 Let that in. Okay, gives me great pleasure to introduce our closing keynote John Traxler, professor of Mobile Learning and Director of the Learning Lab at University of Wolverhampton. I'm particularly grateful to John, because at the last minute I kind of sprung on him, the need to try and sum up the day, as well as giving him the talk he was originally proposing to give, so thanks very much, and over to John Okay, thank you. Good afternoon for everyone. ac mae'n ei wneud i'w rhoi ceisio'r wneud. Mae'n rhaid i'r gwahodol sy'n ei wneud i gael y rheiliadau o'r gymryd a'u rhoi i ddim yn ymddylch yn cael eu ddweud i'r ddadwch i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud. Mae'n rhaid i ddim yn credu'r drwsio'r dddangos o'r ddweud o'i ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud. Mae'n rhaid i ddim yn cael eu ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud o'r clywb am mwylo'r gynhyrch. Mae hyn yn awr i'r gwybod. Yr Rhaglen, rwyf yn gallu'n gweithio'r cyfnod ar gyfer y cyfnod rwyf. Mae'r bwysig o'r prydau sy'n ddegi'r cyflwyngau. Mae'n arnynt o blyg o'r bydd o'r bwysig o'r bwysig o'r rwyf. Mae'r bwysig o'r bwysig o'r bwysig o'r rwf. Mae'r fath o'r bwysig o'r popeth oherwydd o'r cyfnod rwyf. yw gwaith y gwirloellaeth cwmaint o'r miliwyr a dynyaid yn cael ei wneud ei wneud y gwrdd y ddechau a'r gwaith yma yn ôl ymlaen nhw'n y cymunedau ymlaen chi wedi'i ar croeso'r diolaw o'r cyfleoedd celeru'r cyllidau ac yng ngyrsbyn iawn, yna'r haf beth hefyd i gyda'r cyllideb yn eu cyllideb ar gyfer rhynghau ei cosi siarad. I hope that makes sense, and I hope that becomes apparent, but there is a kind of disjunction in there. I suppose recently, because it seems to be doing progressively more events to people who aren't the chosen few involved in mobile learning, it seems sensible to provide some kind of critical overview. The first half of the talk, if you like, to try and outline maybe a bit critically what we've achieved in the last seven or eight years. And I think, broadly speaking, there are two specific achievements. I wouldn't say we've proved anything. We might have demonstrated something. The first one that I'll unpack to some extent is the way in which what we've done is take learning in some shape or form to communities or people, or even countries and regions that have been previously unreached to other forms of educational intervention. Clearly, in some cases, and this may be relevant to a limited extent in the UK, that's been to do with the sparsity of students or the lack of density of students, that the distance, the geographical spatial separation, so work I've done in East Africa, for example, that's been a very clear and obvious way that mobile learning has reached people that it wouldn't have reached previously. But at home, there have been more kind of straightforward demonstrations. And this is from a gisk book of 2005 that I think Andy alluded to indirectly. And it was an attempt to not kind of get hung up on what's the technology, you know, is mobile learning defined by being a particular technology. And this is actually the adult and community learning sector of what we do. And so I'm partly including it because they're just such an overlooked part of the educational spectrum, where the woman in question, the young woman is the tutor, she just puts these laptops in the back of her car. I mean maybe now, you know, five years later it's netbooks. But we shouldn't overlook perfectly pragmatic and simple solutions to fairly pragmatic and straightforward problems where what we're doing is around, if you like, the learner experience rather than something defined in terms of this technology or that technology. And I suppose when I've been pressed to say, well okay, did I actually think this was mobile learning? I think there is a bit of a distinction. And maybe there is a definition around technology to some extent and it's around the fact that you wouldn't actually carry around a machine of this size for a bit of opportunistic learning or a bit of spontaneous learning or unpremeditated learning. You'd have to have a reason for carrying something like that around. And maybe learning, mobile learning, the way we've written it up has been characterised by words like kind of spontaneous, lightweight, opportunistic, bite-sized. And you're never going to do that on those kinds of machines. But we're moving towards those kind of affordances becoming rapidly more available on all sorts of different machines. This was an early experiment, a project that we funded internally at Wolverhampton supported by Sony where we gave PDAs, as they were called in those days, to what were classic, non-traditional students. And again, it's attempting to reach out to our constituencies that weren't accessible with any other technologies. Students whose families or streets or regions or cultures were not traditional. They weren't familiar with higher education. And again, this wasn't pedagogically profound. In fact, I'm not even sure if it was pedagogical. It was actually giving them the kind of support information for finding their way around university. I mean, often where you have highly modular, very large multi-site institutions, the complexity, the overhead for people who are not familiar with that kind of culture of being in those institutions is really quite intimidating. But of course, as with many mobile learning projects, it wasn't sustainable. It only worked because Sony gave us the kit. There's a different example around this community as well of how we've used mobile learning to reach communities that we wouldn't otherwise have reached. And that's actually girl or women students from relatively, if you like, conservative communities, for example, in the West Midlands, where they are, if you like, fathers or brothers, drop them off at the timetable