So what happened? Taking pictures was, until 2000, mostly a ceremonial activity. Apart from professional photographers, people only took pictures on some fairly standard occasions: holidays, family events, and the like. No one was faced with the question, upon leaving home: « Did you take your camera with you? » But at a certain point, with a camera in almost all cell phones, the question became moot. The standard question « Did you take your cell phone with you? » received an answer that applied to the camera as well, by default. Now, one thing is planning to take a camera with you when you leave home; another is to having in your pocket all day, no matter what. At some point, you'll start using it to record whatever crosses your visual mind: an interesting shadow, people at a meeting so that you can later on check who attended, the poster of an exhibit you think you should visit, calculations on a blackboard, the scene of an accident.

The camera-as-a-bodily-appendix reveals something about the camera that was concealed by the ceremonial camera: cameras are excellent visual note-takers. Remark that portability was not the distinguishing factor here. Digital camera and reflex were portable too. It was the constant presence of the camera in your pocket that made the crucial difference.

The camera story provides us with two important lessons. The first is that progress is not made when one looks at uses and then looks for the suitable technology for supporting or assisting them: one looks at the technology instead, and figures out new uses for it. As some have said (most notably, Jared Diamond in an important chapter of his Guns, Germs and Steel) invention is the mother of necessity. More generally, and this is the second lesson, there are nowadays more (technological) answers than questions; we should thus look for the good questions.

I call the use-first/then-look-for-technology pattern an electrification pattern. It has been with us in many occasions: the e-book, the e-whiteboard, and a sizable amount of educational software, are clear instances of electrification. It is as if one had looked at the old book or at the old blackboard and asked, what would it look like if I provided them with electricity, automated components, software and so on and so forth?

Intuitive and straightforward as it may be, electrification rarely provides interesting steps forward. This is not to deny that the augmented book and whiteboard are worthless. But one can think of many cases in which strict compliance with the electrification ambition would have produced curious monsters. Picture electro-acoustic music's goal as that of simply re-producing, imitating acoustic musical instruments, instead of delivering, new, literally unheard of sounds and rhythmic patterns. Or picture word processors as simply extended typewriters; true, at some point in history they were just that, but soon enough a massive computing storm invested the texts so produced – delivering, for instance, the magic of the find function.

Equipped with the lessons from these cases, let's have a look at promising and less promising avenues for mobile learning. I propose to do a little of concept-fixing first.

What do I have in my pocket? What can I do with it, that it can change my life and that of my learning community? We call these things mobile phones or cell phones, but they are nowadays small portable computers. Even if there is large variance in their capabilities, from high-end smart phones to simple cell phones with a few basic functions, the proper conceptualization respects the computer like nature of these artifacts. We should think of them as small computers that have interconnection capabilities, storage capabilities (for pictures and various types of documents), various types of interfaces with humans (from keyboards to pens to cameras to accelerometers) and nowadays GPS capabilities.

Some of these capabilities are interestingly related to the particular size of the object: it makes a lot of sense to equip with an accelerometer something you can hold in your hand; much less so for a laptop, not to mention a desktop. A GPS makes some sense in a laptop, little sense in a desktop, and a lot of sense in a mobile phone or camera. There is something specific to size that invests the nature of the applications.

Let me talk a little bit about these two interfaces, the accelerometer and the GPS locator. We thought of the cell phone as of something that connects to your mouth, ear, eye, and fingers. But with the accelerometer you find out that it connects to your moving arm as well. More or less funny applications poured in: the picture of a glass of beer (iBeer) appears on the display of your phone, you turn the phone, the appropriate noise of liquid flowing out of the glass is made. But these are gadgets. More interestingly, someone noticed that as you can write with your fingers (through a keyboard or a pen) you can also write with your arm (the way you do when you write on a blackboard). Developers thus modified the input interface of the phone, Phonepoint Pen, taking advantage of an accelerometer that designers did not dream of using for that purpose (Agrawal et al. 2009). It is as if you were tracing words in mid-air, retrieving them on the screen of your phone (or on any relevant peripheral: external screen, printer.)

