Who will put learning onto mobile phones? Part 2
The peek at mobile learning in the future, displayed in the picture on the left, is a challenge to each one of us. The best answer to the question ‘who will put learning onto mobile phones?’ is: you and I will. There is no reason we cannot begin today.
The theorem of geometry stated and illustrated in the picture could be sent by any mobile phone as a text message, or by a high percentage of mobile phones available these days, to also include an image (in this case, the triangle). All that is needed is for one such message to be sent from the phone of its creator to a teacher or student, and that same message can be forwarded limitlessly to other teachers and students.
It may seem idealistic and optimistic for me to say that specific nodes of knowledge emerge from individuals, which in turn, can be used for global learning. The best example I can offer is the fact that this is exactly what happened with the emergence of the internet. I was there and had an up-close seat as Director of Content for HomeworkCentral.com from 1997-2001. I can tell you that as a lot of planning and talking went on in the American education professional, industry and government circles about wiring schools, there was also another kind of action that was not noticed much. Individuals, museums, laboratories, governments and other institutions that had access to knowledge made their own websites. They just went out and did it. The websites they made are now the backbone of some great content that already exists in a commons learning pool, made available on the internet.
Some of my favorite examples are these websites, all started by one or two individuals and used now for over a decade by millions of students:
Astronomy Picture of the Day
Luminarium
Math2.0rg
ChemicalElements.com
Famous Trials
If you click through to visit these five websites, you will see that each of them is in some parts, or completely, protected by copyright. How can I then say they are in a commons? One way to answer this question is to point out that they are all openly available online to learn from, which is not true of a large amount of learning materials inside educational and publishing websites.
Each of the websites I have listed is several years older than Creative Commons, which was established in 2001. The way these websites have cobbled together their copyright notifications is a lesson in why Creative Commons is so useful and important. The pioneers of open learning content - in the time before Creative Commons - had to figure out for themselves how to protect their rights when they chose or were forced to do so. By looking at what each of the five website creators say about their choices on rights to the materials, we can see why the internet needs Creative Commons, and why education materials need CC:
Astronomy Picture of the Day: explains that only some of the pictures they use are copyrighted
Luminarium: reserves all rights
Math2: says use can only be personal
ChemicalElements: reserves all rights
Famous Trials: describes several ways permission has been gotten and says, ‘this is an educational and non-commercial site . . .’
Creative Commons licenses cover all of the options these website creators had to figure out for themselves in order to offer their content openly for personal study and use as a learning source. Creative Commons provides tools by which websites like these can move into the age of mash-ups, ripping and burning. No one could have dreamed that in the mid-1990s, when the five sites were created, that it would ever be possible to remix digital learning platforms as we are beginning to do today.
These and other websites were much simpler when they were first built in the mid-1990s when the internet was a new and primitive medium, just as the mobile phone medium is today. Pioneering is always primitive. But pioneering is the key to momentum and the great many people who launched the first learning websites that did not sort out to the top contributed importantly by getting knowledge online.
I would argue that the wrong way to expect for the learning commons to develop is for large amounts of pre-internet learning resources to be repositioned into the mobile sphere. There is a powerful reason that those who put learning onto mobile phones should be node-builders: learning in our digital age is growing as a networked commons. When you put worthwhile learning material onto a mobile phone and send it to someone to teach or learn, you are adding to the network’s communal knowledge. Ideas are connecting. The more of us who create and launch mobile nodes of learning into the commons the richer the resources and ideas become for future learners.
Your mobile learning material may even survive to become a favoured learning resource on the subject that you launched to mobile phones. That is what happened with all five of the examples I listed above of early subject websites. Because they were placed in the then new open network, they were available for study - and soon these five sites became favourites. When Google came along, the individuals who created those five websites found themselves at the top of the lists for their subject matter.
A similar adventure lies ahead for mobile learning content. As someone interested in the commons, you can contribute to it right now, in a simple way - by sending some learning material by mobile messages to teachers and students. You might actually help kick off a global cascade of learning. You are almost certain to teach someone something.
If a celebrity does something foolish in public, only to be captured by a passerby’s camera phone, he or she can’t keep her picture off the network of mobile phones all over the world. When a hanging was captured on a mobile phone, the video was networked by millions of phones within hours. Can the theorem for a triangle spread that way too? I think so.