A few days ago, whilst walking back from a local supermarket where I had taken my wife for tea (she deserves a treat now and again), I was able to capture two extremely rare sights...

The first was a duck and about 13 ducklings walking around a garden looking lost. And who can blame them? The garden was miles away from any kind of pond as far as I know. We found out subsequently from one of the residents of the road we were in that a few days ago the duck and her ducklings could be seen walking from a hospital located about half a mile away. Wonder where she thought she was going? In search of a better life perhaps?



Interestingly enough, I almost always take my camera with me, in case I see anything interesting, and this time I didn't. Typical. Nevertheless, I remembered that my phone has a camera built-in so I used it. OK, the quality isn't great, but it's a lot better than I could draw!

The next rare sighting took place about 5 minutes later, when we saw two policemen walking down the road. In 15 years of living here I have only seen the police twice, once in a car and once when we'd been burgled, so this was a reassuring sight.



I captured that on my phone too, partly because I didn't think anyone would believe me if I told them, and partly because they joined in trying to rescue the duck and her family, which I thought quite humorous and quintessentially English.

On a more serious note, this is a great example of how having the technology to hand enabled me to capture a moment, which I am now, courtesy of another type of technology, sharing with the world.

In my opinion this is the sort of thing we should be encouraging youngsters to do with their phones, subject to various sensible precautions.

At the moment, phones are either banned, confiscated, or the subject of much angst as teachers struggle with trying to discourage their use in a negative way. At the moment in the UK, such negativity takes the form of "happy slapping": basically beating someone up while someone else films or photographs it on their mobile phone. This then morphs into cyberbullying when the video or snaps of the victim are circulated as a source of amusement.

Another unhappy development (hopefully an isolated incident rather than a trend) which I read about recently was using a phone to take a photo of a teacher's cleavage.

Such issues and incidents have to be dealt with, but what we don't seem to be doing as an educational community is promoting the positive use of such technologies. We always seem to respond to invention and innovation by banning it, confiscating it, and fighting against the (inevitable?) rise of its antisocial usage which has at least in part been caused by the fact that we didn't bother to provide any positive role models for its use.

For a community concerned with education, we seem to be awfully slow learners.

Computers in Classrooms issue #19 will feature a set of guidelines for positive mobile phone use for schools.

What do you think? Please leave a comment.

© Terry Freedman Tue, 9 May 2006

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"educational technology" "ICT in Education" "Terry Freedman"
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