Until mobile browsers existed, there has NEVER been a way to proved equal schooling to all children. The usual situation is for elite kids to have better schools. The effect of that is for the highest achieving kids in worse schools often to get a worse education than the low end achievers in the best schools.
For decades in the United States there has been hue and cry to give equal opportunity to minority kids by providing them with equal education. Today a high percentage of minority kids are in relatively bad schools, where the top students are learning at a level far below that of their elite contemporaries in schools across town.
Across the world there are many places where children receive rudimentary education, or none at all. There is simply no realistic hope that each of the world’s kids will ever attend an excellent school. At best only some will; those who do will tend to be the children of the powerful and wealthy. Intelligent individual students from poverty and upwardly ambitious environments will mostly attend poor schools or none at all.
For a student to own a mobile with a web browser changes everything by making each child’s access to online knowledge equal with all mobile-equipped students. Take for example this website:
Led by E.O. Wilson, a team of scientists, educators, science writers, and wildlife biology students is working in Gorongosa National Park, Mozambique until the second week in August to document a story of transformation in this “Lost Eden” of Africa. The expedition is gathering the lessons to be learned from Gorongosa about ecology and evolution, and will present Gorongosa as model biosystem in the upcoming online text book “E.O. Wilson’s Life on Earth.”
Granted, students would need to read English to use this website, but the translations to many languages are coming. The fundamental point is this: Because it is on the web, this exploration of Gorongosa is exactly the same for everyone who learns from it. Every student who looks at it is on literally the same page as all the others who do so. This is true for:
The valedictorian of a top Seattle high school
A sophomore at a poor South Chicago high school
A college freshman in Kenya
A sixth-grader in Mongolia
A young teenager an India slum
… you get the idea ….
In the mid-20th century the USA tried busing kids from their home neighborhoods to balance school equality. Affirmative action attempts to create more opportunity by admitting students who do not qualify for supposedly better schools. Civil rights have been advanced little by these kinds of measures.
Providing individual mobile access to the web to every student makes real the right of each to equality.
Let any child anywhere use his or her mobile to take the school standards tests. All the time now the corporate training world, people learn, are tested, and are certified using their internet connection. Take a look, for example, at the Adobe Certification center.
Wow: one envisions layers and layers before the kids somehow learn — and prove their teachers have taught and they have the test answers — for whatever this common core is. Why not just put it all out there and let everybody develop and work on what students learn in the transparency of the open internet?
Why not just spend a few million dollars and put everyone’s idea of standard stuff we want kids to learn online, and test them there? Everything could be online: material that is rigorous, material that meets various benchmarks — Texas history for the kids there, and how to farm cranberries for the kids in Vermont. Very soon, tests that won respect of admissions departments and employers would emerge.
The reason this will work is that the individual mobile internet browser will belong to a single student. This ownership makes the opportunity equal for each kid who has a mobile because the nature (good, bad, or not there at all) of a classroom is taken out of the equation.
Each learner can come to the trough of online knowledge, and each can partake according to his or her own appetite. For sure, there are some youngsters in failing urban schools who could ace math tests at the college level. I have met them, I know this is true. There are struggling students in excellent schools who would benefit from studying, on the privacy of their mobile, subjects they “didn’t get” in earlier grades. Being able to get certified online gives them a way to catch up. There are young people in slums and poverty across the world for whom learning basics and more on a mobile browser is a key to their country’s future development. With a mobile browser in her had, a girl interested in astronomy, whose cultures forbids her to attend school, joins her global generation with access equal to every other student who is, for example, browsing images from the Hubble telescope.
A challenge for educators: Put online centers like the Adobe Certification webpages that teach, test, and certify school standards for math, science, technology, languages, humanities — and be sure to make those pages mobile friendly.
ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN — With a curriculum that glorifies violence in the name of Islam and ignores basic history, science and math, Pakistan’s public education system has become a major barrier to U.S. efforts to defeat extremist groups here, U.S. and Pakistani officials say. . . .
