Comments on: School Ban of Mobile Phones Down Under http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2007/08/13/school-ban-of-mobile-phones-down-under/ All About Mobile 2.0 Tue, 02 Dec 2008 05:19:59 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.5 By: Leonard Low http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2007/08/13/school-ban-of-mobile-phones-down-under/#comment-233752 Leonard Low Tue, 14 Aug 2007 02:38:51 +0000 http://mobilecrunch.com/2007/08/13/school-ban-of-mobile-phones-down-under/#comment-233752 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. 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.

]]> By: John M. http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2007/08/13/school-ban-of-mobile-phones-down-under/#comment-233620 John M. Mon, 13 Aug 2007 19:56:36 +0000 http://mobilecrunch.com/2007/08/13/school-ban-of-mobile-phones-down-under/#comment-233620 talk about cheating & copying in school: www.comombo.com talk about cheating & copying in school:

http://www.comombo.com

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