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Tabula electronica – life-saver or career-killer? The college-issued iPhone and its discontents August 24, 2008

This ABC News clip continues to sour my attitude toward closed-code proprietary media players, but it also offers the most thoroughgoing effort so far in reporting an emergent trend: colleges issuing iPhones to their incoming freshmen.

The early adopters play up – and justifiably so – how GPS and local network alerts on this system provide a needed security enhancement in the open space of the university. Of course the e-mail, the IM’s, the facebook and other apps available through the device make it the state-of-the-art in Weapons of Mass Distraction, and this scares the hell out of professors like Cornell’s Robert Summers, who apparently hasn’t quite embraced laptop computers, understandable if he began his Cornell tenure at about the same time as the first moon walk.

But give him credit for intuiting the dilemma: as laptops are to paper notes, as paper notes were to slates and tabulae, as mass-printed books were to the manuscript at the lectern, interaction with the iPhone produces a different cyborg embodiment – a different physical dynamic between the human and the requisite educational technology that produces that, oh, “student function.” IOW, pedagogy has intellectual and ergonomic aspects. IYOW, you learn with your body (as well as your “mind,” if you insist).

Stay with me here… if you change the embodiment of learning, you have to change the pedagogy.

Actually, this pedagogic shift will happen anyway. The deeper issue is whether we laborers in the knowledge industry are willing to retool accordingly.

If you insist that students only learn by showing up together at the same lecture hall at the same scheduled periods to listen synchronously to a live human deliver a lecture, for which the only remaining record should be a carefully-inscribed set of hand-written notes, you’re in trouble. Wireless technology has already disrupted this, and the iPhone will only push this further.

OTOH if you remember just how crazy a weed ivy is, and you’re willing to think creatively, you might find some new places to plant it, some (not all) of which might be surprisingly successful. Because reorienting the student-learning machine complex amounts to changing the soil, the sun, the availability of water for that ivy.

It’s academic climate change. It’s evolutionary pressure. And this breed of smartphones and UMPC’s, including those free student iPhones, may be the next major selector.

You in?