This may shatter my reputation as a techie, but I have hung on to this Nokia phone since 2001– I really am not a huge mobile phone user, and I come it at max maybe 150 minutes a month. All this phone does is enable me to make phone calls (shocking), though in fits of boredom, I have played "Snake" on it.
As you may notice, it has been sporting a lovely bit of duct tape to keep the battery connected.
But Old Nokie is now retired, and I am sending this phone via my new Motoroloa V10, a camera phone that I used to take this picture. Actually, I first got a Nokia 6225i but never got it to send pictures nor could anyone at the store or the tech support line. Hint- never buy a new phone at the store where it is so new, the employee do not know how to use it.
I am now using phone technology that ahs been around for 2-3 years. I guess I am a phone Luddite or Lagger.
I bare my soul in being not much of a techie in terms of cell phones.
That said, having snapped a few camera phone photos and emailing to friends and directly to flickr via their easy access, I am rather startled that I cannot easily find many or any examples of this simple and readily available technology in a context of learning.
Oh sure, plenty of us (self included) write about its potential, but where are the examples? People are writing about citizen journalism but where are the citizen Photojournalists? The cases where students are using phone technology as reporting devices? We have in wide distribution a simple technology tool that would allow students to be roving reporters, or to gather field data (observations of natural or man made phenmomena) or documentation or projects or …
I am thinking of things like coverage of the 2004 wildfires in Southern California or the BBC’s News program of Your Pictures, Your News. But it need not be news that is the sort of data collected / reported by phone.
Maybe I have missed it, but isn’t this a ripe and rich area for teachers to tap into as a learning tool? I am sure they are out there, hidden beyond the reach of Google way out there on the Long Tail…
If it helps… I don’t even have a cell phone. Janice has one (an old POS Nokia cheapo) for emergencies, but we have a tiny 20-minutes-per-month plan for that… I was rather embarrassed at WWDC when everyone was asking me for my cell number to coordinate. Doh 😉
I’m with D’Arcy – phone luddite? You seem pretty advanced to this cell troglodyte – I had one once, and when the phone company kept billing me after the contract expired and I no longer used the phone I declared war on the phone company (to strains of ‘I fought the law and the law won’). Hey, maybe if you post your cell phone number here the blog spammers can start telemarketing to you as well 😉
Cheers, Scott