There is a new call for a banning of mobile phones at schools in Australia. Not because of fears of cheating or excessive gabbing, but rather because students are using the phones to film their own mini-versions of “Romper Stomper.” In New South Wales government schools filed 25 reports of police regarding incidents involving video-equipped mobile handsets over a six-month period.
Some of these incidents, which include were captured on mobile phones and include segments of bullying and sexual assaults have been posted online on sites such as YouTube. Thus far the NSW government has rejected a call for a total ban.
talk about cheating & copying in school:
http://www.comombo.com
Comment by John M. — August 13, 2007 @ 11:56 am
While there certainly are cases of mobile phones being abused at schools, there is also strong support from educators to use students’ mobile phones to support their learning experience - for example, taking pictures or videos of science experiments or artistic influences, listening to audio e-books on the built-in mps players in phones, or being alerted of emergencies on campus via SMS.
To ban phones because they happen to be used in documenting incidents of bullying or violence is throwning the baby out with the bath water. It’s like saying we should ban computers at schools because of incidents of bullying, cheating, or accessing banned content using computers… or even just shutting down schools altogether: there would be so much less bullying and student violence if schools didn’t bring the students together in the first place, right?
For more information on the use of mobile devices in education, you can check out my blog on “mobile learning” or “m-learning” at http://mlearning.edublogs.org. There is also an international m-learning conference being held in Australia leter this year, with information at http://mlearn2007.org.
We hope very much that reason and innovation will prevail over hysteria and fear of change.
Comment by Leonard Low — August 13, 2007 @ 6:38 pm