MLearning: Divide bigger than the Grand Canyon

This week, a student pal brought up the topic of mlearning. As I've posted on my blog for some time now, I too feel that there has to be some learning (edtech) opportunity for mobile devices when an estimated 80% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 own cell phones, as reported in the linked AP article by Allen Breed. However, there are challenges and pitfalls everywhere you turn - from opening up the walled gardens to the dark side of cell phone use that is causing schools and other institutions to ban cell phones, as in Milwaukee, New York City and Akron. These barriers are making mlearning advancements difficult, if not impossible. Cell phones are seen as a means to cheat, distract from classroom activities, call in reinforcements during a fight, bully other students, facilitate contact between pedophiles and children, etc. As I am not in the k-12 trenches, I am not well equipped to enter this debate. However, I do feel that it is worthwhile to consider the comments in the article by Steven Jones, a professor of communications at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He notes, "To virtually every technology there's a good side and a bad side. And in a really short time span here, we've seen the good side and the bad side of text messaging". He further notes that in the bad side examples, technology made it easier for the bad guys, but "it was not responsible for the conditions underlying those messages ... these were social problems."

What concerns me most about this debate is that we seem to be addressing social problems by shooting the messenger (the cell phone), rather than trying to understand what we don't understand about this technology. Unfortunately, the digital divide between the students using cell phone technology and the adults making decisions to ban the technology is massive. This divide was never more apparent to me than after I read the first article in the January / February TechTrends, a publication of the Association for Educational Communications & Technology. The article by Don Descy entitled, "IM set to talk with you with text" was a primer for readers (presumably non-millennial educational communication and technology EXPERTS) on the difference between IM and text messaging and how one can BEGIN trying these new communication technologies. By writing THIS article in THIS publication, Descy seems to affirm my belief that the communication technologies that whipper snapper millennials use extensively (the article notes that over 500 BILLION messages were sent in 2004) have non-millennial edtech EXPERTS largely baffled. This begs the question, how can a group of EXPERTS devoted to educational technology possibly grasp and advocate the positives (or find sollutions for the negatives) of technologies that they have never tried? And these are the EXPERTS ... what about the moms and dads and others in the community who aren't the edtech EXPERTS? What frame of reference must they have about this topic? Until we build a bridge over this massive divide, is there hope for mlearning?


Technorati Tags: mlearning, mobile, edtech