But is this change beneficial to the educational objectives of school systems, especially when compared with the capabilities of computers, a technology only just recently embraced? We had Mike Trucano argue that mobile phones are a real alternative to computers and they’ll Inspire inevitable educational change, but most commenters disagreed. They were more aligned with Bob Kozma’s assertion that computers are more capable than mobile phones and to be useful, phones need to converge into computers.

And all parties were smart to take J Tim Denny’s lead with this comment:

[W]e tend to chase the technology, there are all sorts of exciting devices for the geek in us, but what is better for teaching and learning is the crux of the argument

To begin with, many educators are thinking that mobile phone usage in the classroom can be detrimental to educational goals. Why? Let’s have Weziwe Sikaka explain the basic issue:

I agree, mobile phone technology is quite advanced but these are not designed for educational purposes. The distructive nature in the design of a mobile phone makes it nothing more than a communication accessory. The accessibility and affordability of phones has in fact adversely affected the educational environment in schools whereby you find students heavily immersed in conversations through phones during classroom sessions which is quite distructive.

In addition, often the term “mobile phone” is confused with “smart phone”. While mobile phone penetration is soaring, these are basic phones, not high-end iPhones, and Alan argues it will be a long time before we see a switch from one to another:

While mobile phones’ usage may outnumber PCs in terms of ownerships, most are non smart phones like what Shabani said. To have the general population to have smart phones with latest gadgetry would be a long long time or never will. Phones have their main uses mainly for communication. In a way, this is a form of learning. But to equate or even think that using mobile phones to impart knowledge, the way a PC is able to do, is wishful thinking.

Bob Kozma gave thought to the ways in which computers are more capable than mobile phones, and listed a number of learning applications are not adequately supported by mobile phones. While the list was not exhaustive, Shabani highlighted Bob’s basic argument:

The advantage of computers is their complexity. They are complex and use complex applications that allow teachers and students to work on complex projects in science, math, etc. More often this advantage is hurting computers in education as complex applications require complex training. Teachers, both in developed and developing countries are not learning fast how to use these complex applications, student are.

Don’t count smart phones out of the long-term educational mix though. And do not think there is a binary choice between mobile phones or computers. As Mike Trucano points out, we should be more holistic in our technology thoughts than that:

With few exceptions, education ministries have done a poor job of changing to support the kind of learning enabled by PCs today. If and where ‘phones’ are relevant learning tools to students in developing countries, let’s hope that policymakers don’t (belatedly) orient themselves to plan on how to take advantage of just the PC. Learning-centric, device-agnostic – that should be our aim.

Especially when Alex Twinomugisha tells us the major difference between smart phones and computers, this ability to run complex applications, is shrinking fast:

The problem, in my view, is that the (web-based) applications that mobile phones are supposed to access were designed for computers. This is changing quickly with many of the new web applications having mobile versions. In Nairobi ( I know this is a far cry from rural Africa or Asia but nevertheless offers interesting insights), scores of secondary and university students can be found rapidly clicking away on their mobile phones: chatting using Google Talk, exchanging emails via Gmail and constantly interacting on Facebook (which I am told is the latest mobile addiction in this city!). All these applications can be harnessed for education.

Luckily, some teachers are already exploring how they can integrate mobile phones into the classroom, in a positive way. They’ll have help from the likes of Chansa:

Being a teacher myself I have been using my laptop and my mobile phone to do on line research and exchange information with friends in other parts of the country this has helped to alleviate the problem of lack of text books. This facility has benefited my fellow teachers and students. as well.

Better yet, smart phones can empower teachers to move from phones as basic teacher aids to empowering a whole new vision of the classroom, according to Todd Diemer:

As educators, if the Smartphone era is coming, and coming soon (or already here), now is the time that we need to be preparing for it. The lack of quality resources that scaffold learning is one of the biggest challenges that smartphones can address. Tools that allow for the distribution of materials, collaborative learning between students, feedback between teacher and student, and communication to the outside world need to be developed. Teacher training programs need to be developed, for this change will amount to a complete rethinking of where the physical focus of a classroom will be (from teacher in the front to student groups spread out).

In fact, Shabani shares a viewpoint that is almost universally held in the education and technology fields:

The biggest beneficiaries of these technologies will be students, not really teachers, because the youth tend to learn fast when it come to technology-related applications and devices. This gives me an idea of reverse capacity building: When will students start teaching their teachers? We should think about this and not limit students’ capacity to share their knowledge. There are millions of kids who can help their teachers in how to use technology-related devices and applications.

