Well, I say MY students, but they’re my colleague’s students. They are fifteen ‘Advanced English’ students studying Wordsworth poetry, and I’m working with the teacher to integrate a mobile blogging project into the unit of work.

Bem legal

“What does this world consist of? First is hardware: Mobile telephony. Laptops, increasingly wireless. Personal digital assistants, including PalmPilots and Pocket PCs. The Danger Hiptop. Tablet PCs. Handheld gaming tools, such as the N-Gage. MP3 players. Wireless connectivity detectors. Bluetooth-enabled devices. Wireless access points, which can irradiate a room or area or be knitted into a cloud covering a block, a campus, or an urban sector. Digital cameras, still and motion, which are increasingly found in cell phones. USB drives. Fusion devices, such as combination phone/PDA/MP3-players. RFID tags in the millions. All of these are supported by ambitious, shifting, emergent infrastructure networks of connectivity, access, and payment.

What social practices are emerging from this expanding, disruptive device ecology? The idea of emergence is the key rubric here as cultures grapple with and generate new device-based practices.⁴ Every week produces a new twist of wireless culture, from personal spying to mobile-phone-based Bible lessons.⁵ Personal surveillance is growing: the personal spying hardware market has advanced from the old X10 camera to smaller devices, and users are repurposing cell phones and other devices to snoop on spouses and employers. In American culture, speakers can curtly demand a cell phone shut-off, whereas other cultures allow energetic mobile talking and texting, even in movie theaters. More broadly, mobile and wireless computing has altered the rhythms of social time and has changed uses of social space. Cell-phone-equipped urbanites meet by triangulating fluid schedules and shifting points on the cityscape. Texting occurs within and between nearly every social situation—driving, going to the theater, attending classes—despite the abhorrently kludgey interface, adding a secondary, and sometimes socially oblique, communicative layer to everyday life. Multiple, distributed, radio-connected devices—from bridge-sensor arrays to Wal-Mart’s use of RFID tags—have enabled new orders of research, information tracking, dataveillance, personal surveillance, and communication. Easy digital photography and videography have opened new frontiers in art, such as moblogging, while also affecting police-community relations, school surveillance, and spousal tensions. Integrated virtual and face-to-face communities, such as flashmobs and Hiptop Nation, have formed, as have political, artistic, and social groups, which move in smartmobs,⁶ using mobile technologies to enhance their cohesion and efficacy.”

More: Educause