The speed of change and mobile computing

At the first Boot Camp in 2006, recipients received laptops (presaging the laptops we were able to offer to all full-time faculty members beginning in 2007). I don't want to tell any stories out of school, because what happens in Boot Camp stays in Boot Camp, but it's fair to say that mobile computing was new for those first few Boot Campers - and actually for several groups of Boot Campers after that.

It's hard to believe how laptops have come to replace desktops in only five short years, even harder to believe for those of us who remember when there were no desktops at all.

But it's almost impossible to believe the speed with which "mobile computing" is coming to replace laptops.

I have to put "mobile computing" in quotation marks because it's an often-used phrase that still lacks general consensus on its meaning. Mobile phones that can compute are clearly indicated in there somewhere. "Smartphones" like the iPhones and Blackberries are not just phones, they're handheld devices running their own computing operating systems and therefore their own applications - harking back to the days of Palm devices, but far more omnipresent. Building for smartphones gives tech people a headache, because you can seldom build just once: if you really want to write an application that can do things, you need to write it for iPhone and Blackberry (and probably Droid, and perhaps if you really want to get ambitious, the Windows smartphone OS as well). And that means, yes, you're writing it two or three or four times.

But what really blows the mind of anyone who wants to understand "mobile computing" is the proliferation of devices that aren't phones and aren't laptops either and yet on which one expects to be able to compute. ("Compute" in this sense is almost never in the classic sense of "compute" - to have an electronic device execute your calculations for you - but in the modern sense of "compute", which generally seems to mean "access the web, SMS, and related technologies, and do things with them".)

I have sitting on my desk right now an iPad and a Dell Duo, a netbook that converts into a tablet. More than netbooks themselves (I own two, one running Windows 7 and one running Ubuntu, an open-source Linux adaptation specifically for netbooks), these devices change the paradigm of computing. The screens are bigger than phone screens, and the interface allows for a certain amount of touch control and input as well as keyboard (or "keyboard", in the case of the iPad with its virtual keyboard).

We acquired the Dell for testing, as we are looking at ways of using tablets for interactive online class meetings, and to display to the screen (instead of Sympodiums, for instance) in classrooms. We don't expect any of these technologies to become widespread any time soon - but the pace of change may surprise even us, the academic technology nerds whose job is to look into these things.

What shocks me most about the Dell Duo is that it is clearly competition for the iPad. While I applaud Apple's genius with consumer electronics, there are still a lot of Windows users who want to be able to use a tablet with Windows - and I think this convertible netbook may end up being a nicer option for them. It's a 10" netbook, with a flippable touch screen. It weighs only slightly more than this iPad here, and it has onboard USB and headphone jacks, doing the iPad one better. (Don't consider this a sales advertisement - go look into one on your own if you want to buy one. For one thing, I've logged into mine and still don't quite see how to interact with it via touch.)

My point is not that this is a cool thing (we here at Faculty and Student Computing are not ones for the toys, you know - even our per-capita membership in World of Warcraft is very low) but that this is a consumer device that runs Windows and could sincerely give the iPad a run for its money. For that matter, the iPad has a lot of money. Googling "iPads sold to date" gives me an answer of 19 million to date (as of 5 days ago). Given that the first iPads were sold almost exactly one year ago (the first week of April, and this is now the last), that is an insane number of devices circulating - and changing people's attitude toward computing.

That's why the phrase "mobile computing" sent people by the hundreds, if not thousands, to participate in EDUCAUSE's "Mobile Computing: A 5-Day Sprint". We computing people are rushing to keep up with this trend. We have the same things to worry about with these new mobile devices as we did with laptops: the costs of upkeep, the need to integrate them into our current information environment, and above all the security of our students' data.

But for faculty and students, the opportunities, I think, outweigh the challenges. I've seldom seen people as charged up about a device as some of our faculty are charged up about the iPad, and the students are right behind them. In fact, I think I only saw it once: when students and teachers started getting desktop computers of their own, in the late 80s and early 90s.

Those people were on fire with enthusiasm for the power and opportunity inside those ugly plastic boxes. They could create simulation after simulation with spreadsheets like Lotus 1-2-3 - they need never again run numbers over and over on chalkboards! They could correspond in minutes with colleagues in Europe or South America! They could connect to online library catalogs and browse whole collections without leaving their desks! The whole process of revision in writing was completely reinvented - revising could become an ongoing, fluid process, no re-typing of existing text required! Those people were excited.

Today's faculty and students are excited in different, but related ways. They have many computers - almost too many, some of them. This device goes with them anywhere, lightly and easily, even for some folks with physical challenges - and with DropBox, it can connect them to their files anytime, anywhere! It lets them physically interact with the writing surface in ways they haven't been able to since they went digital in 1990 - they can scrawl notes on the screen - and then email them to other people instantly! They can read email, by the way, anywhere and any time - but on a screen large enough to also host a fair-sized book page! And color graphics! And (almost, in my opinion) small enough to hold up and read with one hand! They can watch full-length movies on that same screen!

When I look at that list, none of those things seems as revolutionary to me as the earlier list. After all, I could do those things with netbooks, or notebooks, or my beloved Palm device, or I don't want to do them at all. But for the people who do want to do them, it's as though they've been straining upwards for years and now their wings have been freed.

I didn't want to run spreadsheets with Lotus 1-2-3 either - but then, I never had to write them out on chalkboards (and do the cascading calculations across all those chalkboards that people used to have to do when they taught or learned heavy calculation & projection topics). Since it has become possible, a lot more people use spreadsheets. What tools that are special-purpose now will become omnipresent in the future simply because they're now easy enough to use for everyone?