session, lecture, pick them up immediately after it's finished and take them home. Well, actually with a private device, a mobile one as it happens, again, we can actually give them social or informal learning that was otherwise maybe being denied them. A different kind of community where lots of conventional schooling was really difficult. This is in one of the South African townships part of a project called Mobile Ed. And again, because of the acceptability, familiarity with mobile devices, we're enabled to reach these kids in ways that was kind of acceptable and unintimidating that was very, very difficult any other way. This one, again, relates to a particular community that was very difficult to reach and the history of it is, sorry, this is a circus, so I'm talking about circus folk, if you like, travellers, gypsies and so on. Goes back to the work of the LSN, LSDA as it was then, in one of the very early, if you like, flagship EU projects called M Learning that was specifically funded across three countries, I think five partners to work with NEATS, if you're familiar with that, not in education, employment or training. And it was predicated on a number of things which are still really quite relevant, even now as we talk about ubiquitous or universal mobile devices across the whole population. And that's actually that people felt confident with small devices of their own that had, if you like, keyboards that they were used to. And it was seen as potentially, if you like, bait or the thin end of the wedge that would get them into more formal learning where they had to use bigger keyboards, let's put it at its crudest. And there was a perfectly straightforward economic agenda as well, that, okay, mobile learning was and probably still is quite expensive, but it would get them into the, if you like, the system, the massified education system where unit costs were lower and in fact the rest of the agenda was actually into jobs and paying taxes. It was also, and actually when we looked at the results, so I was the evaluator and it was quite large scale by comparison, it had 200 or so learners in all sorts of different groups. It was, the results were rather ambivalent. Half the students or the learners involved said yes it was great, they really loved mobile learning, they'd like to go on to do more learning, they'd like to progress, they'd like to get into college. And the others said mobile learning was great, they really liked it, why should they want to do it in college? So that, you know, that kind of juries out I guess on that. There was also the notion floating around that was alluded to just before the tea break, but actually we were going to see some convergence and we had lots and lots of projects where essentially they were using a particular device as a proxy. I think we used XDAs if anyone can remember them. And they were kind of proxies because sooner or later we would get to the kind of sunlit uplands of a converged generic device vaguely like the PC and everything would become easier. I think the reflection in the course of today is no, that isn't happening, that may not happen and so a lot of what we were hoping for hasn't materialised and things haven't got necessarily any easier. If you like on a more, still a kind of ambivalent kind of note, we have seen these devices extend learning to communities of users who are disadvantaged because of physiological cognitive reasons. So this is a chap who's visually impaired using a mobile device and the way in which for example the hearing impaired community have taken to SMS for example is a very good case. And another good case is people with dyslexia who have trouble organising their time. Mobile devices with their organisational capacity, with their personal information management capacity have been very supportive. And if I'm making a kind of general case this has allowed us to reach communities or people that otherwise wouldn't have reached. This is another one of them. It's not just spatial distance or infrastructural distance but all sorts of other distance. And finally this is a picture from Nairobi bus station taken out of a window, at least with a camera phone. And that's a different argument in favour of mobile learning has been our capacity to exploit dead time or kind of low grade time, us cues in the lift, wherever. So I'm hoping this at least creates a plausible impression that what we've done has opened up educational opportunities. But I think I also need to say I suppose that it's a kind of deficit model it brings everyone up hopefully to the same level. It's making up for shortcomings. I think there is another half to what we've achieved and this is a slide from a colleague doing field trips in well obviously Sellerfield, north west of England. And I think our second claim, kind of speaking on behalf of the community but let's hope they don't mind is that what his name is Clive Roberts, what he's done is move from a situation where students take measurements on, I don't know, scrappy bits of paper that are environmental readings, they then go to the hostel, write them up, put them into a spreadsheet on a laptop and hope they're right and hope it didn't rain on a piece of paper. And what we had and this is quite some while ago was to put them on a VB application on a mobile phone which means they can capture the measurements in situ that they can then do the processing in situ. Okay, it's a pragmatic solution but it's actually a rather different one as well and it's one example of how I think we've extended the notion of learning to something in this particular case that can be kind of what I'd call contingent that actually these students can not only grab the data, get it validated and take it off-site but actually it can be processed on the spot in real time and it can lead to