H Duderstadt, New Tech Maven

Last night I got a phone call from a good friend of mine. As the only free time she often has is when she’s driving her car, it was using her cell phone. Though the conversation lasted for a while, the performance of her cellular company was abysmal. The phone conversation was difficult to understand, the call was dropped more than once, and all in all it reinforced my belief that the future cell phones is not as phones.

Now, before you label me some kind of Luddite who wants to go back to the good old days of land lines (and I wouldn’t fight that idea as when I want to make a phone call, I do just that.  I pick up my hard wired corded phone!), realize that I have probably used cell phones longer than anybody you know.

And I got my first one back in 1986 when I had one installed in my Subaru. It involved wiring a fairly large transmitter into the back of the car, then running cables to the roof for the antenna and the front of the car where they mounted the handset. Back then, you had to be very careful about how much you used it because you paid by the minute. Long conversations rapidly ran your monthly phone bill in the hundreds of dollars.

A number of years later, I purchased a first-generation portable phone. The word “portable” was kind of a stretch as the phone itself weighed about 4 pounds and actually used a a separate handset.   The one advantage was that unlike the early portable phones from Motorola, this one had the same power output as the kind installed in a car. Which meant, you could use it to cook hot dogs!  Just stick them on the antenna.

Since then, I’ve gone through several different carriers and numerous phones. I’m currently with Verizon and use an LG Voyager phone. To say it’s awful is to put it mildly. I can’t wait until I can upgrade to my new iPhone in about two weeks. I realize, that the iPhone is not known for being a great phone, but that’s okay because I never actually use my cell phone to make PHONE CALLS.  Even with Verizon, which is supposedly the highest rated carrier, I often lose my connection, the conversations breaks up, and I usually end up telling people to wait until I get home and can call them over my land line.

Over the years, the quality of phone connections, in my opinion, has actually gone down hill. Even with my 4 pound portable phone, phone conversations weren’t  that painful. Now, they seem to break up constantly, and all in all are an  awful experience. It’s little wonder that recent studies have shown that cell phones are actually leading to people spending less time talking with each other over a voice connection, and more time sending text messages. That’s the only way you can make sure people get your message!

Maybe in Scandinavia where every body is given a cell phone at birth, there is good reason for people not to have a land line wired into their house. Even here in the San Francisco Bay Area, the undisputed technological hub of America, cellular phone connections are pretty much hit or miss, with the majority being miss.

But, we now live in the era of “smart phones” which can do everything we used to do with our computer. Of course, the hot new thing is video chat. Ironically, that’s probably a good idea because we can all learn sign language and use that to make sure our message gets through as the voice connection or probably still be awful with that!

So, you can see why I believe the future cell phones isn’t for making phone calls allowing people to communicate in any other means than voice.

Kids in school love to complain about how boring so many subjects they have to study are.  “Why do I have to learn Trigonometry anyway???  It’s so BOOOORING!”   Or, “our physics teacher was going on and on about gravity and I just don’t get it.”

Yet, ask them about the latest video game they are playing and their whole mood will change as they start going on and on about how many zombies they were able to kill in Left 4 Dead, or how they built this amazing house in Sims 3 and wished they could really live there.   The two might appear to have nothing in common but you’d be suprised.

Take a look at the typical video game boys in particular like to play and you’ll find a real world complete with many of the same  properties a real world has, INCLUDING GRAVITY.  In fact, there is a game known as Garry’s Mod which is called a “physics sandbox”.  It’s basically an environment where the laws of physic exist and you can create things that are influence by this.  A walking house; a tank you can drive around, an whole army that you can control, even electrical circuits that control specific machines.  Imagine a virtual place where children can build anything they can imagine and then operate it as if it’s in the real world.  The potential of this program in an educational environment is immense.

The possibilities go on and on.  If this is something that excites you, the best place to start is read James Paul Gee’s work “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Second Edition: Revised and Updated Edition“

You might think I am a typical “EdTech” evangelist who believes that technology is the “Holy Grail” of  our education system.  Transforming every classroom into a digital nirvana of state of the art computers with high speed Internet access,  handing out iPads instead of textbooks, requiring all teachers to put their curriculum online are all things I should be a advocate for claiming they will turn around the problems we face our schools.   But, you may be shocked to learn that I don’t believe anything of the sort.  Yes, I do NOT believe that technology is the answer to the United State’s long suffering education system.

Now, before you brand me as some kind of a Luddite who wants to take schools back to the days of one room school houses with blackboards and school marms (though I did like the idea of a one room school house…more on that some other time).  I DO believe that technology, and the tools it represents, is a KEY part of solving our problems.  It’s just that it alone won’t necessarily help.

To better explain this, let’s take a trip back to the 1990′s when the dot com revolution was raging and everybody believed that the Internet was the future.  A group of very dedicated network experts and technologists started a program called “Net Day”.  I had several friends who were a part of this.  The goal of Net Day was to bring together technology experts to wire public schools with high speed internet access using fiber optic cable, the latest in networking technologies, and a whole bunch of volunteers who worked in schools all across the country.  It wasn’t a bad idea.  It was a very good one.  But, in the end many of those high speed lines just made teacher’s lives harder than easier and teaching more difficult that effective.  A lot of the reason was  whether teachers were trained in just what to do with all this data they had access.  Certainly, there were those who had a good understanding of the internet and were able to see a dramatic improvement in their student learning with the connectivity that Net Day brought.  But, there were many more who ended up having to shut off the computers and even unplug them as kids started doing what kids do when they get around computers.  They’d start trying to visit web sites they shouldn’t, and they’d play games.  In the end, some rooms even had the computer removed and how have these weird connectors in the corner where the fiber optic cable came in.  Don’t get me wrong, Net Day was definitely not a flop.  It actually did a lot of good.  In fact, link to Project Tomorrow and you’ll see it’s still going strong.  But, there’s a tendency to embrace a technology just because you are caught up in the excitement about it without really thinking out how it is going to be used and making sure the teacher using it knows what to do with it.

So, there are many wonderful technologies that could improve learning in our schools.  From hand held devices such as iPads to video games to blogs, there are an amazing array of wonderful things out there that we should give serious thought to using.   And, in this blog I’ll talk about a lot of them.  We just must make sure we don’t forget the teachers who will be using it, and ignore the potential downsides so that we can prevent these from hurting their very real potential.

In the end, heck yes I am pro-educational technology.  But, I’m also pro knowing what do, how do it RIGHT and what the results will be before you commit to it.