. . . according to education reform advocates here, any effort to improve the system faces the reality of intense institutional pressure to keep the schools exactly the way they are.
How widespread is this intransigence toward changing schooling? This kind of stubbornness is not just found in Islamabad. Intense pressure to keep schools as they are ranges in different places and cultures from orthodoxy to tradition to profit issues by vested interests and control demands by unions and, most sadly, a panoply of corruption.
While we deal across the planet with the inertia and intransigence that promises to perpetuate failing schools for at least another generation or two of kids, why not let the kids trapped in these schools learn the basics with handschooling? To do that, we need to get a mobile that browses the internet to each kid, and focus more on sharpening the findability online of basic subjects. Every boy in the picture above could learn his algebra from a mobile friendly tutorial in Urdu, Punjabi – and one day the full range of local languages. My guess is that many Pakistanis of their generation are already doing some handschooling beyond their school walls — or when they have no school to attend.
Will school science continue to teach the long-standing problem in cosmology about how dwarf galaxies form? I don’t know if/where schools teach the dwarf problem, but I do know curriculum and testing standards lock in old knowledge to what is taught and tested.
In this week’s Nature Fabio Governato and colleagues present computer simulations that appear to have solved a long-standing problem in cosmology — namely, how the standard cold dark matter model of galaxy formation can give rise to the dwarf galaxies we see around us.
The beautiful animation above shows how exploding stars are a key force in shaping dwarf galaxies.
Educators are long overdue in dancing away from locking students into subject matter that fossilizes into printed textbooks and their matching tests. As I lamented this week, Texas is doing that right now for history.
The education establishment has judgmentally held the internet at arms length for way too long. It is time for teaching to step into the magnificent ballet of what is known by humankind in the open internet.
And wonderfully, it is now possible to put knowledge like the dwarf dance into the hand of every child.
In the piloting for the program in England, the Silicon.com article reports: “A recent Institute of Fiscal Studies report cited by the government also states that having a computer at home could lead to a two-grade improvement in one subject at GCSE.”
The Detroit Free Press laments that: “Most Detroit Public Schools’ fourth- and eighth-graders were unable to score at a basic math level on a national test this year — marking the lowest performance in the history of the National Assessment of Educational Progress.” A two-grade improvement would be huge in Detroit.
At the end of 2009 we read this headline: Detroit students’ scores a record low on national test. This is once again the sad echo of what, in his 1991 best seller, Jonathan Kozol called Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools. A quotation on the cover of Savage Inequalities from New York Times book reviewer Andrew Hacker says: “An impassioned book, laced with anger and indignation, about how our public education system scorns so many of our children.” Kozol’s powerful depiction of this national tragedy is still a best-seller, ranking today at #1343 on Amazon.com.
Wave after wave of “school reform” has failed. We have not ended our scorn of many of our children. Detroit’s record low last year tells us, in fact, that the inequalities have only gotten deeper. Change does not happen. More of the same does not make anything different.
Different, though, has actually become possible. There is something new: let’s do it!
In 1991 when Kozol’s book was published, the possibility of each child holding everything known in his or her hand was still Star Trek stuff. Today it is real and is happening. The hands in the image above belong to a fourth-grader who is the daughter of one of my nephews. Making each of our children equal to her in knowledge access is just one smartphone away. [Sure, I know homes and teachers vary -- but the equality is profound for the individual child using a mobile internet browser. The reading, writing, arithmetic, history, science, technology are just out there waiting to display on the mobile, and to be learned by whoever is peering at its screen. The device does not ask or care who your daddy is or what sort of school you attend.]
This video created by Coursesmart, a joint venture of five textbook publishers, shows how students might use tablet-based textbooks. It is based on their own renderings, not specific applications being developed with Apple.
Terrific as the use of textbooks on the imagined device would be, Apple’s tablet will surely not be a one trick pony. In fact, a really big trick is demonstrated briefly in the video: going out to the Web to find subject matter related to a textbook topic.
