Going mobile

OMG, I finally got a smart phone. I knew I needed to catch up with the rest of the world, especially the college student world, in order to be effective in my job as an instructional technologist. I want to be able to understand firsthand what the affordances of truly mobile technology mean to my ability to engage with things I'm learning. I've had an iPad for just under a year, but I wax hot and cold with that. It's not quite mobile enough because I'm really a hands-free person. I don't want to have to carry something as big as an iPad - a smart phone still fits in my pocket. 

So what does it do for me? It makes email even more intrusive, which may not be my favorite thing, but I think it makes it much easier to keep track of my thoughts. You may not think my thoughts are all that important (but, hey, you're reading this), but my work life is getting increasingly fast-paced. Thinking about the things that are important to me, like how mobile technology is affecting education let's say, is hard to do in the middle of the whirlwind that is my life, professional or otherwise. When I read something, think of something, see something, I want to be able to note it. I may not be able to think about it at that moment, but it keeps it from flying in one side of my brain and out the other. 

I've heard people say that their lives are on their phones, and I always thought it was kind of sad. The truth is that our lives are increasingly in the cloud - that's getting increasingly scary, but it's so darn powerful and convenient. It is both compelling and insidious, and I'm not sure what I'm going to do about it. All I know is that I'm typing this in Evernote, so I can access it anywhere on all my devices...

Back to what it means to me and my brain. I'm dealing with information overload just like everyone else, and I think I'm finding that time and organization to reflect and digest some fraction of the information is important to my thought process and my ability to learn from everything that is coming at me. I've only had it for a week, but it makes it possible for me to carve out some extra time to think about things and be able to pick up from where I left off. 

What will it mean to teaching and learning? Can we convince students that their classes should be part of their lives that go on on their phones? Better yet, can we find a way to make education important enough and authentic enough to be part of their lives? This is a big key. Right now mainstream education is in its own silo for many students. Until it becomes connected to things that students do and see on a day-to-day basis, it will stay there. Not all learning has to be uber-academic learning. We are not fostering intellectual curiosity in our students because we are generally ineffective at getting them to care. I've seen glimmers of hope that having students on the lookout for examples of things they are learning as they go about their business really increases their engagement with the subject. That connectedness goes a long way towards developing curiosity, and smart phones can help students, notice, comment on, and share the connections they are seeing. And when they share them, they are likely to make a wisecrack about them - the wisecracks are often insightful, you know. Let's set the students free (at least a little bit) to wisecrack about how they are beginning to participate in the disciplines they are learning.