The second point concerns the embedding of GPS in handheld devices. It's hard to overestimate the creative disruption that awaits us. People ask why they should care about GPS in cell phones; they see an obvious use for them in cars and boats, where they are essential to navigation and way-finding; aren't other uses just gadgets? To my ears these doubts sound like doubts people may have had about the first mass-produced wristwatches. Back then people worried: wouldn't public clocks and the siren marking beginnings and ends of shifts at the workplace suffice? What use mass timekeeping? Clocks give your position in time, GPSs your position in space; what is to be gained by an accurate knowledge of one's position? Well, as David Landes has powerfully argued in his Revolution in time, putting a clock in each pocket has changed forever the shape of society. Clocks turned out to be not only about timekeeping; they are about synchronizing complex, distributed social activities at a fine-grained level. Analogously, GPS are only partly about way-finding. On top of the intrinsic interest of information about one's place, it is the integration of GPS and other peripherals that will provide major changes. When connected to a camera, a GPS provides pictures with a place-stamp on top of the usual time-stamp. Documents in general can be organized according to their place-stamps, something you may find convenient if you have to attend a large number of meetings at different locations, visit different schools, for instance. On top of organizing your folders by filename, date, size, etc., you would have an organization by place – maybe through a map. Track-keeping of locations would generate a straightforward construction of narratives: literally, journeys through one's life. Data mining on records of one's movements can provide insight about how to optimize traffic, improve driving safety. (Clearly, the problems posed by making location data accessible to third parties require a lot of societal care; we cannot address this complex issue here.)

The third moral, then, is that major changes may occur in areas that are not directly invested by the new technologies. To put it vividly, consider how rendez-vous etiquette has changed because of cell phones: Cedric is late at his meeting with Magda, but it is Magda who takes the blame because she did not carry her cell phone with her. Cedric:"I tried to call you, but you were nowhere to be found!”; if not the final word, this is at least a Good Excuse for Cedric. Sure enough, one should just expect that as a consequence of mass introducing certain items in people's lives, existing practices change or disappear, and other practices are born. What is generally frustrating, but I find potentially exciting, is that it is pretty hard to see what the changes will be, no matter how they appear trivial in hindsight. This difficulty is, in my mind, the main drive behind the electrification temptation. It was easy to predict that television would disrupt a huge number of practices, from the way one buys to interest in sports and so on. All this is pretty trivial. Wasn't there an interesting promise of television about education? It turns out that the major educational effects of television appear to have been on the linguistic side (De Mauro 1973); some communities are linguistically more cohesive because of the standardization of a regional idiom. On the other hand, we do not have more biologists or literary scholars or a better workforce because of educational television programs.

There are quite a few reasons suggesting that mobile computing has the potential for disrupting teaching and learning practices. But computing and learning have so far been uneasy bedfellows. Their relationship can be aptly synthesized in the idea of the electrification of the classroom. I'd like to show one of the countless pictures available on the web that proudly document the facilities at this or other institution.

Fig 1. The electrified classroom

Where is the innovation? What I see here is just an old classroom, with chairs and desks, turned towards the teacher's pulpit; screens and keyboards replace paper and pen, and a larger screen replaces the blackboard. 'Replacement' means that in the functional architecture of this environment some pre-given roles are still there; there has been no thought about new roles. The old school has been electrified. Of course, many schools around the world would be happy to be able to provide their pupils with just that. I am not claiming that it is wrong to so equip school. I just claim that it is profoundly unexciting. Everything in this picture bespeaks a missed opportunity.

The missed opportunity is now patent in view of the portability of computing items. It appears to make little sense, even to be a bit grotesque, to offer a version of the above picture in which smartphones replace laptops. Why should one nail smartphones on desks? At the same time it is easy to fall into another electrification trap; for instance, by dreaming of a «diffuse» classroom in which pupils connect from home with a teacher who appears on the screen of their cell phones, teaching an old, ordinary lesson.

(This connects to one of the risks we were aware of when we designed the Interdisciplines process and interface: we were actually asked to create a « virtual conference » in which people would interact from home on some sort of reproduced, virtual theater. We sensed that we were missing out many opportunities.)

In a high end scenario, thinking beyond electrification may simply mean abolishing the desk populated classroom without having to abolish the school: people can meet in a variety of spaces, each adapted to a different function, carrying along their suitably refurbished cell phone. New academic spaces like Gehry Stata Building at MIT (Campbell 2007) are tailor suit for this particular type of mobile connectivity. The high end scenario is not to be ruled out from the onset. In countries like China internet connections through smartphones are on the path to outnumber those through desktops or laptops (Source: The meek shall inherit the web; The Economist, Sep 4th 2008).