1. “‘Webphone’, a device that uses the Internet, a la Skype, as its transmission medium and thus escaping forever the tyranny of the phone companies.” Malone does not think Google will do the Webphone in its new Nexus. If/when it does arrive, he says such a device will “stun the tech world.” When the Webphone does arrive, it will stun the education world by ending establishment control of learning content. A student with a Webphone will have individual, free access to the internet in his or her pocket. Here are some opportunities educators should be preparing for in the coming Webphone era:
Only open educational resources (OER) will be findable online by Webphones doing searches.
Because educational resources will move to the cloud, they become globally within reach.
Connecting to any education resource can only happen via a single url (node) making it necessary to optimize nodes for findability (or, for sure, they will not be found)
You may think of others . . .
2. Apple’s new “‘category-buster,’ . . . think of an oversized iPod Touch, but no doubt with much of the functionality of a personal computer (not to mention all of those iPhone apps). It will also no doubt, have one or two very cool and unexpected new features . . . .” Of course, the iPod Touch is already a wireless way to access the internet without phone company control. Webphone changes for education again come into play. Other factors educator might anticipate in mulling how to teach toward students interacting with stuff to learn through their Apple tablet that is interfacing the internet:
Should, and how should, curricula and pedagogy in general intrude into the natural patterning of knowledge subjects in the open internet?
Can, and should, education standards writers impose grade levels upon learning resources being directly accessed by students? Here, for example, are expertly curated learning resources online; what is education’s remaining role in standardizing them, if any?
How else should educators anticipate the handschooling era that is fast upon us?
As this image from the Molecule of the Week reminds us, patterns of networking nodes emerge to create much of the real and virtual worlds. Educators need capture this emergent abundance from within OER. To do so education must focus on two kinds of nodes: the ones online that form OER (not the just the bundled pedagogy) and the nodes that each are a student toting 24/7 access to the internet cloud.
NEXUS ONE AND THE TABLET by Michael S. Malone
. . . But if any could stun the phone world it would be Google. It too [like Apple] is full of smart, arrogant people, the company has lots of dough, and because phones are outside its core business it can in theory take a big risk without worrying about legacy issues. For example, as many industry insiders have suggested, Google could stun the tech world – and hit Apple at its weakest point – by coming out with a “Webphone”, a device that uses the Internet, a la Skype, as its transmission medium and thus escaping forever the tyranny of the phone companies. There’s a lot of problems with that strategy, of course, but it would certainly shock the world, and put Apple on the defense.
Unfortunately, the early reports suggest that what Google will introduce next week, the Nexus One, will be a largely conventional smartphone. That’s a pity, because I suspect Google will never get this chance again.
Meanwhile, strong on momentum and flush with cash, Apple isn’t waiting around for the world to catch up with it. Two weeks from now, the company is expected to introduce yet another category-buster: this time it’s rumored to be a tablet device – think of an oversized iPod Touch, but no doubt with much of the functionality of a personal computer (not to mention all of those iPhone apps). It will also no doubt, have one or two very cool and unexpected new features that will make it a gotta-have for Apple fanatics everywhere. Once again, Apple will have a new product that challenges convention, seemingly obsoletes an entire multi-billion dollar industry (in this case, handheld computers) while overwhelming a second, newer industry (netbooks, such as the Kindle) and yet is still stunning to look at.
Skeptics are wrong to think courses are ineffective on smartphones. If Lynda is doing it, you can be sure courses on smartphones are in demand, will be compelling, and will be profitable.
In a decade or two, when the world looks back at the transformation of learning to mobile, what will be the kick-off date? When did handschooling* really take hold and get underway? I would lay down a bet that 2009 will be the year. Here are some reasons why:
First, smartphones are rampant. These devices are actually — finally! — delivering the internet through browsers that are easy to use for the nimble fingers and sharp vision of kids. The tipping point is close and closing for the cascade of internet browsing mobiles into the hands of student age people.
Second, the mobile phone transmission networks that are quickly covering the planet are also being crept into by internet browsing. I am not an expert here, but with my iPhone, where I can make a phone call I can browse the internet. That fact is transitional for learning.
