|
David Greenfield • Framing the Research Problem • Force Field Analysis • Ubiquitous Technology: The Cell Phone • • Literature Review • Cycle One Report • Elevator Pitch • Cycle Two Report: Data Analysis • • Final Report • Blogs • Related Work • About David Greenfield • Contact • Home • |
||
|
Ubiquitous
Technology
I have a long time interest in developing projects that use technology for story telling and community building, so my initial thoughts related to how this could be done. One easy solution is to send a group of learners on an adventure/learning experience/field trip where part of the assignment would be to use a cell phone to capture images and audio reflections that would be immediately published to a web site that could then be accessed by their complete learning community to both read and make comments. The technology portion of
this idea seemed accessible and easy to
use, but another problem arose. I currently
work as an independent consultant and designer
so I have no immediate access to groups
of students, with the exception for my
own children’s classes. I also am
aware of the general wariness of many educators
to both technology and for parent’s
ideas for enhancing their children’s
education.
My Research Adventure I presented my idea to a friend of mine who is a teacher at a downtown L.A. school. He was not convinced, but agreed to take a letter to the principal for me. My email was returned to me by my friend with the comment that it did not address the school’s, city’s or state’s educational goals and questioned why it was different from MySpace. I replied that first, thus is a graduate research project, so that it does not have to exactly fit the school’s educational mandate (he agreed) and that it is very unlike MySpace in that the content is completely generated by the cell phone and only viewed on a computer. Also, it is not structured on an individual’s interests, but rather is structured on the shared experience of a group of learners about a specific topic or experience with the spirit of a building a collaborative presence, similar to the collaborative cognition used in creating space. This contact too seemed to be at a wall. My next visit was to the director of my son’s school. He was excited about the idea and also had a specific project in mind. Their school is partnered with school in Tel Aviv Israel. The students write to each other 8th graders of both schools do two-week visits to the partner’s school. The students of the Magen School in Tel Aviv were scheduled to be in LA two weeks after our meeting. The director suggested that he would speak to the director of the program and that I should send a note. During this time I noticed
that there was a tendency among some of
the educators that I spoke with to be unable
to focus on the relative simplicity of
this project, since all that is really
required is a cell phone, with or without
a camera. A picture (or in this case an
example) being worth a thousand
words, I decided to do a demo of the concept.
I decided to attend the annual dia de los
muertos celebration at the Hollywood Forever
cemetery with only my cell phone to record
the event (for the record, I also brought
along my ipod and a microphone just in
case). It was a great event and offered
plenty of opportunities to for audio and
images (I did not test the video). I took
images of altars made for the occasion,
and interviewed some of the artists who
made them and immediately published all
media: images were sent to Flickr and audio
to Gcast. Later at home, I organized the
audio in a Gcast browser, and the images
in Flickr, adding the audio links to the
image and publishing the whole site to
Del.icio.us. This site can be visited here: The
initial response was very positive so
I created a new gcast account for the
students. Unfortunately, the teachers
seemed unable to schedule time for me
to come to the school to show them what
to do. Finally, on the last day of the
visit I went to the school, found a
couple of students (one from each school)
gave them my phone and had them call
the number, make a podcast and take
a couple of images for the web. Here
are the links that I sent to the teacher/administrators: To listen to podcast, go to: Along with pursuing the school projects, I began to think that this type of project could provide me with the foundation for my ARP. The basis of this project is on integrating technology to foster collaborations between schools and museums that promote learning and community building. Because of the market penetration of the cell phone is much higher than the computer, I began to feel that the cell phone might be a way to successfully lower the entry point of the digital divide. I approached the director of the Zimmer Children’s Museum in Los Angeles with the idea and we have entered into a dialogue about creating a program for the museum using cell phones as a production tool. The director is especially interested because of iTeach, their museum outreach program that goes out to schools in the inner city and other low-income areas. These are schools that do not always have new or recent computers, where existing computers may be broken, the teachers lack the time or training to use technology and where students probably do not have home computers. But, there are cell phones that can be used in creative, non-threatening and lo-tech ways. On another note, I have also begun discussions with a friend and colleague who have a software development company. One of his projects has been the development of an open source application supporting school and museum learning partnerships. He is intrigued by the simplicity and depth of the concept as well as the complexity of the technology (for the programmer, not the user). It will be interesting to see if and where this leads. Final Reflection
|
||
Doing initial stages of research,
I heard many anecdotal stories about people
using cell phone to receive information
(messages to aid in guided tours of parks
and museums, text message announcements
about classes or content). But as a learner
whose preferred method of learning is by doing and
not just reading, my challenge was to discover
how to use a phone in a learning environment
as a production tool and not just as a
receiver of data. I was suffering from
thinkers block until I attended a session
at NACOL (North American Council for Online
Learning) and heard and saw Hall Davidson
of the Discovery Network demonstrate
real time pod casting with a cell phone
and the web site Gcast. One call to a general
phone number with a discreet access PIN
gives the user the ability to create real
time audio files as both RealPlayer and
MP3 formats. I suddenly was faced with
endless possibilities of how to incorporate
the cell phone into any and every subject