I posted this earlier today at http://ken-carroll.com/ on the issues acting upon the theory and the context of mobile learning.
As an ESL teacher for many years, I’ve discovered that the practical issue is the one that stands. The possibilities are endless, but if they make no practical sense they go to waste. So, after all questions have been answered, the fact that remains is that it will be of use only if it need be applied. Here 2 options come about: you facilitate the learning experience through the choices the learner may have or know, or you guide application towards previously proven mobile channels for facilitation (which the learner may or not be familiar or aware of). Both take a lot of planning, guidance and flexible leadership in order to get the best results. However, it best not- be done lone ranger style; as a learning facilitator, opening yourself to collaborative teaching, will guide you and your students to new and very practical learning experiences. So to teach, as best as one can, one must a student always be. The gaining of insight into mobile learning is to be brought about by learners’ practical applications and by working collaboratively at all levels towards a common goal, which makes the most of the resources at hand, opening new awareness, and making it a learning experience for everyone involved. I've found that the richest learning experiences happen this way and, that where mobile learning is concerned, the answers come about in such practical ways, you often forget what it was that sparked the idea. Usually the answer rides upon the collaborative fuel of trying to get the most out the available resources.
Having said this, I have found myself already at the crossroads that Ken Carrol points out. I can see what’s ailing education and still can’t find the means to save my child from it. I agree that it looks like it can take years for the changes to happen, but feel the solutions could be simpler that they seem to us. I sincerely believe that if we can manage to understand that it’s not only through improved individual teaching practice that change will be achieved, but in the overall collective awareness that schools are learning and breathing organizations, alive and well as long as teachers and administrators work collectively towards common goals that have them learning and achieving change, it is that we will have gained a major step towards taking education into the 21st century. Too many times I have found schools dying and totally out of oxygen because things are done as they have always been done, teachers are left to their own means, and there’s no sense of being a team, so much that it seems almost a miracle they acknowledge being part of the same school. How can there be any successful learning in these institutions if while we live in a globalized world, these institutions can’t even connect within themselves?
