PEDAGOGY for I - MODE

Planning Pedagoy for i-mode: Learning in the Age of “the Mobile Net”

The text examined early initiatives in school and higher education settings, and suggested some principles and possibilities for pedagogy in the context of the mobile internet.
Everybody is familiar with mobile phones and their text message, camera and video capacities. Texting and photographing with mobile phones are common practices across diverse social and economic groups in coutries worldwide. Always on, large-sacale, ful internet wireless connectivity is just around the corner. In short, i-mode is imminent globaly and the entire internet has been becoming both personal and portable, that´s why the mobile acess to the internet has been becoming more and more an integral component in learning work.



Jeremy Roschelle points out a negative aspect in the use of mobile technology in learning:
“The most common [mobile] Internet applications can be quite problematic in classrooms. Schools, for example, have been tempted to ban instant messaging because it enables cheating and disruptive behavior. Further, attention is a teacher´s most precious commodity, and no teacher wants her students´attention focused on messaging with friends outside of class.
Consistently with this, none of the Roschelle´s case study applications require connectivity beyound the local classroom, nor does ay require a generic messaging capacity that would allowstudents to “pass notes”.
Rheingold argues that under conditions of the “mobile net” new kinds of smart mob behaviours will became incresingly prevalent and dominat withing everyday life and can be used in eduation: studies of adolescent practices that are mediated by mobile phones, for example game playing through physical and virtual spaces using mobile phones, PDAs, laptops and hom computers. Smart mobs are people who cooperate in ways never before possible because they carry devices that possess both communication and computing capacities. Even though the individuals who consitute a smart mob may not actually know each other, they are able to act together for shared purposes.
The tools of techno-networking are, precisely, excellent tools of social networking. Here we relate the positive points of the i-mode:
In i-mode, time and place become fluid and flexible. It added up to how people do their lives, being able to negotiate times and places on the run may be a key to reducing stress, making meetings more enjoyable, cosolidating relationships, and so on, as well as contributing to more functional values like being more efficient with time and other resources.
With all these, the tendency is that learning will incresingly move out of classrooms and into virtual and physical spaces for learners to make rich connections to people and non human resources:
“Learning is mobile in terms of space, i.e. it happens at workplace, at home, and at places of leisure; it is mobile between different areas of life, i.e. it may relate to work demands, self-improvement, or leisure; and it is mobile with respect to time, i.e. it hapens at different times during the day, on working days or on weekends”.
As we can see, things have been changing day by day and the schools have been facing waves of digital technologies. The end result is a masive amounts of “digital busy work, a lot of “old wine in new bottles”, to avoid this, the curriculum and pedagogy of the schools can not remain intact.
Its important to mention here some priciples and criteria for planning “pedagogy for i-mode”. First of all, curriculum and pedagoy must not be hostages to technological change at the level of artefacts and besides that schools can not simply find ways to accommodate new technologies to classroom, it could waste all the potential that new technologies have. Several educational principles and related criteria derived from a sociocultural perspective and to which are committed seem specially relavant for this subject. Theses are:
• The principle of efficacious learning: This envolves thinking of education and learning in term of human lives as trajectories through diverse social practices and institutions.
• The principle of integrated learning: Learning is integrated when the various bits of social practives that go together to make up a practice as a whole.
• The principle of productive appropriation and extension in learning: It involves looking for ways to reduce or ameliorate conflict between social identities during learning.
• The principle of critical learning. The student should learn critically, the fact that becoming fluent in Discourse is best achieved through processes of learning inside the Discourse.
Schrage goes on to argue that “the biggest impact these technologies have had, and will have, is on relationships between people and between organizations” From this standpoint, schools can consider how communication and compution technologies might be used produtctively in terms of new relationships that could be developed and mediated using these technologies, reather than in terms of information delivery or of doing old things in new ways. The knowledge-producing schools approach must be based on a view of education as a “whole of community responsibility”.

Lilian S.