Third, online knowledge quality of learning resources has become embarrassingly superior to print. A student simply learns more by clicking through the website of the Large Hadron Collider than by reading a textbook author’s synopsis written months or years before.
Fourth, handschooling is emerging in the for profit sector, while the edu sector continues to hemorrhage money. A fellow I know is qualifying for an Apple certification for which he can only take the test on his iPhone. Apple is not tax-supported.
Maybe the HandheldLearning 2009 in London in a couple of weeks will be the day of the turning point into the new era of handschooling. If so, its founder deserves kudos. A few years ago I was on a panel with Graham Brown-Martin who founded and heads the HandheldLearning conferences, now in their fifth year. He is a true believer in learning for every child which mobile can deliver. He has pushed forward to empower kids to learn with mobiles, against education establishment inertia and the need to clarify the mobile learning vision for all of us. Graham is leading a winning movement, as I am sure the Festival will reveal.
*Handschooling is a new domain I have registered. More about that soon.
This week I received the Half the Sky book just published about “turning oppression into opportunity for women worldwide.” It is an important book about a crucial topic.
That said, the chapter on education completely misses the major potential of mobiles to change learning for girls: mobility! The huge problems they discuss for girls in getting education are all related to leaving the home to go to a school: cost, gender prejudice, menstruation taboos and embarrassment, demands for sexual favors from teachers, and even rape. (Wow!) Think of this: NONE of those problems exists when a girl stays home and uses her internet-browsing mobile to learn.
The idea that the new generation can and will learn somewhere besides and other than at school is not limited to girls. Worldwide there are many places where there are no schools but lots of kids. Here in New York City, there are lots of schools where kids attend but do not learn much because the schools have low quality and low expectations.
The turmoil about whether President Obama’s speech to school kids next Tuesday should be heard by them is growing, reports the Associated Press today. There is a long list of adults wrangling over the decision: White House spokespeople, Department of Education leaders, governors, mayors, school district heads, school principals, and parents — to name the main ones.
So far, I have read nothing that has mentioned the idea of a student herself or himself deciding whether to watch the speech. Yet any kid at school with a smartphone can browse to the White House website to watch and listen to what the President has to say — that is if students where he or she is are allowed to use their smartphones in school. Undoubtedly a video of the speech will be available essentially forever after it is given, so there is no chance of no option to watch. But should/must classes stop what they are doing and sit in rows watching Obama’s speech to them?
When I was in school in 1940s and 1950s, censorship of electronic media was not much of an issue. Our intercom system at Austin High School in El Paso, Texas was installed in about 1950. I recall April 11, 1951, the day that Douglas MacArthur’s famous parting speech to Congress was piped in and regular teaching and learning was put on hold to listen. I remember I was in the girls’ dressing room next to the gym, standing and listening as he said: “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away… ” You can hear what I heard on YouTube.
Whether you think it is a good idea for schools to pipe in President Obama — or it was a good idea for such an indelible impression to have been made on my young mind as a famous general told Congress what he thought — for us as mobilists this incident highlights a major bend in the road of education just ahead. It was a huge change when I was in school to be able to pipe a president, general, or politician into a classroom live. The fact that kids are rapidly getting individual access to the wide live world is an even bigger change.
The issue that is causing the turmoil about next week’s speech is whether it should be forced on students, and who makes that decision. The big issue just ahead is who has the power or right to tell kids what they must watch individually. I think there is a new civil liberty: the freedom to access the open internet. When a message is piped into a whole class or school, supervisors must decide whether to do it. But when each student can watch individually, can/should the school force them to watch something?
Of course, this issue is far larger than whether to force students to watch a particular politician. What about forcing kids to learn standard curricula using matching textbooks? If a student wants to learn more science, history, literature and the rest online, and get certified for achievement online, can/should schools force her to pass state approved tests? Individual mobiles are about to put learning choice into student hands.
