Mobile Learning

Bill Rankin's Mobile Learning Presentation

Bill Rankin took me back through a long journey to help me understand the roots of education. He showed me how the way we understand the world has been changing social, economic, and educational aspects at a tremendous pace.

The way Bill Rankin compared and contrasted the scroll vs codex was very easy to digest.  What really caught my attention was when he explained with very simple terms the age of books. People then invented the card-catalogue to find specific information in a library. I recalled when I was learning this system in 4^th Grade. I didn’t know why to do that until I found myself surrounded by tons of books  trying to find where B587.3 was. I spent several hours hunting for specific information for a class project. Teachers back then served as primary conduit of information with students as receivers. Students mainly focused on memorization of facts and data in the early 80’s.

There has been a significant change in the age of data nowadays. More people consume and create information. By the year 2020, the information will be doubled every 15 minutes; massive information will be emerging from different sources. We will be very close to the movie MATRIX, figuring out what is real, and what is not!

My own perspective of education in time is that we are redefining our role as educators. We have to be guides and mentors to work collaboratively with our students to help them solve real problem issues such as: global warming, natural disasters (earthquakes lately in Mexico City), unemployment, just to mention a few.  Mobile devices could a very useful resource to start finding different solutions to our daily problems though social media, for instance. I strongly agree that mobile learning is changing  the way we teach and learn.

We need to innovate in order to teach our students to survive in this digital age world. We must teach informational model to assess information in any context. I truly believe that the lab Edisson had long time ago, could be a mobile device in our student’s hands today. Google and find anything you want to know: craft arts, cooking, astronomy, religion, etc. Children no longer need facts since they have smartphones or ipods. Instead of teaching memorization and facts, students need to learn skills: interpersonal skills, inquiry skills, the ability to innovate. As mentors, our first step would be to start changing education paradigms by bringing your own devices into the classrooms.