How the best knowledge gets to everybody to learn
Pedal on over to the Carnival this week on MobileActive here. The host site is “a global network of activists and campaigners using mobile phones for civic action and engagement.” The Carnival posts are social, tech, and other top blog thinking and writing.
On his Martin’s Mobile Technology Page here, Martin Sauter states the core idea that can make the delivery of education resources open and free.
To me sponsoring web sites, particularly in the wireless domain, seems to be a win-win situation for the site, the sponsor and the mobile web in general. . . . Many companies want to expand into the mobile space. So their sponsoring and advertising does not only help their brand but also helps to expand a market which is still in its infancy.
Study subjects like math, geography, literature, science (virtually all subjects) are ripe for presentation on mobiles. If the corporations with deep pockets present these subjects, the kids will soon have the subjects in their own pockets. That is a big, big step toward getting the subjects into the kids’ heads.
via Carnival
For an introduction and an interactive visualization of Alan Turing’s famous computational machine visit MIT here. Technology
Justin Oberman at MoPocket has done a terrific job of preparing this week’s Carnival here. As Justin mentions, he and I literally live a block apart in New York City, yet we have never met in person. We shall fix that soon: I keep checking for people I see on the sidewalk with a mobile in a hip pocket. Meanwhile, the fact that we met on the Web instead of the street just goes to prove geography is no boundary to whom you can meet online (neither vast separation nor almost none at all).
Near real time seismic events are displayed by the Caltech webpage here. Earth sciences via Scout Report
A major theme of this blog is to point out that mobile devices are the core tool for learning in the 21st century. While speculation about what kids should have goes on and on, what they DO have is far more illuminating—and disheartening.
The two paragraph at the end of this post are from a New York Times article today titled Back to School, With Cellphone and Laptop. The paragraphs I picked are about elementary school children. From reading them we get the mental picture of a pre-teen child with a cellphone in one pocket and a flash drive in another. (I was at a conference recently where one of the Ph.D.s was complaining that he had lost three flash drives already that day; they are about the size of a half a stick of gum.)
Some of the questions the image of mobile phone, flash drive toting children bring to mind are:
What about kids who don’t have a flash-drive receiving computer at home?
Why isn’t the flash drive built into the mobile phone?
If the flash drive were built into the mobile phone, would we make sure the kid can study those files on that mobile device?
Why are the school files he uses not accessible through the Internet so he can use them from home, the library, etc.?
Why doesn’t her mobile phone have Internet access so she could study her files on the bus (if they were on the Internet)?
Why are the hundreds of dollars worth of printed study resources still in the child’s backpack if she is carrying her study stuff on her flash drive. An expensive redundancy here?
Why is the education establishment so far behind on the digital convergence curve? Why!
New York Times article quotes:
The LG Migo VX1000 . . . . is a child-friendly, simple phone: no text messaging, no games and no camera. It is also very small and light, well suited for child-size hands. The Migo has only four numbered buttons, which can dial four preprogrammed phone numbers. Those numbers cannot be changed without a password. To place a call, the child simply presses one of the numbered keys and the talk button. In the middle of the phone pad is a large key for emergency calls.Catherine Poling, the assistant principal at Kemptown Elementary School, near Frederick, Md., suggests that students also get a flash drive for portable storage of their computer files.“With the volume of files that students work on, including video and images, it would be helpful if they all had a mass storage device to transport files between home and school. . . .”
The new Carnival is online now at Abiro here. The very first entry touts the QWERTY keyboard. Even though kids type well with their thumbs, the fuller keyboard seems like a far better long range education feature.
The FBI instructions here outline the nature of fingerprints and techniques for recording them. Forensic science
Follow along here as famed wildlife photographer Kim Wolhuter posts accounts — and gorgeous images — of the making of his upcoming documentary about wild Zimbabwe. Animal sciences (Thanks! Chris)
This weeks’s Carnival is now online here at Mobile Enterprise. Included, from Stephanie Rieger at Keitai, is a post about the beta program Mobile Bubble Pop, which among other talents can promote literacy in small children. Stephanie’s entire post is an important look at young kids and their (I think) inevitable use of mobiles as the basic learning device of their generation.
Get the low down on the curators of 60+ living specimins at the new Lizards and Snakes Alive! exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History. Animal sciences
This forensic tool is used to test for 10 drugs of abuse. More about it in the webpage here in the medical and diagonistics information from Craig Medical. Forensic sciences
