Mobile phone imagination - using devices kids love for their education
Marc Prensky

Marc Prensky is an internationally acclaimed thought leader, speaker, writer, consultant, and game designer in the critical areas of education and learning. He is the author of "Digital Game-Based Learning" and the upcoming "Don't Bother Me, Mom, I'm Learning" (Paragon, 2006). Prensky founded Games2train, a game-based learning company, whose clients include IBM, the US Department of Defense and the LA and Florida Virtual Schools. He believes that especially with kids, cell phones are the ideal platform for computer-aided learning. In Mobile phone imagination, Prensky gives us some idea why.
 
 
 
 
Some of Marc Prensky's sites
 
 
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
– Albert Einstein  
  
 
The mobile phone is an amazing phenomenon – and a harbinger of the great changes to come in the 21st century. It’s only 32 years old, but over one quarter of the world's population owns one or more. The number of text messages sent and received every day exceeds the population of the planet. Mobiles can already be printed on cardboard and use Wi-Fi, implying that the cost of basic service may soon go to pennies.

The first big wave of mobile use was voice, the second text, and the third cameras. With movies, TV, GPS and the internet already on the newer devices, the old bromide "You ain't seen nothin' yet" is probably literally true here. I am already greeted whenever I pick up my phone with my 6 month-old's smiling face, and as soon as he says "Dada" that will be my ringtone. My phone is my camera, my MP3 player, my note-taker and my alarm clock, finally eliminating the other devices I used to carry. And as soon as someone invents a good one-handed way of entering text that is as fast as a keyboard (our biggest need at the moment, despite T9), I will do all my writing that way as well.

Of all the possible uses for mobile phones, the use that will have the greatest impact on the world in the long run, I predict, is just emerging – using mobile phones for worldwide teaching and learning. Cell phones are not just communications devices sparking new modalities of interaction between people; they are also particularly useful computers that fit in your pocket, are always with you, and are nearly always on. Like all communication and computing devices, cell phones can be used to learn. So rather than fight the trend of kids coming to school carrying their own powerful learning devices - which they have already paid for - why not use the opportunity to their educational advantage?
 
 
 
I have written elsewhere of the ways we might use the various modalities of the mobile phone for learning. What is most important though, is that we enlist the learners, particularly the younger learners, in this process. The people I call today's "Digital Natives" are inventing and moving to new ways of doing things at breakneck speed. I predict they will invent new ways of learning via their phones, either with us or without us.
 
 
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