And that’s a great egalitarian answer to the original question, “Are mobile phones better learning tools than computers?” In a collaborative learning environment, where teachers, students, and technology co-exist, its not the technology, its education that’s the focus.

For me, there are two issues that need to be addressed if such a convergence will improve education in the developing world. First, smart phones should have the features that are needed to support education. Among them are:

• The ability to communicate with multiple people simultaneously would allow teachers to communicate with multiple students and students to communicate with each other. This would support group discussions.
• The ability to access multimedia content. More and more educational content is multimedia—audio, video, graphics—this is increasingly important in helping students understand complex concepts and principles.
• The ability to run simulations and other applications. Learning is so much more than just accessing content. Students must be actively involved in their learning. Games, simulations, and other applications allow students to engage with complex ideas and apply them in creative ways.
• The ability to create and post text and multimedia content. It is important for students to also be able to generate content, not just access and use it. Tools will be needed that allow students to generate and post their own online contributions.
• The ability to collaborate on these tasks. Students learn most when they interact with each other, as well as the content. Tools that allow students to generate content should support their ability to work with each other—to contribute to joint products, to edit, to comment.

This is a pretty powerful set of capabilities. Sounds a lot like a computer, right? It’s a lot to ask of a phone. But this is what is required of technology if it is to contribute to educational improvement. Are we going to see these on an inexpensive handset in the near future? Beyond the “$100 laptop”, are we going to have a “$20 iPhone”?

Even if we have a “$20 iPhone”, will these powerful features by themselves sufficient to improve education in the developing world?

No, not when teachers are still focused on teaching and assessing rote learning. I continue to insist that we need a significant realignment in curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, and teacher training that emphasizes knowledge creation, collaboration, and sharing. This will prepare students in the developing world to participate in the global knowledge economy and information society. It is only then that the immense potential of ICT – computers or smart phones – will be realized.

What do you think?

As Tim says, “device convergence” will make this a stale debate, but not yet. Comparing computers and phones is like comparing “apples and oranges”, we can (and will) eat both, as Allen suggests. But, for the sake of this debate, let’s stick with the artificial choice of either/or:

Phones can indeed be a distraction device. We are seeing them banned in many schools (including the USA, as Wayan rightly notes). We are at the same time seeing parents lobby in some countries against such bans, arguing that they need to be able to connect to the children in the case of emergency.

Cheating with phones, cheating with computers, cheating with calculators, cheating with crumbled up pieces of papers. While mobile phones do perhaps offer certain advantages in this regard, I don’t know that any device as a monopoly here.

Indeed, phones are out of reach of most students and teachers in most countries, and smartphones are even further out of reach. But what if we extend our time horizon a bit? Smartphones are coming faster than we think. Can anyone who has seen the explosive growth in mobile phone use over the past five years doubt that cheaper, more powerful, more widespread smartphones are coming, and soon? Government policies and plans often look 5-10 years in the future. A fixation on the ICT form factor of the past — the PC/laptop — seems to me to be terribly short-sighted.

Are there currently abundant, compelling uses of mobile information devices, something that I will label a ‘mobile phone’, for lack of a better term, in widespread use today in the education sector? Aside from uses of PDAs and calculators, all of whose functions will presumably be subsumed within the functionalities of the ‘phone’ at some point, the answer today is largely no. This answer, I would like to submit, will change.

Of all the commenters who have posted insightful remarks on this site, I must confess that I agree the most with Alex’s points.

Seeing phones as destinations for education content and applications ported from PCs is an unnecessarily limitation on our vision here. Simply digitizing textbooks and making them available for use on a computer has not proven to be terribly effective. Why should we expect content developed for 15″ computer monitors to work on 2″ screens?

The success of the iPhone is showing that there are many types of compelling content and applications that only make sense to develop for the phone — and that there are critical masses of software developers willing to do such development.

Only five years ago, the use of the mobile phone for access to banking services had been largely abandoned in ‘developed’ countries. ‘Why would we use the phone to access our banking information, people asked, when we had access to a much richer experience using PCs and the Internet?’ At about the same time, firms in the Philippines were finding many users were quite willing to use their phones in slightly different ways to transfer money to/from their banks — and each other — in ways slightly different from how such practices were envisaged in OECD markets. Learning from such experiences, Safaricom rolled out its version of m-banking in Kenya last year with explosive results.