them asking other questions taking other measurements. And I think Steve Draper, for example, at Glasgow uses a similar term for the way in which the ZAPPA, the RC audience devices, can be used in teaching. It allows you not to kind of have a hardwired lesson but one that can evolve on the basis of the environment or the responses or whatever. And some work I did with the ICTD community which is ICT, if you like, for development in developing countries, we use the WiMote which you've probably seen used as an interactive whiteboard. Again, it's a pragmatic solution because you save yourself £1800 rather than buying, as it were, a real one from Smart Opymethium but it also allows a kind of contingent teaching you can just do a presentation on the fly on any bit of wall. So I think mobile technology, if you just have a pico projector, for example, and maybe a laptop or even something smaller these days. So there's a type of teaching and learning that we haven't had before and as I'm calling it contingent, there might be better words. But we've also used these technologies in our work to make learning, if you like, either more situated or more authentic but people like nurses, teachers, vets, midwives, whoever, or students doing field trips. We've done it with undergraduates doing religious studies going to mosques and synagogues and churches where actually you can take them out of the classroom and it becomes more meaningful work-based learning as another example because they're actually learning in a meaningful and authentic environment. So these are students at Imperial learning to be theatre operatives and you can see the obvious practical advantages to do with having lots of reference material, being able to capture reflections, being in contact if they're a dispersed group with the rest of their cohort, with their tutors to work on assessments to capture images as well. So yes, there's been quite a lot of this kind of work most recently maybe with the Alps kettle in the north west of England, northeast of England sorry. And I think one of the things we look back in 2005 which is still relatively true is actually how do we find a business case for some of these things? How does mobile learning not look like just another way of spending money? Well, I think in some areas, in some niches like as I say nurses teaching maybe where they're funded differently and maybe where there's a clear professional objective and a fairly kind of transparent argument that it's making teaching learning better maybe we have got a kind of sustainable way forward. This is from Carl Smith and his colleagues at London Met and is an example of context aware learning where the learning is actually driven by the location of the learner, where they've been, what they're doing, their history. And so there's quite a long history of work in say museum spaces, art galleries, botanical gardens, castles, game parks in South Africa where what you're presented with either audio or video enriches the learning experience and takes you out of the classroom to something that's more meaningful but actually specifically tailored to where you are, where you've been. And I guess we've got so far with that. Again, it's been project driven but it's essentially been episodic in the sense that this experience has been so far based around on the gallery visitor or the student in question gets issued with the device for the duration of the lesson and all the machine can learn about their preferences or their learning style is gathered during that episode then they hand it back. So I think that's problematic but maybe the increased affordability, functionality, network coverage and all that open out the possibility that we can move into a more sustained version of context aware learning where the capacity of the machinery to learn about your preferences and to look at proximity not just in kind of geographical terms maybe social or pedagogic terms becomes increasingly possible and interesting. And I suppose where also we can start to look at not just this if you like web 1.0 version where the machinery just tells you things but actually where you're in a position to contribute and engage and people learn from what your reactions were as they come to the same space or come with the same history. And finally the idea of augmented reality which is location specific or context aware but also attempts to overlay this looks like Jane Eyre I suppose or something like Brontian maybe where what you're seeing in the real world is overlaid by extra experiences that enrich, in this case enrich the learning. But having said that I think there are considerable problems oh this is courtesy of John Trindall I hope to say and it illustrates some of the problems we have and have had in the last eight years, nine years, ten years one of them is scale. There are very few, have been very few mobile learning projects of any size at all and curiously in the school sector the biggest one in the country if not the world is in Wolverhampton but most of our projects, most of our trials have been small scale, they've been a cohort and they've also been short term we haven't cracked the problem of sustainability as I said earlier and as we look at what this is offering to the university sector and clearly these are significant challenges most of our work has been around projects as I say and one of the things you'd hope we would have generated as it were in order to tell you was evidence and I don't think we've actually got sufficiently competent methodologies to give you credible or rigorous evidence about how good is learning with mobile devices partly because of a kind of philosophical problem but a lot of our research methods are to do with being stationary and for example when I was the evaluator for the M Learning project which was about