Should SMS be part of Australian school curriculum?
In August last year, the Presbyterian Ladies’ College at Croydon caused shockwaves in the academic community by opening up to the opportunities offered by new communication devices such as mobile phones. This Sydney girl’s school began an assessment period in which students would be able to phone or text message a friend during exams to ask for help.
Similar to the options available in the popular game show ‘Who wants to be a millionaire’, students would be able to ‘ask the audience’ (go online) or ‘call a friend’ (via mobile phone or SMS text message). Before throwing up your arms in horror as to what the school system has come to, let’s take a look at the rationale behind the decision.
Marc Prensky, an internationally acclaimed educational speaker and writer, was part inspiration for this trial. He has challenged the educational authorities to imagine redefining the use of SMS via mobile phones and instant messaging during exams from ‘cheating’ to just using the tools available to students in order for them to acquire the knowledge needed. Prensky has been named as one of training’s top 10 visionaries by Training Magazine and is a prolific writer and creator of educational games used by companies such as IBM and Nokia and institutions such as the US Department of Defence.
In his writing Prensky is constantly challenging the way that we require today’s learners to acquire knowledge and he makes several riveting points. The way that we have learnt in the past worked because of the tools that we had at the time. There was a greater need to memorise information as it was not easily accessible. Today, most information is one mouse click or SMS text message away. Ms Coleman, a teacher at Presbyterian Ladies’ College said that: “In their working lives, they will never need to carry enormous amounts of information around in their heads. What they will need to do is access information from all their sources quickly and they will need to check the reliability of their information.” SMS text messaging is a quick and affordable way to do this.
Prensky is advocating that modern technology must be used to support a new teaching paradigm that fits the world as it works today. Students need to be able to teach themselves with the guidance of their teachers. He points out that until recently all students had as resources were textbooks, libraries and overworked teachers. Today with the increasing ubiquity of the mobile phone, easy internet access and affordable, simple to use SMS text messaging technology, children have access to a host of highly effective tools that they can use to best understand and impact on the world around them.
This is perhaps hard to hear for the generations of parents and grandparents who had the multiplication tables drummed into our heads or had to recite for hours on end lists of important dates and for those who fear that the world is changing too quickly and things will all fall apart. However looking at the rate of mobile phone penetration in the developed and developing world, the fact that all phones can send and receive text messaging, that SMS messages are sent in real-time and can be instantly replied to, it makes no sense to discount this fantastic application as a learning tool.
What Mr Prensky ably does is put on the table the question of why we are not preparing our children for the world that they will actually live in. SMS text messaging is used in a variety of industries from mobile marketing, corporate messaging solutions to social networking and the financial industries – it is a powerful tool and should not be overlooked as an educational resource.
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Tags: corporate messaging solutions, education, financial mobile solutions, instant messaging, mobile marketing, mobile phones, mobile Social Networking, School SMS, SMS, SMS messages, SMS text messaging, text messaging
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