Transhuman-Daily: What is my experience of mobile technology and learning

Dinosaur, that's me a Dinosaur, or am I ?

When it comes to mobile technology I sigh, not something else I have to learn how to use. Why is everything sooooooo complicated these days.........or is it? When I went to school the most modern piece of technology in the school was a pencil, pens were things you got as a birthday present and

invariably it was a refillable fountain pen which had a little lever on the side so you could refill it from a bottle of ink. To refill this was an art in itself, an you usually ended up with ink all over you hands, the pen and your books. Blue splodges everywhere, including your clothes.....mum was not happy. As time moved on radios were introduced to listen to children's programmes on the BBC ...only if we behaved though. Then metal boxes with an overhead lamp became the norm and when the bulb was lit, it projected pictures and words onto a blank wall ....the teacher had to spend hours writing on a clear piece of acetate in order to produce these wondrous pieces of art...instead of dictating passages from a book to us, the use of technology in the classroom had been born.

Time moved on and messy ink refills moved on too, instead of bottles of ink we had cartridges of ink, hurrah, less mess NOT. They were just as bad, however in the classroom we now had a television set and a video player/recorder. Oh what fun we had when the teacher came in, told us that he or she was going to play a video of something educational that we had to watch and study ....only to find that either the television was broken or the video player was broken or the remote control was missing from one or the other, or both, or they couldn't open the locked steel cabinet that the video player was in because some clever student (brat, not my words, toned down for educational purposes) had put chewing gum into the lock. Back to dictation whilst the teacher recovered from a near nervous breakdown. Anyway, time moved on and there appeared to be a hiatus, televisions and video players evolved but nothing much changed as I moved through further education and into paid employment.

As the years flew by, mobile phones came and became mini computers overnight. Personal computers became personal, and home computers. Computers had been introduced into the home via games consoles such a Atari and Sony. Children of all ages became besotted with playing games on tv with their freind's, learning by the use of technology had become the norm. Even the BBC got into the act with their Acorn computer and Clive Sinclair with his ZX spectrum computer, a computer that you could programme yourself at home. Technology advanced at a greater pace, drawing us in and seducing us with its new marvels. learning by playing, learning by doing, learning by watching (also getting lazy by sitting on our bottoms instead of playing outside). Teachers devised new ways of educating and entertaining us at the same time. Then when I entered University I found everything had changed....MOODLE!. A platform meant to inform and educate. A platform that supplied e-mail facilities, Office 365, supplying all the software such as PowerPoint, Word, Excel all in one place for student to use across the University. OneDrive for storing your work, and of course a digital library. No more waiting in a library for a book to be returned, if it was digitised into an e-book ...easy access, a journal sir ? no problem if it was online, job done. Would you like to do an add on course from home ? easy ...log on supply your information to the provider and off you go . The course completed online without moving from your front room. Smartphones are used in poor countries all over the world to enable easy access for their students as new technology impacts on education.

Whilst technology and mobile technology has advanced at a breathtaking pace and has provided a brilliant platform for us to use and to learn from and develop your knowledge and qualifications with easy access, there is a dark side. Once you engage with it distances you from personal human contact, it isolates you, you have no audible, visible, human contact. You become isolated, you become ....dare I say it part of the machine. It is invaluable for learning and progress, but at what cost ? I appreciate the advances that mobile technology can bring to the student with ipads and iphones and their like but there has to be a cut off point. We ourselves are human, not robots , not machines. However, as time progresses we are becoming what we produce, a machine that accesses information, acts on it, produces something with that information and moves on to the next gigabyte of information.....exactly like a production robot in for example in a car factory.

Recent studies however now suggest that mobile technology is not the panacea to increasing knowledge and education that it appears to be students cannot multi task using their mobiles and study at the same time. doubts have also been raised by world renowned institutions such as the OECD (Organisation for economic co-operation). They state that 'computer's do not improve' students results. Information can be accessed at a touch of a button or screen, a simple way of accessing information, but you can turn a computer off, who turns the students off so they can rest and recuperate ? When does using mobile technology become a dangerous habit like taking drugs in the quest for more and more information, and when does mobile technology actually decide whats best for you ? That future that the likes of Arthur C Clarke and Stanley Kubrick where a computer makes decisions and the human cannot override them may already be here .......but its name may not be

Dave .......