literacy and mobility the original proposals for evaluating it was to make the students sit down and write things so if you see there's a kind of paradox or a contradiction there we haven't evolved methods that will give us evidence that is aligned to what we're doing and credible and trustworthy and we've tried to kind of improve the kind of signal to noise ratio in our projects but as soon as you do that it involves well it's the issue about kind of throwing out the baby and the bathwater learning with mobile devices is about moving around it's kind of woven into everything else you're doing and it means gathering data is really complex because everyone's doing several things at once when they're moving around when they're using mobile devices and that in part accounts for the problem we have with evidence which I guess in part explains our problem with sustainability that we can't actually be convincing enough and I think there's also a problem with equity if you like there is a considerable risk and maybe that kind of echoes what people have been saying here that what we're doing works for rich people or rich institutions or rich countries and there is an ongoing issue about other people other institutions being left behind this was taken by Agnieszka Korski-Hulm a while ago and she was actually illustrating the fact that for her mobile device whichever it was you actually get an awful lot of other stuff clutter basically but the reason I'm showing it is actually just to make the point that I don't think mobility or moving around or mobile learning is as it were free all of a sudden we get a different set of affordances about well people sometimes call them tetherings or moorings actually you no longer think about where you're going to sit in terms of is it comfortable or the sight line or the audio you start thinking about where are the electrical sockets where is the coverage is there adequate coverage on a Bluetooth Wi-Fi this that and the other and so all of a sudden we start redefining how we understand the architecture of the for example the spaces we want to teach in and that may be true of the geometry of the spaces but it may also be true of our understanding of the time that teaching and learning takes place so it's to do with how long have you got till the battery goes flat or what's the envelope of your text messages you know have you used up the bundle and that kind of thing and it's parallel in a sense to the way that the car is portrayed as the great kind of mobiliser of the 20th century yes it is but if you drive around London it's been a lot of time worrying about where's the parking spaces where are the petrol stations and is it all turning into Los Angeles so as I say none of these things are free they all come at some kind of a cost I think if we're to move forward on getting a better understanding of mobile learning and the possibility of learning with mobile devices we need to look at the projects and worry about why so few of them have sustained and this is a kind of reference to the some fell on stony ground issue the way our projects have been funded maybe lots of education innovation has been funded has been on the basis of looking at the project and wanting it to be good and hoping that the kind of host environment the soil will like it and I think there's been a lot of emphasis on the seed and the project and insufficient emphasis on the host organisation its expectations, culture, standards, quality regime and all the rest of it and that's maybe partly a remark about the culture of innovators and researchers versus the culture of rank and file teachers or quality assurance people and I kind of worry that so far what we've achieved in lots of different projects has been to prove that if we run mobile learning projects or projects about learning with mobile devices and we fund the gadgets then maybe all we're doing is proving that spending money on education improves education and we need to look at the possibilities of there being no money and what can we get out of mobile technologies if we're no longer funding the hardware, the gadgets and all the rest of it and I think again that's a... it's overlooked or it's underplayed this is Iron Bridge near where I live and it's the world's first iron bridge and because of that the designers I guess were fairly conservative so it's actually designed along the lines of a wooden bridge and it makes me think of... I'm not sure if it's an urban myth but the expression that when a new technology comes along the first things you do are the ones that were previously difficult and then you try and do what was previously impossible and finally you try and do what was previously inconceivable and that's a kind of considerable challenge actually because I think the history of a lot of work with using mobile learning and mobile learning technologies comes out of e-learning it's to do with the frustrations of it and it's a lot of what we're doing for example putting Moodle on a phone for example is treating mobile learning as a kind of impoverished but portable version of e-learning and it's... if you look underneath that you find out that the disciplines that have been supporting e-learning I think have been maybe psychology, technology and education and a lot of their understanding and their theorising of what happens in e-learning and consequently of mobile learning have been hardwired into it because that's where they started from they haven't started from anthropology or sociology or lots of other different things so we're still struggling with an understanding of learning with mobile devices that doesn't kind of take us back to e-learning and if we look at how it's worked out in other parts of the world there are only different models for example in Southern Africa where supporting learning with