CADE-ACED / AMTEC Conference 2006 (Part 2)

Part 2 of my CADE ramblings...

People are finally talking about people. Many of the main speakers have discussed the tension between technology and the people involved. In conversation the previous evening, one person noted that she was in the process of completing a survey (Australian) on tech use. The intent of this, as I recall, was to establish some understanding of the delivery possibilities for distance learning. What came of this was that some people owned computers, more people owned a DVD player, others owned mp3 players/CD players, but nearly everyone owned a cell phone.

Her fear (as it was evolving at her institution) was that she would be directed to deliver "mobile content" because her target population would most likely be able to access it that way. Here's a good example of my musings in the last post - institutional drivers that don't align with basic ideas like educational theory, technology driving education and not the other way around, and so on.

Now here, I tread on soft ground... my home institution is driving hard at the whole concept of mobile learning, delivering content to cell phones, Crackberries, PDAs and so on. I have seen the evangelism and being a geek, who has used a mobile device since the Newton 120, I am heartily impressed. I can see the value in a psychologist (like me) being able to access specialized journals/abstracts/content on the fly. However, I don't want to do this on the almost-postage stamp sized screen on my cell phone! I don't even read articles on my laptop (unless I am in my office and working.) My students admit they print everything out...

And my colleague from down-under found that the nearly universal reaction to the option of cell-phone delivery to students was "no way - -my cell is private and I don't want a bunch of school work invading it." Very interesting reaction... and I know that my 2 year old LG 6070 couldn't handle even 1 pdf article, let along all the content I might want to capture. (Now she had a windoze mobile device that looked kind of like a sleek cross between an LG 9100 and a UTStarcom 6700 with sliding keyboard etc that was truly tech to lust for ...if only it ran Palm OS... and I could see using it much more like a mini laptop adjunct/replacement when mobile.)

Once again, there's a tension (perhaps unacknowledged as yet as such) between 'tech and teach', between institution and instruction. No easy answers once again, and a long road to travel for the non-geeks to catch up to the geeks in some areas.

Paul