Mobile Learning Hot seat provocation piece

Q-What do ballpoint pens, transistor radios, calculators mobile phones and I pods all have in common?
A-They have all been banned in classrooms!

However earlier this month London and Telford hosted two of the worlds largest gatherings of academics, policy makers, educational professionals and yes , learners, to explore how mobile technologies are being, and could be used, in learning.

One of the highlights of the M learn conference in Telford, hosted by the University of Wolverhampton and attended by leading researchers from every continent in the world(except Antarctica!) was the presentation from Elizabeth Hartnell-Young from the Learning Sciences and Research Institute at the University of Nottingham who shared her findings from her BECTA funded research project “How Mobile phones help learning in secondary schools”
Her full report can be found on the Becta website here

http://partners.becta.org.uk/index.php?section=rh&catcode=_re_rp_02_a&rid=15482

and an interesting interview with Merlin John can be found on the futurelab website here

http://www.futurelab.org.uk/resources/publications-reports-articles/web-articles/Web-Article1125

Elizabeth headed back to Australia to take up a new post as Director of Research in a country where learning with mobile phones in school is actively being explored;

http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,22606,24538923-2682,00.html

Another regular event on the Mobile Learning landscape is Handheld Learning, which has grown from a handful of interested activists 5 years ago to almost 1000 delegates who attended this months conference in London to hear from practitioners, policy-makers and learners how mobile technologies are supporting learning in a wide variety of contexts. All of the presentations can be viewed here;

http://www.handheldlearning.co.uk/component/option,com_smf/Itemid,58/topic,1472.0

One interesting statistic emerging from one presentation was that whilst

“more than half of all pupils were excited by the prospect of using mobile devices for learning only 15% of school leaders thought it was a good idea”

So the key questions for us are:

What are the implications of this thinking and emerging practice for schools in general, and the BSF programme in particular?

What are the barriers to exploiting the potential of mobile technologies for learning?

Steve Moss from Partnerships for schools, responsible for the BSF programme offers a clue;

“The barriers are not technological that is for sure…..they are all in our heads”

What do you think?