mobile devices is seen around the issue of service delivery it's kind of making the machinery of education run better it's telling people to pick up their assessments or pay their fees or go and get a parcel from the post office whereas in the US again there's a kind of different educational tradition and they see it in the words of an American colleague of mine in terms of drill and kill a very kind of behaviourist making people do exercises and that's maybe games based whereas ours seems to be heavily or maybe worryingly kind of theorised and I'm not sure if that holds us back sometimes in conversations way back with Helen Beatham from JISC we used to talk about whether there were two basic paradigms around e-learning or learning with technology and the conventional one was the one I think she called the world in a box where what you try and do is create experiences within the classroom within the computer where you try and abstract and draw everything in in order to kind of manage and explain it and so if you look at simulations for example they're an attempt to put the world in a box to make learning manageable because it breaks it down it runs on a predictable basis but what we're being offered with mobile devices is what Helen would call the box in the world where we can take the gadget out and all of a sudden learning becomes potentially uncontrolled, messy kind of contingent because the environment is a significant part of the learning experience whereas attempting to abstract and bring everything into the classroom kind of sanitises it so that's an issue in how we try and understand what the potentialities of mobile learning for our universities are and I guess another issue of saying that what we've done with mobile technology has been an outgrowth or continuation of e-learning has been sometimes what we've achieved with e-learning people have characterised as an industrialisation of learning you know we've turned universities into battery farms or factories I mean if that's the case or if that's a plausible depiction then we have to worry about how do mobile devices fit into that you know are they a kind of the flexible the flexible manufacturing version of that is that the way Nissan and Saab manufacture cars you know is it somehow analogous to the next generation of manufacturing okay so that's a kind of critique of where I think we've got to with using mobile technologies for learning in the way that's been characterised by the mobile learning research community but clearly the important thing really is actually the extent to which mobile technologies are universal, ubiquitous, pervasive and all the rest of it across society where I worry that we're getting left behind and we're not understanding what's going on in the wider world I don't have any statistics about because I can't remember things about how pervasive mobile technologies are but I have been told because I remember these in Uganda apparently there are more mobile phones than there are light bulbs and in India there are apparently more mobile phones than there are toilets now I don't know what that's telling you about the relationship between toilets and light bulbs who knows but I think in terms of what the way that might challenge the university sector we have to look at how that's challenging all sorts of different parts of our environment we're obviously seeing a vastly increased impact on the economy and clearly part of our job is to train people for that economy so these are, if you're familiar with tasers these are retail holsters for tasers but the attraction is they're all MP3 enabled and the manufacturers say they put the cute into electrocute but it's, well if it takes us to the end of the wedge let's hope not but the world of work that our students are going into is being rapidly transformed by new products new services, companies that didn't exist five or ten years ago I worked with a company in Nairobi who say they are East Africa's lords of the ringtones they've got a business that you couldn't have conceptualised ten years ago there are new forms of asset well like ringtones or downloads and again new jobs that didn't exist before and that's part of what we're supposed to be training our undergraduates for but also people argue that mobile devices are changing not just the types of jobs but how people do those jobs remote jobs used to give workers a measure of independence or autonomy but actually mobile devices may be restrict that they allow increased oversight or de-skilling because you don't need to know how to mend a photocopier now you just read the instructions on your mobile phone which not only tells you what to do to repair the mobile phone but also tells your employers where you are and there's the literature talks about the day extender syndrome the constant pressure on our private space courtesy of mobile phones to increase the working day so all of those are part of the work environment that the universities are supposed to be recognising and training for and I guess there's also a relationship between education and learning being seen as work you know, if you try to persuade kids to go to school then there might not be much intrinsic motivation there is an element that they have to do, they're coerced it has similarities with work in that respect it kind of bleeds in either direction the connection between work and learning someone I think, sorry Richard Noss used the phrase epistemological revolution and I thought ah that's what the work, that's the phrase I've been looking for because he was talking about the fact that these technologies and he was only talking about computers, not alone mobile phones these technologies change what we know and how we know it and by inference they change what we learn and how we learn it but we see communities of people because