Handheld Learning - learning with mobile and ubiquitous technologies

Hi all - I am getting a bit worried   

As mobile learning spreads its wings, and as more and more teachers and tutors are doing more and more really creative things with it, there seems to also be a parallel rise in really rather unhelpful, backwards thinking.

see my blog rant about it, here (prompted by a conversation with Graham)
http://moblearn.blogspot.com/2006/11/mobile-learning-myopia.html

Is this myopia just a natural side effect of the increased exposure that mobile learning has been enjoying?   

Or are the myopics in fact correct, and are the rest of us overly naive about the role technology should be playing in learning?   

Good point. (see, I was missing the wood for the trees too!)

So, does that mean that we are in a natural cycle, and in the end the general myopia will clear up, and people will see these things for the benefits they can add to learning?

Or is there some sort of duty on practitioners who have good stories to tell, and positive messages to go out and spread the word?

(I guess this is what I am struggling with. by nature I am a live-and-let-live kind of guy, but some of the negativity seems entirely unsupported by any of the evidence I have seen in the many trials I have been privileged to be involved with)

I think your points are interesting. Working in HE and following Handheld Learning this year I would say that there are blinkers in place in HE.

Not sure why the hesitation is there but I think part of it is fear. For most of my colleagues, they work in two places home and the office. They don't need to be mobile, since those two locations offer them all they need. Their mobile phones are therefore primarily for quick short calls and the occasional text. Most don't use portable devices other than a laptop for the meetings which sometimes take them out of the office.

Then come all these student's with devices, which are used sometimes subversively e.g. text messaging in lecturers etc. and the  staff member is shut out because the technology and it's potential is simply not on the radar.

It's something I am trying to challenge because I see a generation coming through that is mobile and portable and we need  to meet the challenge and enjoy the excitement.

It's a phenomenon known in physics, in the electrical / electromagnetic field, whereby any change of emf [electo-motive force] ("current", if my memory serves correctly) will induce a "back-emf" that resists the change.

The reason is that we're asking people to step outside of their comfort zone, into areas of gadgetary use that they reallise they have little or no experience of controlling, or of coping with vagaries that may arise.  What they have is what they know, can control, and already which works for them (in most cases).  Especially in cases where there are a myriad of devices, each with its own command set and ways of going wrong, they are nervous about change.

They need to be able to see the pedagogic advantages, with assurances of minimal risk and disruption.  Sadly, they are rarely won over by the enthusiasm of those whom they see as technological obsessives.  Often it is not until they are forced into a situation in which (in this case) "mobile devices" are so incontovertibly the only feasible solution will they remove their blinkers, and consider utilising the gadget.

We, on the other hand, will be developing the next bit for them to be nervous about !

It was probably the same when someone came up with chalkboards.