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One of the remarkable woman in mobile I discovered lately is Judy Breck. During the early Internet period, she led HomeworkCentral.com’s open content collection and she has since written four books about knowledge digital migration and connectivity.

Howard Rheingold says on her latest book 109 IDEAS for Virtual learning:

“Judy Breck is onto something — something big. If you are interested in the future of knowledge and learning, her big idea will be useful to you.”

Judy’s central idea from her book is the following:

“the network, patterning structure of what a mind can know is mirrored in the network, patterning structure of the open Internet. That idea is not only theoretically elegant. It is so powerful that it has been a self-fulfilling prophecy: over the past decade what is known by humankind has spontaneously nestled into the Internet and begun interconnecting itself into a cognitive network…”

Her vision is resolutely mobile so I thought it’s about time I’ll ask her all about it. Judy is also part of the SmartMobs.com Blog Mob, you can follow her other activities and personal blog at GoldenSwamp.com.

DIGITAL LIFESTYLE

- How does mobile technological progress influences your daily routine in your work (or as a writer/blogger)?

My digital lifestyle is that of an author. My writing is devoted to the global virtual knowledge ecology. In 2005, I wrote my fourth book on the subject: 109 IDEAS for Virtual learning: How open content will help close the digital divide.

I also showcase learning links and comment on the ecology on my blog: GoldenSwamp.com.

The global virtual knowledge ecology, as I define it, is the network of open content for learning that has formed over the past decade within the Internet. Because of this new ecology, students everywhere can literally learn from the same virtual page! But to do that they have to have a connection to the Internet. Mobile is almost suddenly my major focus because it has now arrived as — I am convinced — the last key step toward worldwide engagement by students of the global virtual knowledge ecology.

To sum up what I just said: I am thrilled, excited — blown away! — by realizing mobile is the next really big thing for global learning. Bottom line: mobile is how learners are getting connected to knowledge!

- What do you mean by learning from the same page?

I mean exactly the same page! Let’s take Wikipedia, for example. If you pick an article to learn from in Wikipedia — and study it in English — you could be in any culture or country on the planet. You would be learning from exactly the same page of knowledge as everyone else using that page. You can click a different language from the choices in the left column of the Wikipedia page and study almost the same material in that language. This sort of same page learning is light years away from learning that now goes on from school textbooks printed in different cultures and countries. I’ve heard it said that some of the Brit kids still learn in school that we upstarts in the States really didn’t win much in what we call the American Revolution. Kids in the States learn quite the opposite.

I learned the most about the digital revolution as Contentmaster (1997-2001) of HomeworkCentral.com. At that point I was a player in the Internet boom and actually got myself a page in the now defunct (R.I.P.) Industrial Standard. I had a very typical “ride” on the Internet boom and after it was over I had been so impressed by what I thought could be done for learning I have written four books about that.

DIGITAL VISION

- What do you think mobile brings to learning that is new and important?

I do not look at mobile and Web 2.0 from a geek viewpoint because I am not a geek. What Web 2.0 means to me is that a profound revolution is happening from which mobile will emerge as the leading individual/personal digital content device. That is a hugely important deal for commerce, and for education which is my strongest interest.

- What role would mobiles have in education?

Education is a huge topic with lots of issues ranging from nurture, culture, discipline, skill practice, community learning, and acquiring subject knowledge. My focus is the last one — knowledge. The mobile can play roles in many of the other aspects of education, but for knowledge it is pretty simple: the mobile can deliver it to one learner at a time. It can put you, as a learner, on the same knowledge page as other learners. If you have a mobile in your pocket that has Internet access, you have just about any subject knowledge you might want to learn in your pocket. That is HUGE when you think of the fact that already a couple of billion people have mobiles. (And that is twice as many as have other Internet access.)

- But the mobiles don’t all access the Internet?

Not comprehensively — yet. Already though, even the simplest handset can access some knowledge.

- Don’t’ mobiles cause distraction at school?

