The image here is grabbed from one on a MobHappy post called “More On the Tipping Point.” The post’s author Carlo Longino writes:
. . . the bit underneath that’s interesting, the “or go to m.yahoo.com using your mobile browser.” Yahoo’s confident enough that people will know their phone has a browser, know how to use it, and be comfortable enough to access the service that they’ll put it in mass-market campaigns. Nice.
The rules against mobile phones in classrooms have been made before the tipping point Carlo writes about. Before the phones had workable Internet browsers many school people decided that the nuisance factors of the devices justified forbidding them in classrooms. The Internet browser tipping point has changed that. Denying a phone with a viable browser is denying access to online knowledge.
It is time to re-think the classroom role of the device most of the new generation already has in its pocket. As the tipping point becomes a cascade, and the mobile phone warps fully into a usable and then dominant way to interact with knowledge on the Internet, excluding mobile phones from classrooms will warp from a discipline role into something harder and harder to distinguish from censorship. The interesting, and increasingly pressing, question for school people is not how to keep kids from using mobile phones in classrooms. It is time to focus on how to use the digital entry of knowledge into their pockets to enrich their learning.
