Quo Vadis Mobile?
8th October, 2008
Mark Prensky made a surprise appearance at an “academic” conference in Telford at the 7th World MLearning conference from the 8-11th October and persuaded the 220+ audience that a “non-academic” approach to the issue resonated better with teachers and learners and made no apologies for his “simple and in your face” approach
http://www.mlearn2008.org/
He posed two main questions;
Where is mobile technology going?
Where is education going?
in a complex,uncertain,diverse and unequal future with change increasing in speed and magnitude!
In the long term he envisioned technology to be:
nano-scale,implanted,multi-sensory,thought and personality driven and sentient.
He suggested there was no place for “herding and telling” in education and that the role of technology is to support “new paradigms in learning and teaching”
This point resonated with leading academic Professor Diana Laurillard in her keynote presentation to open the conference.
“It seems what we have said is” here is a technological solution – now what is the educational problem?” asked Professor Diana Laurillard from the London Knowledge Lab, part of the Institute of Education, She opened the event with a keynote presentation that set mobile learning in the context of learning theory and a “conversation framework” to help educators understand the synergy between learning and digital technologies.
“Digital technologies are not optimised for learning” she explained.
She suggests what we should be asking is :
“what supports the learning process…..what technologies will optimise intensive active learning?”
Drawing on her conceptual frameworks identified in her inaugral lecture at the LKL
http://www.lkl.ac.uk/cms/files/jce/presentations/laurillard-inaugural-20080226.ppt
She argues that we should;
“make pedagogy the driver of technology and not the other way round”
Futurelab is always looking for ideas. Find out how you can 
Bob Harrison
Ben Williamson
Dan Sutch
Richard Sandford
Leon Cych
Martin Owen
Sarah Grier
Tim Reader
October 12th, 2008 at 8:31 pm
[...] focus on new technologies within education. There is a good post by Bob Harrison on Futurelab’s blog Flux which addresses this issue by referencing both Marc Prensky’s talk at mLearn and Diana [...]
October 18th, 2008 at 11:08 am
Future thinking about the relationship between technology and pedagogy is all good and well. But as practitioners in schools we have to do two things. Firstly we need to be opening up to these exciting possiblities and secondly we have to work with what we have now. It may be as much about finding ways of closing that gap – and I do therefore thingk that the starting point must be about pedagogy and then what technologies we can use to meet those needs.