Next week the new book Half the Sky, on the plight and progress of the world’s women, will be released. Last spring I had the privilege of hearing the journalist power couple coauthors Nicholas Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn talk about some of amazing women whose stories are in the book. The image with this post is from last weekend’s New York Times Magazine article by Kristoff and WuDunn. In the photo are Saima Muhammad, shown with her daughter Javaria (seated), who lives near Lahore, Pakistan. She was routinely beaten by her husband until she started a successful embroidery business.
I have pre-ordered Half the Sky — whose title is based on a Chinese saying that “women hold up half the sky.” Perhaps the authors have mentioned mobile as they look to the future for the situations where women have been isolated and confined. Let’s think about that a bit here.
Imagine what it would mean to each of the women in the photo above to have a smart phone that accesses the internet tucked away in a pocket. One or more of them already may. I would bet that Saima uses at the least a personal cellphone in her embroidery business. In Jump Point, Tom Hayes predicts that by 2011 there will be 3 billion people individually connected into the internet. Let’s guess that by 2015 a couple of billion more will be added. By then the world’s population will be past 7 billion, they say. Far more than half the population will carry with them a mobile connection to what Hayes calls the network culture. Do the math: most women will have a mobile connected to the internet.
Mobiles will be ubiquitous before another generation of baby girls grow up. Cries for help will reach not just within earshot, but around the world. Girls once forbidden to go to school will carry with them direct access to anything they want to learn. Women will be connected with commerce and possess a tool of entrepreneurial equality — male brawn balanced by female e-connectivity. It can take generations for attitude change to evolve, but the trap of isolation transforms into open sky immediately when she slips a mobile device into her pocket.
Science fiction master author William Gibson tells us he was being evocative—not predicting the future—when he described cyberspace, a word he coined, in his classic novel Neuromancer. Yet many of us think of the internet as something like these words by Gibson in that 1984 book: Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.
In 1984 when these phrases first hit paper, the engulfing global internet was not on any visionary’s radar. Yet Gibson’s word has come to define the location of the internet—bringing along some dystopic baggage many people have not shed.
George Orwell’s novel titled 1984, that gave us the frightening image of Big Brother watching us, was written in what the literati call the dystopian genre — dark, wretched, fearful, the opposite of utopian. William Gibson, who coined cyperspace, is a cyberpunk, which is dystopian. Somehow we have gotten stuck with a word with a dystopian heritage to name the setting of our future. Yet the real cyberspace is hardly a consensual hallucination, though it is experienced daily by billions. The complexity there is turning out to be a marvelous reflection of human thinking. Clusters of data have proven to be fundamental to network science that was not discovered until 1998. Hum . . . what has happened here?
The reality is this: No dystopia is necessarily ahead, quite the opposite is proving to be true. Cyberspace is turning out instead to be the platform for a dawning global golden age.
My grandniece, shown above filling some time on her Mom’s back by connecting to cyberspace is likely to live into the 22nd century. The virtual venue she is already experiencing is being constructed not by the weirdness of cyberpunk but by the wonderfulness of the golden swamp. The mechanisms that make this so will be a major theme of this blog from now on.
Using mobile devices to deliver educational content was discussed in a gathering of experts on the topic at the 2009 Games, Learning, and Society conference on June 10th. The meeting is reviewed in this week’s SPOTLIGHT: Digital Media and Learning from the MacArthur Foundation.
There are hurdles described, like this one – go figure:
Hurdle 1: Cells phones—a key device for delivering mobile media–are often barred from classrooms. Before they were allowed to bring mobile devices into a Milwaukee school, researchers had to turn off the web connectivity and disable the mics on the phones, Ironically, this occurred at the same time the City of Milwaukee was investing in free WiFi in part to support education.
Several steps that are moving forward are described. My opinion is that the two driving factors for mobile learning are 1) the arriving widespread broadband, and 2) the featuring of increasingly sophisticated mobile devices. It is pretty clear that within 4-5 years every student on the planet will have internet access through his or her own mobile device — and that device will be delivering most of the educational resources and knowledge consumed by its owner.
Science fiction master author William Gibson 
