Mobility is coming to school. For the students, it arrived a long time ago but was, with a few exceptions, excluded at the school gate. Smart phones, games consoles, iPods, Pocket PCs, Origamis and devices yet to be seen make up the landscape in which the 21st century student operates with ease.
As founder of the Handheld Learning Forum and Conference , as well as a supplier of these devices, I'm often asked to predict which device will dominate as if this was somehow like a “Windows vs Mac” debate. Of course, the question and answer should begin with the learning and teaching objectives but there are far more qualified people than I to respond to those. What I'm pretty certain of is that we won't see a single device emerge as a "school mobility device" and if we tried to create or enforce one it would be an expensive mistake.
That's not to say manufacturers shouldn't consider the development of student-friendly devices, but the key aspect of mobile devices, in my opinion, is the fact that they're personal and will need to perform other tasks beyond education.
A number of technology enabling factors provide a clue to what might happen in the near future. First, broadband access, for those that can get it, is getting faster and cheaper. Mobile operator Orange has recently been merged into one of it's sister companies, Wanadoo, to create Orange Broadband which I'd suggest is a precursor to a new breed of mobile device that seamlessly switches between wireless broadband and 3G connectivity.
Faster and 'cheap as chips'
And it's all going to get faster and cheaper, fuelled by consumer demand for high-definition television. How's this? Well with old-school television, it is possible to transmit an acceptable broadcast over a 1Mb broadband line. High definition television requires around 11Mb and the market statisticians suggest that homes, on average, will have four screens, that including overhead, will require a 50+Mb connection. The uptake of this technology is expected to be similar to the early uptake and demographic of satellite TV, thus forcing the pricing down.
Another factor is "cheap as chips" online storage. Those of you with a gmail/googlemail or yahoo email account are probably already enjoying a couple of gigabytes of free storage. Considering that the purchase of a 1Gb hard drive 10 years ago was nearly £700 that's a pretty amazing shift.
So we have low-cost, high-bandwidth connectivity combined with cheap online storage. In this scenario the storage of all your digital memories and work locally is not such a good idea when it might be more secure on a remote system that has guaranteed backups.
Forgive the cliché, but we could genuinely be on the cusp of a paradigm shift in computing where a lot of our reliance on desktop and laptop PCs is replaced by accessing our digital stuff, eg photos, videos, books, music, work, etc via intelligent thin client devices that could be part of the high-definition TV in your living room, part of your mobile phone or part of your gaming console.
This presents an interesting aspect of mobility because your "stuff" is held remotely and you can access it from anywhere at the press of a thumb print. Visit your Grandma in Australia, show her your holiday video. Staying away from home in a hotel at a conference? Access your music collection with ease. You'll soon get the picture!
So the point here is about infrastructure and how it will, if we use it wisely, set us free from the desk, whether that's a school desk or an office. Once we understand the learning and teaching benefits afforded by 1:1 ICT access, I would suggest that investment made in ICT infrastructure is more important than handing out mobile devices because the students in many cases are already carrying a very powerful computing system in their bag or pocket. Those that aren't need to be supported by schemes that allow parental purchase such as those proposed by the e-Learning Foundation.
The challenge that lies ahead is how we can ensure that this infrastructure can embrace a variety of devices and how interactive learning materials can be made to work on them in such a way that educators can author once and publish to a heterogeneous group of devices that are in the school, on the move and in the home.
