training that emphasizes knowledge creation, collaboration, and sharing. This will prepare students in the developing world to participate in the global knowledge economy and information society. It is only then that the immense potential of ICT – computers or smart phones – will be realized.

What do you think?

As Tim says, “device convergence” will make this a stale debate, but not yet. Comparing computers and phones is like comparing “apples and oranges”, we can (and will) eat both, as Allen suggests. But, for the sake of this debate, let’s stick with the artificial choice of either/or:

Phones can indeed be a distraction device. We are seeing them banned in many schools (including the USA, as Wayan rightly notes). We are at the same time seeing parents lobby in some countries against such bans, arguing that they need to be able to connect to the children in the case of emergency.

Cheating with phones, cheating with computers, cheating with calculators, cheating with crumbled up pieces of papers. While mobile phones do perhaps offer certain advantages in this regard, I don’t know that any device as a monopoly here.

Indeed, phones are out of reach of most students and teachers in most countries, and smartphones are even further out of reach. But what if we extend our time horizon a bit? Smartphones are coming faster than we think. Can anyone who has seen the explosive growth in mobile phone use over the past five years doubt that cheaper, more powerful, more widespread smartphones are coming, and soon? Government policies and plans often look 5-10 years in the future. A fixation on the ICT form factor of the past — the PC/laptop — seems to me to be terribly short-sighted.

Are there currently abundant, compelling uses of mobile information devices, something that I will label a ‘mobile phone’, for lack of a better term, in widespread use today in the education sector? Aside from uses of PDAs and calculators, all of whose functions will presumably be subsumed within the functionalities of the ‘phone’ at some point, the answer today is largely no. This answer, I would like to submit, will change.

Of all the commenters who have posted insightful remarks on this site, I must confess that I agree the most with Alex’s points.

Seeing phones as destinations for education content and applications ported from PCs is an unnecessarily limitation on our vision here. Simply digitizing textbooks and making them available for use on a computer has not proven to be terribly effective. Why should we expect content developed for 15″ computer monitors to work on 2″ screens?

The success of the iPhone is showing that there are many types of compelling content and applications that only make sense to develop for the phone — and that there are critical masses of software developers willing to do such development.

Only five years ago, the use of the mobile phone for access to banking services had been largely abandoned in ‘developed’ countries. ‘Why would we use the phone to access our banking information, people asked, when we had access to a much richer experience using PCs and the Internet?’ At about the same time, firms in the Philippines were finding many users were quite willing to use their phones in slightly different ways to transfer money to/from their banks — and each other — in ways slightly different from how such practices were envisaged in OECD markets. Learning from such experiences, Safaricom rolled out its version of m-banking in Kenya last year with explosive results.

Just as computers offer certain key andvatages over printed books (and vice versa), so too do mobile phones present us with certain opportunities that computers do not. These are some of the key attributes of mobile phones that make their increased use in education inevitable:

1. Personal.
2. Mobile.
3. Always-connected.
4. Cheap(er).
5. And increasingly ubiquitous.

While I agree with Bob and Alex (and so many others here) on many issues, I disagree a little bit on one final point. Yes, the eventual impact of any technology to transform teaching and learning in the classroom does depend on larger, fundamental educational reforms. But I think we need to think a little more broadly here. One recurrent lament in educational technology circles is that ‘ICTs are revolutionizing education everywhere but in the classroom’. Reform of educational systems takes time — often a long time.

But going forward, the rapid growth of mobile phone use, especially in developing countries, and the inevitable development of education content for use on such devices, highlights an important opportunity for individual learners outside of the classroom to engage in meaningful education activities whenever, wherever they want. This is of course no substitute for formal schooling, and certainly no substitute for the critical relationship between teacher and student and teacher at the center of most learning processes.

The importance of such outside-the-classroom use should not be discounted, and, to the extent such use is increasingly effective and widespread, it may turn out to also be an important trigger for larger educational reforms within the formal education system.

Also, having done volunteer work in rural villages in Eastern Africa, I believe that the most basic technologies can play a particularly important role in reducing poverty, given the lack of resources and under-developed infrastructure in most of the Southern Hemisphere. Indeed, I’ve seen how a technology as simple as a bicycle can make a significant difference in communication among rural villages, so the increased use of mobile phones is a major advance. Also, there have been times when

I’ve argued against the extensive use of computers in developing countries, at least if not accompanied by other reforms. But for the purpose of argument, I will take the position here that computers have a unique and very powerful role to play in supporting education and development, relative to simpler technologies, such as mobile phones.

To start, I will admit that mobile phones are a very attractive technology in developing countries. They are very inexpensive, relative to other technologies. Handsets can be purchased not much more than $10. This cost can be further ameliorated by distributing a single handset over a number of people through phone sharing or renting. It has an added advantage that communication is in verbal form, an important consideration in countries with a high rate of illiteracy, and in the local language, again another important consideration given that there is very little content on the internet in the numerous tribal languages that are the mother tongue in many developing countries.

However, the mobile phones that the ITU is talking about are not iPhones or other smart phones that provide the user with access to the internet or sophisticate software applications. The features available on the large majority of mobile phones in the developing world are extremely limited. I think it would be fair to say that the capability for the most-sophisticated phones commonly available provide capabilities no more powerful than point-to-point messaging and SMS broadcasting. But the impact of information provided in this form is constrained by low literacy rates. This makes community radio an attractive low-end alternative, one that I’ve argued for on other occasions.

This brings me to my main point. Computers have a powerful set of capabilities, relative to mobile phones, at least those less than smart phones. They have a multimedia capabilities that allow not only for the presentation of verbal information but information in a variety of visual forms, such as charts, graphs, dynamic graphics and animations, video, and 3D virtual spaces. With the appropriate programming, they provide for interactivity that allows students to respond to questions, an important consideration when it comes to learning.

With the application of artificial intelligence and speech recognition students can even respond in aural form and have those responses evaluated, accommodating issues of illiteracy. Software tools can be used by students to create oral, graphic and written products. And access to the internet connects students to a variety of digital and human resources that can facilitate teaching and learning.

With these capabilities, students can:

• work on complex projects in science, math, and social studies
• engage in solving real world problems
• access libraries and museums across the world
• collaborate with teachers and students in other countries
• collect and analyze data
• create multimedia productions
• develop community websites
• connect with remote experts
• visualize abstract concepts in science and math

These learning applications are not adequately supported by mobile phones. Granted not all computers, particularly the low-end computers most likely available in developing countries, have access to all of the power described above. But most computers, even low-end ones, have much of this power and if Moore’s Law holds, more and more of them will in the future. Of course, Moore’s Law applies to other digital technologies, as well; so even cheap mobile phones will come to have these capabilities and it will be hard to differentiate among these technologies.

But however powerful and inexpensive these technologies become, it is important to keep in mind that education will not improve merely by injecting computers or mobile phones into classrooms. Significant change will occur only if the use of these technologies is accompanied by reforms in pedagogy, curriculum, teacher training, assessment, and the policies that govern them.

With the appropriate changes, the power of computers can be applied to help students move from the rote learning that characterizes much of education in the developing world to complex problem solving and the creation of innovative products and artifacts that prepares them for life in the 21st century.