2010 Horizon assignment

The 2010 Horizon report listed mobile computing as a short term trend that will have major impact on the education community.  Mobile computing via devices like smart phones, netbooks, tablet computers, and specialized devices like the Kindle has or is moving into the mainstream population.  From personal experience over half of all mobile devices sold in November and December 2010 at one wireless company were smart phones.  The rest of the phones sold are either feature phones, a somewhat specialized mobile computer, or a lower cost voice only phone.  This trend is even more aggressive in under developed countries where the mobile device is cheaper for the individual to purchase, less expensive to build the infrastructure, and quicker to deploy.  It is in these under developed countries that mobile computing may not only dominate computing but these areas may never experience desktop PC era.  The power and usability of these devices continues to increase.  The worldwide adoption of 3G data and the usability impact of the iPhone sparked this trend towards mobile computing.  As the industry continues to develop more capabilities in the phone with faster 4G bandwidth and even greater usability with improved interfaces from the Apple, Microsoft, Google, or RIM we can expect more abilities to be developed into mobile computing.
 
Educational organizations are starting to find ways of leveraging this trend to mobile computing.  Teachers are beginning to provide course material such as lesson plans, books, grades, and instructions on mobile devices.  In other cases they have leveraged the social aspect of these devices and developed mobile learning communities.  Still others have gone farther and started to develop specific applications that aid in research.  The Horizon report references Bluegrass community and technical college and how these have replaced chemistry cookbooks with a mobile application.  Harvard has released an iPhone application that about the H1N1 virus.  This application provides the symptoms, shows outbreak zones, and even provides the user with method to prevent the disease.

Mobile computing will have a profound change on the education system.  The calculator is a good example.  What is the value of a college student being able to find the square root of a complex number when a calculator is able to provide the answer in a few key pushes.   By using the calculator the student can focus more time on other more complex aspects of math.  Mobile computing has the potential.  If the world of information is always at our finger tips is it critical that we are able to remember all that information or that we know how to find it.  What year did Columbus sail the ocean blue, well lets Google that.  The technological changes brought by mobile devices will change the education system at its core.
The social aspect of mobile computing creates a number of ethical concerns.  At the most basic level is should teachers be allowed to “friend” their students in Facebook?  Then if do what happens if they see Facebook posts that are questionable in content?  Who gets to determine questionable content?  What if it is legal, but in bad taste?  Who’s taste rules?  Then there is content.  If a learning community posts information on a social website how owns that information.  Traditionally college declared ownership of all information produced by students.  However, when it is public who owns it?  What about the content used?  How does the school ensure that protected content is not used?  There is a lot of questions that will need to be answered in the next ten years.  While the Horizon report indicated that mobile computing is a current trend, the impacts change mobile computing will make in the education community will have a long tail.


Robert