I am not suggesting that portability per se makes the crucial difference. There may be other aspects, such as the interoperability of applications, or GPS localization, that count. Focussing on the cell phone, we ought to realize that there is plenty of room for intervening on many aspects of the teaching/learning process. Here is a small list:

-optimizing one-to-one relationships that are hard to implement in the classroom because of space and time constraints (see the DrMath service, ;

-enhancing the expression of shy pupils;

-reaching out to families, who may be the owners of cell phones in some cases because of the age of pupils, and design educational processes that involve them;

-creating competition among variously aggregated teams of pupils, thereby enhancing intra-team cooperation that straddle the boundaries of classrooms

-taking advantage of the possibility of intensive repetition

-augmented reality (visiting places, museums, any area) and getting information about it

-competing against the cell-phone as a form of intensive training

-homework reminders; scheduling reminders

-pod-casting

-classroom quizzes during class time as a way to synchronize attention and check content acquisition by pupils

When looking for interesting scenarios, we should keep in mind two background aspects. First, it is not clear that high-end computing power has delivered significant improvements in teaching (unless, of course, one needed to learn computer related subject-matters); second, it is not clear that low-end computing power was so unsuccessful as to be in need of improvement, redesign, electrification or replacement.

I expect some parameters to play a key rôle in discussions to come. We will be confronted in particular with the issue of what is localized and what is portable in the knowledge acquisition process. Lessons from other sectors will become relevant here. The rechargeable phone card has been used to provide micro-banking facilities (http://www.wizzit.co.za/). Your monetary identity becomes physically portable; you have a bank in your pocket. In thinking about education, we should give thought to the portability:

-of thesaurus knowledge (the easy part, in a sense)

-of interactions (cf. the Phonepoint project)

-of algorithmic complexity (breaking down a process into subprocesses, carrying on each of of them locally, then centralizing them)

-of hierarchical roles (e.g. Authorship roles in Wikis)

Each of these parameters, set on specific values, ought to require independent study.

I'd like to close on a couple of warnings. I think we should beware of excessive electronic optimism. A case I discussed elsewhere is that of e-voting. In the case of overt voting it is possible to carbon-copy the manual procedure into an electronic system (such as Doodle: www.doodle.com); electrification is here a viable option; but in the case of non-overt voting the manual procedure has irreplaceable properties of transparency for lay people; they are irreplaceable because in order to understand how an electronic voting system works, it is necessary, for most people, to defer to an expert. Another case is that of the e-whiteboard. The old blackboard had no memory, but there may be the need, in the learning process, of phases in which you can delete everything – a wrong calculation, for instance. Pupils may need this possibility in order to trust the system. Not all practices can be replaced; and indeed, the replacement notion, as we hare seen, is pointless.

References

Data and statistics on embedded cameras: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_phone

Butgereit, L., Math on MXit: the Medium is the Message.

Campbell, R. 2007, Does Gehry's Stata Center Really Work? Business Week, News & Features June 19, 2007.

Casati, R., 2004. Mettiti in posa, ti do un colpo di telefonino; Il sole 24 Ore, February 8th, 2004.

Casati, R., 2009, Trust, secrecy and accuracy in voting systems: the case for transparency. Mind and Society, 1593-7879 (Print) 1860-1839 (Online), DOI 10.1007/s11299-009-0062-5.

De Mauro, T., Il linguaggio televisivo e la sua influenza, in G.L. Beccaria, I linguaggi settoriali in Italia, Milano, Bompiani, 1973, pp. 107-17

Diamond, J., 1997, Guns, Germs, and Steel. W.W. Norton and Company.

Landes, D.S. Revolution in time: clocks and the making of the modern world. Cambridge, Mass. - London: Harvard University Press

The meek shall inherit the web; The Economist, Sep 4th 2008

Wizzit: http://www.wizzit.co.za

Doodle: http://www.doodle.com

Sandip Agrawal, Ionut Constandache, Shravan Gaonkar, Romit Roy Choudhury, 2009, PhonePoint Pen: Using Mobile Phones to Write in Air. ACM Sigcomm Workshop -- MobiHeld 2009. http://synrg.ee.duke.edu/papers/phonepen.pdf; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nvu2hwMFkMs&feature=player_embedded; http://www.groupe-compas.net/2009/09/10/phonepoint-pen/)