Just as computers offer certain key andvatages over printed books (and vice versa), so too do mobile phones present us with certain opportunities that computers do not. These are some of the key attributes of mobile phones that make their increased use in education inevitable:

1. Personal.
2. Mobile.
3. Always-connected.
4. Cheap(er).
5. And increasingly ubiquitous.

While I agree with Bob and Alex (and so many others here) on many issues, I disagree a little bit on one final point. Yes, the eventual impact of any technology to transform teaching and learning in the classroom does depend on larger, fundamental educational reforms. But I think we need to think a little more broadly here. One recurrent lament in educational technology circles is that ‘ICTs are revolutionizing education everywhere but in the classroom’. Reform of educational systems takes time — often a long time.

But going forward, the rapid growth of mobile phone use, especially in developing countries, and the inevitable development of education content for use on such devices, highlights an important opportunity for individual learners outside of the classroom to engage in meaningful education activities whenever, wherever they want. This is of course no substitute for formal schooling, and certainly no substitute for the critical relationship between teacher and student and teacher at the center of most learning processes.

The importance of such outside-the-classroom use should not be discounted, and, to the extent such use is increasingly effective and widespread, it may turn out to also be an important trigger for larger educational reforms within the formal education system.

Wayan’s question here is provocatively phrased. Of course this is not a binary issue: The question is not either/or, as both technologies will be increasingly integral to the delivery of educational services going forward. That said, the almost single-minded focus of most educational policymakers on the ‘computer’ as the preeminent ICT device to be used in schools going forward is short-sighted, so I’ll take the bait for the sake of debate.

The momentum behind the proliferation of mobile devices appears inexorable for the near future. Throughout much of the developing world, when we speak of an low-cost ICT device used by the masses, we are speaking about phones, not computers. In India, there were 15.4 million new phone subscribers in the month of January alone! There is perhaps no more mass-scale undertaking in the world than organized education (with the possible exception of organized religion), and it is difficult to see how the mass adoption of mobile technologies will not intersect with educational practices in key ways.

That said, there are currently five great limitations to the use of mobile phones in education when compared with computers. Quickly, they are:

1. small screen;
2. limited battery life;
3. difficulties with input;
4. the ‘distraction issue’; and
5. a failure of imagination (or phrased differently: we haven’t use them in the past, so we don’t yet have workable models to guide us).

Computers do certain things quite well. If we evaluate the potential use of the mobile phone in education only in the comparison to what a computer can do, we are greatly limiting our vision. How about we switch this around, and ask what the phone can do that the computer can’t?

The Phone is Personal

There is nothing ‘personal’ about a personal computer in schools in most developing countries. These are shared use devices. The phone is, for most people, an intensely personal device — in some places, it is the first thing a person reaches for when she wakes up, the last thing she touches before she nods off to sleep, and it is with her throughout her waking hours.

The Phone is Always On

As a tool for just-in-time, connected learning, the phone would appear to have important advantages over the computer, merely given the fact that it is always there, and always on. The success of the iTunes app store is demonstrating that there are great opportunities to exploit the fact that people are walking around with an increasingly sophisticated computer in their pocket that we are choosing to call a ‘phone’ for historical reasons to offer other types of software and learning applications that are not feasible to offer on a PC.

It is perhaps interesting to note that, while there are mass programs by governments around the world to promote computer use among citizens, there are no similar programs to promote mobile phone use, with the exception of Venezuela — these simply do not appear to be necessary.

The Phone is Proliferating

While mobile devices will no doubt play an integral role in education practices in some places in the near future, we remain a few steps removed from mass adoption, even in affluent, education-obsessed, technology-saturated societies like Korea and Japan. That said, while experimentation has been going on exploring the potential utility of the use of phones in the education sector for quite awhile, it is only a matter of time before we reach a tipping point that could lead to quick, wide-scale utilization in many places.

The Phone is Not the Only Solution

Let’s be clear: Whatever our educational objective, what we are interested in is the right tool for the right purpose. Whether it’s a laptop, a mobile device of some sort, radio, or even (gasp) a printed book, whatever technology we chose to use should be commensurate to the goal at hand. The increasing availability of mobile ICT devices like phones in the hands of teachers and learners will not make the PC go away, but it does present educators with a great opportunity.

By focusing almost exclusively on only the personal computer or laptop when evaluating technology options to aid a wide variety of educational activities, ignoring the potential utility of the mobile phone (“the PC in our pocket”), policymakers in many places are in a sense driving forward while looking in the rear view mirror.

Also, having done volunteer work in rural villages in Eastern Africa, I believe that the most basic technologies can play a particularly important role in reducing poverty, given the lack of resources and under-developed infrastructure in most of the Southern Hemisphere. Indeed, I’ve seen how a technology as simple as a bicycle can make a significant difference in communication among rural villages, so the increased use of mobile phones is a major advance. Also, there have been times when

I’ve argued against the extensive use of computers in developing countries, at least if not accompanied by other reforms. But for the purpose of argument, I will take the position here that computers have a unique and very powerful role to play in supporting education and development, relative to simpler technologies, such as mobile phones.

