The Back Story: A colleague who had a friend who was writing an article for the NY Times recently asked about my perspectives re: cell phones in educational settings. My slightly edited response appears below.
Although mobile devices can certainly be a tremendous disruption (and one that many young teachers are ill-prepared to address), I should also say that from my perspective, the problem has less to do with cell phones/mobile devices and more to do with unquestioned assumptions about what it means to be educated, to teach, and to learn. The increasing availability and ubiquity of mobile technologies like cell phones foregrounds problems that have always existed in education, and makes much more visible the ineffectiveness of longstanding pedagogies that common assumptions about education have reinforced.
For me, school policies against cell phones and other mobile devices are a physical manifestation of beliefs about teaching, learning, and literacy that are not particularly congruent with the rapidly changing society in which we live. They reinforce all sorts of problematic notions such as:
- the idea that learning only happens when it comes through established channels at prescribed times
- the unspoken assumption that teachers are the primary, most authoritative, and best source of information
- the belief that students can only learn (or do) one thing at a time
- the presumption that teachers are most qualified to decide what students learn, and
- the perspective that teachers can and should control learning
They also fail to take into account the fact the writing spaces and tools that “literate” people use are also changing. As people become more adept at working in these spaces, and as the mobile web becomes more functional, it is likely that mobile computing will play an increasingly central role in business, education, entertainment, and industry.
I’m not saying that students don’t need teachers, or that parents and teachers shouldn’t be concerned with the digital dangers (and their physical manifestations) of emerging technologies, or even that technology is a panacea for educational or societal problems. I do think, however, that the world has changed dramatically in the last 50 years, highlighting a desperate need for shifts in the way we think about education.
Instead of reactively seeking ways to eliminate the distraction of cell phones, it would be more useful for schools to think proactively about what makes cell phones so compelling to students, how and why students are using them, and how the concept of “mobile learning” might be used to take all that is good about our present system and make it even better by increasing access to content, to community, and to learning tools/opportunities.
Part of the problem is that most educators aren’t really aware of what cell phones can (or will soon be able to) do. Part of the problem is that unlike many other web 2.0 technologies, cell phones aren’t quite there yet. The larger issue, though, is pedagogy. If your image of what a teacher is and does revolves around images of lecturing, maintaining classroom control, distributing assignments, and grading, it will be hard for you to see the myriad of educational possibilities inherent in social technologies and web 2.0 applications. If your idea of learning involves hands-on, project-based, student-centered activities, then the leap to these same technologies as gateways to educational opportunities and exciting possibilities for engaging what is INSIDE students in the learning process isn’t such a big one. Students are clearly willing to communicate, but are we listening?
There is no question that cell phones are a disruptive technology. They are delivering a wake-up call that is long overdue. We can ignore the beeping alarms that remind us it is time to stop abdicating our responsibility to teach students how to use all new technologies ethically and responsibly, or we can ban them in hopes that the challenges they present to our authority, our effectiveness, our relevance, and our pedagogy will also disappear.
Postscript: I appreciated the opportunity to think about the issue more deeply, but was disappointed by the stance the article in the NY Times took on it:
The poor schoolmarm or master, required to provide a certain amount of value for your child’s entertainment dollar, now must compete with texting, instant-messaging, Facebook, eBay, YouTube, Addcaictinggames.com and other poxes on pedagogy.
One of the many issues at stake here is what counts as pedagogy. If a lecture is the best we can do, then “poxes on pedagogy” that spread widely and rapidly may be our only hope for survival! Of course, we could always try an engagement filter 
.