I consider myself a digital native even more than a nerd. I don't like playing with technology devices for their own sake - though given a task I do want to do, I get excited when a computing device makes it possible to do it. In this way I'm not that unlike our faculty and students who are diving into mobile computing with such gusto.

The challenge for IT people with mobile computing is how to support an exploding IT environment when we were used to a curve with a steady gradient for many years. We thought we understood what "computing" was. Now we have to sprint to keep up.

But the challenge for teachers and learners is to cope with an even broader yawning chasm between the people who live digitally, and the people who don't.

Recently during a "Hofstra at 75" panel, I was surprised to hear faculty discussing whether or not there was a bigger generational gap between students and faculty now than had ever existed before. These were faculty who came here to teach more than forty or even fifty years ago, faculty who had lived through student protests and shutdowns of the main administrative building (even faculty who had studied in the Quonset hut that had previously been in the same place as that administrative building). And here they were discussing whether or not there is a bigger gap between the way they think and learn and the way today's students think and learn than any gap they had ever seen before.

I was even more surprised when one faculty member disagreed by pointing out that she had been using technology tools for twenty years - and they were simple, and easy, and had great benefits, so why weren't other people using them?

There was, of course, no faculty consensus on whether or not students do fundamentally think differently these days, or whether or not it would be easy or desirable to use technology tools in our classes. The conversation, ultimately, wasn't about that.

But I do know, and I think most of those faculty would agree, that certain types of information knowledge and creation, which used to be centrally important to education, are now rendered obsolete by communications and computing technology - as obsolete as writing out all those spreadsheets on chalkboards all over the room. And I'm not sure that anything cohesive or coherent has replaced them. Some of my colleagues on the faculty are carrying out very promising experiments to address this gap, and we saw several of them at our second annual Teaching with Technology Day on April 12 (more on that later). But in the meantime, I'm paying very close attention to mobile computing, and trying to figure out what it means for teaching and learning.

I think it means that, now more than ever, learning has to equal more than information retrieval or regurgitation. Synthesizing or evaluating answers is far more important than ever. I think it means that students who are used to finding out answers in the .12 seconds it takes to execute a Google search really need to know how to ask good questions.

And maybe even more importantly, they need to have a context for deciding what a question is, and what an answer is, and when they think they've found one, or decided on one. And they need help evaluating the universe of possible answers - not just to find the one that is right, but to live with the myriad of possible answers that may exist.

I don't know why "mobile computing" is now and not five years ago. Maybe it's the price point of smartphones. Maybe it's the size and speed of the tools. (A lot of people, when asked what they like about an iPad, mention how quick it is to turn "on" and access versus a laptop.) Maybe it's the combination of the tools with cloud computing services that keep your files available to you anytime anywhere, and the ubiquity of phone chips (even in devices like Kindles) allowing access to those files anytime and anywhere. Maybe it's the cameras and microphones that finally turn all these devices, not just into consumption tools, but into production tools and even into "communicators" that far exceeded even what Star Trek promised us. (Sure, they had videophones on desktops - but the away teams didn't have video connection back to the ship. Whereas you can videocall back to your mother ship, if you have an iPhone with FaceTime video calling.)

Whatever it is, there is a huge leap forward in computing capabilities right now, which always really means a huge leap forward in communication capabilities. And there's an enormous amount of excitement about it, too.

I want to harness that excitement for learning purposes. My connections with our students this year indicate that they mostly want cosmetic improvements: they'd love it if all their faculty used Blackboard, for instance. And who can blame them? They want all their syllabi in one place - and in the cloud. But they're not really dying to revolutionize their class with these new technologies. They're perfectly comfortable using FourSquare to get discounts at Starbucks and taking the same college class that's been offered for years in the same way they've taken all their other college classes. If nothing else, we need to challenge them to ask the sorts of questions a college graduate needs to ask about the new technologies. (Do you really want FourSquare to amalgamate all that personal data about you?) But I'd like to challenge them to help faculty teach them differently, too. So many faculty and students alike are excited about these new tools and their new capabilities. I want that excitement in the classroom! How do we get there?

This year Hofstra sponsored a contest in the fall for students to vote for their favorite iPad App. Evernote won, with Dropbox a close second place, followed by iBooks and 3D Brain. This is an interesting result: the most popular apps were the ones that made living with your files in the cloud possible, followed by two apps that made it possible to do learning activities you could never do before: carry a hundred books with you, in full color, everywhere, or hold in your hand an interactive three-dimensional representation of the human brain. We need to circulate these results more widely among the faculty. How do we take advantage of such tools? Do we require students to get iPads? Can we share? How quickly will the "mobile computing" revolution reach almost everyone, how do we boost the students who need a boost to get there, and what can it do for learning, and by extension for our society?

We hope to learn more through a program we're running now loaning iPads first to faculty, then to one student in one of their classes. We hope the iPad gets used for an in-class activity. We suggested Google jockeying - the iPad lends itself well to a student looking something up, then passing the results around for others to see. But we expect we'll learn a lot from students who are trying them. As you might expect, once the glamour wears off, our students start to see that the iPad isn't a magical genie in a bottle fulfilling their every wish, either. Both the ups and downs of mobile computing should be visible to all - and examined carefully in an academic institution.

Faculty Computing and Student Computing will be sharing many new ideas from our results with these experiments! If you have other thoughts and ideas, please do share them with us.