these technologies that can produce images and ideas and information and knowledge produce, generate, disseminate have communities that are disjoint from what we teach in universities that value their own kind of knowledge that can discuss and consume a specific set of images, ideas and value those and although it might be overstating it you can see how that challenges the notion there's a kind of universal canon of things we all need to know to be good citizens we need to be able to read Jane Austen and we need to train for our jobs well actually there's a third possibility that we can exist just knowing stuff that interests us and the people around us and that we value and they value I mean there has been an argument also that becoming involved in the world of warcraft improves your metacognition which I think find a slight weasel words so I think what this may be portraying is kind of fragmentation to use that word again of knowledge separate communities may be transient may be ephemeral may be highly local but no longer with an overarching notion of there is stuff we all need to know in universities are the repositories for it this was taken outside the BMA in Tavyscock Square 7th of July in 2005 was it the bombings and it's an example of citizen journalism where bystanders have captured this stuff with their camera phones they put it on to flicker everyone around the world has seen it and again you see the kind of generation of information and knowledge that has short circuited the institutions I don't know Fleet Street or the BBC or the Ministry of Information or whoever and that's seen as a kind of democratising feature no doubt it's making knowledge and information more widely accessible that's true but you have to bear in mind of course these pictures could have been taken by the bombers themselves and there will be an entirely different spin on the knowledge that that was being seen to support so again I'm kind of portraying the possibility that these technologies produce a more fragmented partial subjective view of what we know there's also the notion that these technologies as I've said with the day extender syndrome where our employment presses on our private time and our private space these technologies also allow our private space to push back there's a paper some years back called No Dead Air we talk about my music and the fact that I can have my music with me means that actually we're in a different as it were realm we're not necessarily in the physical realm that we're in to the extent we used to be because we've got this space around us our private space people listening to their iPods at work so it's part of an argument that the boundaries between different kinds of space public and private spaces are pressing backwards and forwards on each other and it's being capitalised by these technologies there's also an argument in the literature of mobilities where people talk about what it's doing to our sense of time and people use the phrases like slipperiness of time the softening of schedules the microcoordination of everyday life meaning that all of a sudden we're no longer tied to a kind of Newtonian time where we have to do everything on a universally agreed time but we can actually renegotiate meetings or appointments with our phones we can SMS when we're late, when we're early when we've missed something, when we've forgotten something and you can see it no longer becomes as absolute as it used to be one author talks about the wristwatch as being kind of handcuffs it ties you into a sort of Newtonian industrial time whereas the mobile phone does the very opposite it releases you from that all of a sudden you're in a position to renegotiate all of your appointments on the fly of course unless you're at university or an institution which aren't much, much more fixed they're governed by what schedules calendars, timetables, deadlines and stuff like that so again there's a tension on the university sector maybe, university institutions I think there's a different pressure as well actually that we used to have a kind of, we used to be synchronised like when I went to school we could all talk about what we'd seen on television the previous night which was Monty Python and it kind of gave a, it synchronised us and I don't think we can anymore the volume of channels, video on demand actually all means that we arrive at the water cooler the following morning and there's probably nothing we can talk about that we have in common there's also something in literature where people describe how various mobile devices are watering down the here and now and someone talks about pre-visiting places mobile technologies and personal technologies allow you to actually be somewhere before you've got there and actually if you've recorded them they allow you to be there after you've left there as well and how that kind of dilutes the here and now I find it with sat nav which is a bit scary I'm inclined to look at the sat nav on the dashboard rather than look at the road because it does more or less kind of predict where I'm going to go and Google Street View and the way people receive where they're going on holiday and like I say they've been there before they got there so there's a general kind of remark about the extent to which this is changing the places, spaces that we live in this was taken by Jonathan Donner who works Microsoft Research it was taken outside Microsoft in Bangalore and actually he's written a paper about missed calls a missed calls are those ones that are deliberately not intended to be answered so in the UK when your taxi driver is outside he'll give you a missed call it costs some money and actually there's a whole lot of different ways in which missed calls are used around the world and this is how it's used in India if you want to tell a