Handheld Learning - learning with mobile and ubiquitous technologies

At the mobile learning workshop held at Bristol University discussion started over how teachers and lecturers would have to change their teaching styles to cope with students equipped with handhelds. Some suggestions were

• - coping with students multi-tasking,
• - blurring of the boundaries between subjects,
• - opportunites to involve learning outside the school context and
• -  the need to make opportunity to enable students to reflect on information acquired/learning.

Is this possible within today's climate in schools and universities?

Of course the technology will mean a change in teaching styles.

(i) It means that the boundaries between teacher and learners will blur and, at the risk of clichés, there will be more collaborative learning
(ii) The ease at which learning can become both personalised and personal will mean a fracturing of task and task-delivery.
(iii) The nature of assessment will have to change (see comments in other threads)
(iv) Anytime, anywhere, anyhow learning will mean that teaching will also cease to happen only when the students and the teacher are co-located (as happens already so much in HE [as an ex-OU lecturer this is very true for me])

To misquote Churchill this is not the end of schooling as we know it, it is not even the beginning of the end but it might be the beginning of the beginning. The current UK secondary pedagogic models of learning and teaching are build solidly on the teacher in a classroom for an hour with 30 students. This is no longer a model that holds water given the change in social, technological and economic circumstances of the C21st. Hold your hats it's going to be an exciting but rather rough ride.

One last thing (!) The concept of 'teacher' is also someting that is going to have to change. Look to the model of the health service where the idea of 'doctor' or 'nurse' has now fractured into a number of grades. This is what, I believe, must happen in teaching and we will have lead professionals, curriculum designers, lesson delivers, curriculum designers etc... in our schools. This is beginning to happen with TAs and will start to happen soon with teachers.