Posted on 19th January 2010 by Judy Breck in Golden Age of Learning, Mobile & Ubiquitous, Mobile Learning, Open Content, Politics in the swamp and Schools We Have Now
assessment, equality, global, mobile, online, standards
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.
The Washington Post reports this morning that the “Race to the Top” competition for federal grants to states for education is to increase to more than $6 billion. The core goal here is to measure how students achieve according to standards set for them. As the article reports: “Also, 48 states and the District have joined in an effort to develop a common core of rigorous educational standards to replace the current system in which states have wildly different benchmarks for what should be taught in school.”
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.
Posted on 28th May 2007 by Judy Breck in Mobile Learning
connectivity, global, learning
A post that I wrote for iCommons.org is now online here. Addressed to the website’s international audience, it is illustrated with the faucet shown here from my bathroom sink and introduced with a story about sinks without faucets. You can read the full post on iCommons if it’s of interest to you. Its conclusion is:
Seeing even farther is a second challenge, and one that is extremely important for education in these changing times. For learning to move, as it must, to become Internet-based on a global scale, learning will have to adopt mobile connectivity. The reason is quite simple: 1 billion people have access to the Internet without using mobiles and nearly 2 billion more than that are connected into the new wireless world only by mobile phone. The likelihood of more people getting desktops is fading while the hope of nearly everyone in the new generations having a mobile connection is very real.
By the time the little girl whose eyes laughed at me for being impressed by the automatic water this morning, is in high school, she can have a mobile device that connects her with a vast Internet learning commons. She will then interact on that platform with student and teaching commoners worldwide, in order to have access to the common knowledge of humankind. We now need to think months and years into the future to make that happen.
Posted on 20th September 2006 by Judy Breck in Mobile Learning
africa, global, mobile, w3c
The majority of the now 2.5+ billion mobile subscribers are located in developing countries. This is a stunning new kind of event for our planet: the dominance of leading edge technology is emerging from marginalized places. That has not happened before, particularly on the enormous scale of the mobiles.
The more advanced mobile phone features of email and web browsing will bring the digital, Internet commons to areas where such access had been limited to precious few wired computers. The fact that in undeveloped areas mobile phones leapfrog over the stringing of wires for telephone landlines is well recognized. But there is a bigger frog getting ready to jump. Once the mobile phones are operational in an area, the eventual arrival there of more featured phones will leapfrog the need for installation of stationary computers. This time the leap will be completely over the digital divide.
Two projects that have caught this vision are worth your time. One is the EPROM work toward representing the new majority in planning mobile phone future development, as I posted about earlier this week. The second is the W3C Workshop on the Mobile Web in Developing Countries to be held in Bangalore, India December 5/6, 2006.
Posted on 26th May 2006 by Judy Breck in Mobile Learning
eclipse, global, johns_hopkins, warming
The matter of global warming is heating up big time among the politicians. To assess the validity of facts in the warming hyperbole, scientists have potent new ways to do real global science. Young scientists, can observe and even participate by connecting online to projects like this one at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory — unless they are blocked at school. One way to be sure kids are getting the right information about global warning is to see to it that the kids can run videos like this one on their phones. That is going to take some waking up among older generations, and their leaders like the Mayor of New York City who forbids mobile devices at school.
The mobiles are the tools of the new generations, and global warming is most important to them.
Posted on 15th March 2006 by Judy Breck in Emerging Online Knowledge
blog, global, learning, map, visitors
The map shown above displays a dot for each of the last 100 visitors to the GoldenSwamp, which is a blog about global learning. At least one visitor has dropped by from each of Earth’s seven continents. When I write about “global learning” on this blog, I am writing about something very real that is already here. Most classrooms — especially pre-college — are isolated from global communication. Yet the youngsters in those classrooms are preparing to live in the world illustrated above. Please think about how much sense that does not make, and what we can do to connect the digital natives to their future.
