The World A.T. Ways

Posted By Barbara Lindsey on September 21, 2009

For many of us, these past few weeks marked the beginning of a new academic year. As students returned to campus they brought with them their mobile phones, those ever-present, always-on devices that have become the bane of many an instructor. A few of our faculty, not unlike elsewhere, have suggested an outright ban on all mobile phones in the classroom. While an explicitly stated policy on mobile phone use is preferable to this instructor’s staged response, I wonder if the difficulty lies in simply not knowing how we can use mobile phones to support student learning inside as well as outside the classroom.

It can feel a little like navigating uncharted territories.

So why should we use them?

According to a Pew Internet Report, 71% of U.S. teens aged 12-17 use mobile phones. Recent data from a Ball State University survey of college students reveals a higher percentage of smart phone ownership among college students compared to working adults. In what should be no surprise to educators, text messaging has assumed primacy over email and instant messaging as students’ preferred means of communication. And research from the World Bank indicates an explosive growth in mobile phone subscriptions in developing countries, with 70% of the total world subscription in 2007 originating in developing countries. According to the World Bank, this trend will continue, with almost all new customers coming from developing countries. I would argue, then, that it is incumbent upon us to understand the ways in which these mobile technologies are shaping not only our students’ lives and how they engage with each other, but how these technologies are influencing the economies, politics, social interactions and arts of the cultures we study and teach.

So where could we start?

For now, let’s take a look at upper level courses. We want our students to engage in sustained interpersonal, presentational and interpretive discourse in the target language. We also want them to move beyond a basic comprehension of facts and ideas to an analysis and evaluation of their significance within a broader context. That’s often difficult to achieve given the scope and sequence of traditional plans of study. Thus, we often spend a good deal of class time lecturing and providing students outside-of-class resources to help in comprehending our lectures. But what if we pre-record those lectures for students to listen to before coming to class (and for post-class review)? And what if we tapped into the application-rich resources of many of our students’ mobile phones? What kind of learning could take place in our classrooms then?

At Abilene Christian University they decided to find out:

ACU Mobile Learning from ACU Videos on Vimeo.

If we structure our class sessions so that, when appropriate, students can collect, share, analyze and evaluate internet resources that pertain to course content, then we can use that class time to guide and support them in that process. We are then not only teaching them content, but also how to critique information within meaningful contexts that have real world applications. And since the vast majority of our students carry around what amounts to powerful, mini-computers in their pockets, even those who don’t have a mobile phone can still benefit by working in class with those who do.

Here are some ideas for using students’ mobile phones in the classroom:

Checking for Comprehension

• Almost all students have unlimited text messaging. Not all students contribute equally in class discussions or worse yet, let you know when they are lost and need help. A simple poll students can respond to via SMS can give you valuable information to help fine tune your discussion on the fly. Poll Everywhere lets you set up a live audience poll for up to 30 people for free. Students with internet-capable phones can even use the smart phone web version to avoid sms fees.

Keeping Students on Task

• Want your students to break out in small group discussions but can’t visit each group to address questions and keep all students on task? Follow Carla Dolman’s lead and have one person in each group record their discussions, using either the audio or video recording function of their phone to then send those recordings to your email, drop box or web site.

Organizing Shared Resources

• As students work together in class, they can jot down notes, take pictures of written discussions or presentations, and record audio with Evernote, a free, web-based and smart phone application that helps your students capture, organize and share notes, pictures, and web pages. This might also be a nice way to assign groups responsibility to recapitulate the main points and supporting content for each class session.

Evaluating Resources

• We certainly don’t expect or want to be the sole source of information for our students. And yet students do need guidance in evaluating resources found on the web. In small groups, students can search Flickr, Wikipedia, YouTube, and Google Earth to find and discuss content related to your course. Students can also use sites such as Word Reference and Lingro (see our interview with co-founder Artur Janc and blog post on online translation tools for ideas) to look up words and phrases they don’t know. Finally, students can evaluate their findings as a whole group activity and then share them with the class via Twitter or delicio.us, which have versions optimized for smart phones. I would love to see Diigo available on smart phones because it is a far superior research and learning environment. See our posts on Twitter and and interviews with Enza Antenos-Conforti and Maggie Tsai of Diigo for more ideas.

Connecting With the World

• The power of the internet is its ability to provide our students with authentic, meaningful contexts for their learning. Skype is a simple, yet powerful way for our students to learn from and with native speakers as we discovered from our interview with Jon Pennington. Now that Skype is available for smart phones, students can bring native speakers and content experts into the classroom for free, as long as they have a wireless connection and the call is Skype to Skype. Another application that I think has some terrific potential for our students is the micro-volunteering mobile phone application, The Extraordinaries which allows you to spend as little as a few minutes to improve our world. As this enterprise becomes more robust, there will be more opportunities for our students to participate. Students of French, for example, can help catalog historic French photos for the Bibilothèque de Toulouse by writing descriptive tags in any language for the images in the library. The tags students create will help people when they search the library’s photographic resources online. Not only are students practicing and enriching their vocabulary under your guidance, they are providing a meaningful service in an authentic context.

So where can we learn more?

• Our conversation with Liz Kolb uncovered a variety of ways mobile phones can be used to support our students’ language learning. Her blog, From Toy to Tool: Cell Phones in Learning is the first site I go to when I want to learn about new mobile applications and their use in education.
• Another great resource is the cell/smart phone section of Clif Mims’ Learning Telecollaboratively wiki authored by Kristy Conger. It provides links to mobile learning definitions, classroom uses, presentations, and various mobile applications. Be sure to check out the rest of this wiki, too!
• Wesley Fryer’s Mobile Learning group on Diigo with many international contributions, including Jess McCulloch, who shares great finds.
• The Horizon Project. Each year the New Media Consortium releases a report on emerging technologies and their import for teaching and learning with their predicted educational adoptions one to five year timeframes. The 2009 report has an extensive section on mobiles, with a predicted adoption time of one year or less.
• Our worldatways diigo group bookmarks tagged mobile. We’ll always add new finds related to mobile technologies here. We invite you to join our group and contribute to our collection of resources so that we can all benefit from our virtual collaborations.

As always, if you have some great mobile phone applications to share or know someone who has traveled this path and is doing great work integrating mobile phones into language, culture and literature courses, please let us know by commenting below!

In which we traverse uncharted territories: hic sunt mobiles? by Barbara Lindsey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

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Categories: Teaching and Learning, web 2.0
Tags: ban, Barbara, cell phones, mobile