The announcement this week of the Future Mobile Awards 2008 does not include a category for education. Its Content and Applications Stream is made up of these categories: Web 2.0, Search, Advertising, Gambling, Games, Music, TV, Adult, and UGC (user generated content).
The awards sponsor Juniper Research describes their purpose: The Future Mobile Awards are given to companies that we believe have made significant progress within their sector during the previous year, and are now poised to make considerable market impact in the future.
Put together the pieces:
The education industry rakes in billions of dollars annually just to produce printed textbooks.
Learning is in large part a connecting/communicating process, and mobile is in the connecting/communicating business.
Youngsters (think students) around the world are demanding and getting mobile phones.
The opportunities in for mobile education sector appear to be wide open. Why have they not blossomed, as other sectors have?
I think this is what is actually happening: As it has gotten broader band, mobile is emerging as the primary tool of learning/education — with One-Web interfacing knowledge resources to an individual student device that enables collaborative learning. The ecology of enlightenment that is emerging will support new education dynamics. These dynamics are:
The knowledge to be learned forms an open network commons within the cloud and the students and teachers both use their mobiles to interface that knowledge via the One Web and to collaborate in the learning process.