To start, I will admit that mobile phones are a very attractive technology in developing countries. They are very inexpensive, relative to other technologies. Handsets can be purchased not much more than $10. This cost can be further ameliorated by distributing a single handset over a number of people through phone sharing or renting. It has an added advantage that communication is in verbal form, an important consideration in countries with a high rate of illiteracy, and in the local language, again another important consideration given that there is very little content on the internet in the numerous tribal languages that are the mother tongue in many developing countries.

However, the mobile phones that the ITU is talking about are not iPhones or other smart phones that provide the user with access to the internet or sophisticate software applications. The features available on the large majority of mobile phones in the developing world are extremely limited. I think it would be fair to say that the capability for the most-sophisticated phones commonly available provide capabilities no more powerful than point-to-point messaging and SMS broadcasting. But the impact of information provided in this form is constrained by low literacy rates. This makes community radio an attractive low-end alternative, one that I’ve argued for on other occasions.

This brings me to my main point. Computers have a powerful set of capabilities, relative to mobile phones, at least those less than smart phones. They have a multimedia capabilities that allow not only for the presentation of verbal information but information in a variety of visual forms, such as charts, graphs, dynamic graphics and animations, video, and 3D virtual spaces. With the appropriate programming, they provide for interactivity that allows students to respond to questions, an important consideration when it comes to learning.

With the application of artificial intelligence and speech recognition students can even respond in aural form and have those responses evaluated, accommodating issues of illiteracy. Software tools can be used by students to create oral, graphic and written products. And access to the internet connects students to a variety of digital and human resources that can facilitate teaching and learning.

With these capabilities, students can:

• work on complex projects in science, math, and social studies
• engage in solving real world problems
• access libraries and museums across the world
• collaborate with teachers and students in other countries
• collect and analyze data
• create multimedia productions
• develop community websites
• connect with remote experts
• visualize abstract concepts in science and math

These learning applications are not adequately supported by mobile phones. Granted not all computers, particularly the low-end computers most likely available in developing countries, have access to all of the power described above. But most computers, even low-end ones, have much of this power and if Moore’s Law holds, more and more of them will in the future. Of course, Moore’s Law applies to other digital technologies, as well; so even cheap mobile phones will come to have these capabilities and it will be hard to differentiate among these technologies.

But however powerful and inexpensive these technologies become, it is important to keep in mind that education will not improve merely by injecting computers or mobile phones into classrooms. Significant change will occur only if the use of these technologies is accompanied by reforms in pedagogy, curriculum, teacher training, assessment, and the policies that govern them.

With the appropriate changes, the power of computers can be applied to help students move from the rote learning that characterizes much of education in the developing world to complex problem solving and the creation of innovative products and artifacts that prepares them for life in the 21st century.

Beginning with innovators like Seymour Papert, and extending through the One Laptop Per Child program, which claimed to be a direct descendant of his work, there is an additional push to move computers to a one-to-one basis with children. That computers could actually supplant the top-down knowledge transfer usually practiced to a more self-directed exploration of knowledge. But reliant on one-to-one computer saturation, this specialized effort has always been restrained by the massive costs to allocate and support such technology diffusion.

But why have a monolithic focus on computers? What about mobile phones?

Today there is a mobile phone revolution in the developing world. From the rural Maasai to the slum dwellers of Mumbai, poor people are acquiring mobile phones by themselves – without the government subsidies of the telecenter era. In fact, mobiles represent a huge shifting the technology deployment burden from the state to private companies and individual consumers.

And yet saturation levels are nearing one-to-one in the developed world already, and gaining quickly in the urban areas of the developing world. Because of their relative low costs and low operating needs, its now a given that mobile phones will always out number computers. In addition, phones are gaining in capacity and computing power, with high-end smart phones rivaling some of the low-end netbooks already.

Could it be that mobile phones offer developing country governments a better learning tool and more educational benefits that computers?

This month, we will have two respected discussants explore this topic:

Dr. Robert B. Kozma
Dr. Kozma has directed or co-directed more than 25 projects that have examined the impact of ICT on teaching and learning and developed advanced computer environments for education.

Michael Trucano:
Mike Trucano is the World Bank’s Senior ICT and Education Policy Specialist, providing support to World Bank education projects with ICT-related ‘components’, and is involved in a variety of research activities.

Please join us for what we all expect to be a lively and informative conversation – your input can start right now.

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