firm to try and sell you some services you give them a missed call but it's an example of appropriation I think that's a problem we have in the educational sector of understanding the changed nature of that appropriation we've had a model of appropriating corporate technologies PCs from international business machines and we've got a model of how we adopt them or adapt them for education and how we roll them out and how we organise change from the top within our institutions and all of a sudden we have a scenario where the devices we're trying to co-opt or appropriate for education are now actually individual ones they're kind of designed and marketed and owned on a kind of leisure, lifestyle, retail basis and I think that is problematic for how we roll out educational change within our institutions we can't just kind of drop it in at the top and then regulate how it percolates down through our institutions because it's actually beating on the walls trying to get in and I think there's a different problem maybe a philosophical one about how because technology is so ubiquitous the phrase is technology enhanced learning or maybe technology supported learning and no longer appropriate the technology is the learning the technology is us it's no longer appropriate to see technology as some kind of dumb if you like conduit that you push learning through or some kind of dumb receptacle but you put the learning in but actually it is the learning and so I think the relationship which is maybe quite meaningful so that a lot of people here coming from the and I ought to stop using support services now but coming from that sector is actually they're not the support, they're integral the learning is one and the same with the technology we also need to recognise at a different rather human level the way in which these technologies are altering social behaviour so I'll just mention three things one is how we have to learn maybe as lecturers, maybe standing in front of people the extent to which mobile phones particularly change expectations about how people behave with each other so the mobile intrudes and the virtual intrudes in the way that a desktop computer never would if you engage with a desktop computer you're in a kind of bubble with your back to the world if you engage with a mobile phone it's kind of woven into the rest of the world and that means actually of course people get phone calls in the middle of face-to-face conversations and we have to learn a whole new repertoire of my signs but it's a kind of signal that I still value this conversation but I'm answering this call doing the body language almost automatically and also to cope with what people have called enforced eavesdropping you know you can be in a train and someone's having a kind of domestic on their phone next to you and again we have to learn a whole lot of social cues to say no I'm not at all interested I'm kind of turning away and hiding in my newspaper and you see stuff in maybe the Times Higher and you realise how kind of fragmented and generational that might be you know because you get kind of grumpy young men grumpy young men complaining about students texting in lectures well yeah they do they will you know we need to recognise actually that is the world we're in and it's affecting all sorts of other things and I think we're also seeing amongst communities sorry I think we're seeing communities growing up in these various technologies each of which it's a kind of in a sense move on from what I was saying each of which has their own taste expectation, values, protocol, etiquette again fragmented ephemeral but to recognise as institutions we are relatively fixed and lagging behind and the audiences or the people we have responsibilities to reach out to don't necessarily work the same way as us there's also a literature of the moral panics around mobile phones as well which is worth bearing in mind when you kind of start to get aerated about this stuff and worry about well all those slides of students on mobile learning projects who seem to have a pooling posture or the fact that using mobile devices is frying their brains or making them all stay in bed too long or implicated in the decline of literacy or facilitating pedophilia and all the rest of it there's a big literature saying watch out it seems to be how the media latch on to various themes at various times and the moral panics of mobiles is just one of them and maybe teachers' concerns about losing control as the technology shifts from being the institutional stuff on desks to the stuff in students' pockets is one of those moral panics, I don't know and finally and finally there's also the issue about what this stuff does to our sense of identity some years ago I heard a man from Nokia talk about the fact that within the company mobile phones are referred to as our new private parts they become us and other phrases in literature are that they become embodied, they become another limb they're almost like Philip Paulman's account of demons you know that you can't be, if you're separated from it with agility and you kind of go into some kind of psychic meltdown or they're prosthetic, are there another limb and in one of the literatures about this aspect of identity and what mobiles is doing to it there's an account of what I remember being called Camilla Gates where the air to the throne also refers to his mobile phone as a body part anyway we won't go into which one and there's the aspect of which is coupled with identity to some extent but how these devices if not are implicated in an increased sense of surveillance you know we are being looked at more our images are being captured 300 times a day and all the rest of it and what that might do to the sense of I don't know that there are even learners and their teachers and their institutions