I was reading yesterday about MySpace's plans for streaming video viewable on mobile phones. I think this kind of development just has to bring mobile phones into the educational mainstream that little bit quicker.
Now, obviously you would need to be a member of MySpace to use this, but forget about that and focus on the implications. If you regard this as a proof of concept, not just in terms of the technology itself but of giving a large and defined body of people access to it, the possibilities start to look very interesting. Dare I say "exciting"?
Two sentences in particular in the article struck me:
1. "Users will be able to view all the videos they have uploaded or marked as a favourite."
and
2. "As well as video uploaded by members, professional videos will also be made for the mobile platform from National Geographic and other media outlets."
Let's look at that first one. It means that if a student discovers a useful video on YouTube (or, come to that, a useless one from an academic point of view but which is entertaining), she can sit quietly in the café or school library the following day and watch it without disturbing anybody else or without having to circumnavigate the school's blocking of YouTube.
This makes personalised learning even more possible. Think about this: when I did my teachers' training course at Brunel University in 1975, the uni library had a bank of videos that you could borrow. I thought that was far ahead of its time, but the downside was that you couldn't take the videos away -- and in any case there would have been no point bin doing so because back then only a few very cutting edge and pretty wealthy people had video players. Even if you were one of them, chances are you would have the "wrong" format out of the several available at the time.
Now, of course, a library could have a repository of videos available for students to stream to their mobile phones on demand. So when a teacher tells a few students to go to the school library during the lesson to carry out a bit of extra research, one of the things they might do is, in effect, take the library with them and sit in the school playground (if it's a nice day) watching the appropriate streaming video (thereby ticking the "Keep Healthy" box of Every Child Matters into the bargain!)
Just in case you think I've lost the plot here, consider that second quotation. Professional videos? National Geographic? How long before the History Channel, UK History or the Discovery Channel gets on board? It won't be long before the least education-friendly environment, as far as technology is concerned, is school -- and in the light of the results coming in from the survey that Miles Berry and I are conducting for our presentation at the BETT Show in January 2009, that is already the case.
I think many schools of the future (which, as far as I'm concerned, starts now) have some tough choices to make. Are they going to continue to try to ban technologies like mobile phones and have an increasingly hard time enforcing ridiculous rules, or are the going to start building relationships with their students on trust and knowledge?
To quote from Khalil Gibran's The Prophet:
"People of Orphalese, you can muffle the drum, and you can loosen the strings of the lyre, but who shall command the skylark not to sing?"
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