I think it is insulting to kids to give their parents their own PCs at work and make students share at school. Yet we have been doing that for years! And now that the kids mostly have a computer of their own (a mobile) I also think it insults youngsters not to trust them to use their mobiles for learning. My view is that the mobile should become the new device used in education for delivering knowledge. Let’s scrap the shared PCs at school and upgrade the mobiles. Why? Because each student then has his or her own learning device where that student can customize and personalize to have the device integrated with the individual learning process. (Yes, I believe kids will do that! Don’t you? When we expect them not to, it is hardly likely that they will.)

- How does mobile affect the individual? How is it personal?

This can be thought about philosophically, but it is very practical too. Since this series is about women, Rudy, let’s use them for an example.

There is a problem called gender parity that is worried about in a lot of developing counties. It is the result of cultural factors which cause girls not to get equal education to that which the boys get. This is a deep and old cultural challenge. In the United States there was a woman named Mary Lyon who was a pioneer in battling gender parity in the early years my country. She founded Mount Holyoke college, which has her story on this webpage.

Mary Lyon’s problem was the one that a mobile can now solve for a girl anywhere: the delivery of knowledge equal to what boys are learning.

- How would girls affected by gender parity use mobiles to get equal knowledge?

It’s really wonderfully simple: if a girl has a mobile she is a knowledge equal to a boy who has a mobile. So, the more knowledge becomes available by mobile, the more everyone gets regardless of gender. The problem for girls now is that – as they were in the States in Mary Lyon’s day - they are often not allowed to attend schools. Today schools are where PCs are available, thus where Internet learning is possible. So, lots of girls around the world miss out on Internet learning.

- Will girls really be able to get the mobiles?

I recommend an article about Nigeria that the BBC published on March 18, 2006 to get a sense of what is happening with mobiles in Africa and other developing countries. In pertinent part it says:

“In any big town you just have to look around and there will be a boy within hailing distance ready to sell you a top-up card. Girls are less likely to be scampering about in traffic jams with strings of cards. But give them a picnic table, a red, yellow or green umbrella, and a “make your calls here” sign, and they are set up in the telecommunications business.”

- What about more remote areas?

There are lots of statistics to show the penetration is widespread and cascading. I’ll just point to an observation in an email I received a year ago from an Afghan friend of mine who lives in Austria and works to aid Afghan school children:

“May 2005: I am in Afghanistan, recently. I returned from three days trip to Afghanistan eastern province of Laghman, during my stay in that province I saw unbelievable developments and change in the life of people particularly in access to satellite TV and mobile telephone. Just within three years, people even in the mountainous area using satellite TV, mobile Tel - using by people in everywhere some people jokily saying even Kabul’s beggers in the street using mobile Tel . . . .”

- How do you see the mobiles, once they have them, changing the lives and status of women?

Let’s go back to Mary Lyon, who was a girl born into a colonial home in the United States. When she was school age the best she could expect was to go some of the time for a few years to a school where girls were taught less than boys. If Mary had had a mobile loaded with knowledge, she could have learned the basic knowledge first, and then continued to use her mobile to learn the sciences that interested her, etc. She could have sat in the corner of her log cabin by the fire where she cooked and done her learning there, or under a tree by the field she helped to farm.

Girls could do the same thing in Nigeria at the tables where they sell phone cards and in the mountains of Laghman, Afghanistan. Mary or a Nigerian or Afghan girl could study from a mobile in privacy under a veil if that met the cultural traditions.

Rudy, the girls have or soon will have the mobiles. We just need to make sure the mobiles offer the knowledge the girls are missing for cultural reasons.

- Is the knowledge content available on the mobiles?

Now, Rudy, you have come to what I am hoping my work will help push into more public action and thought: let’s get that knowledge available on the mobiles!

At one end is a mobile with full access to browsing the Internet. Open content for learning is already out there. For example, MIT is about to finish putting the courseware from everything they teach openly online. A mobile that can browse the MIT Open Courseware materials makes that knowledge available to its owner wherever he or she is. I have posted many examples by study subject of excellent learning links on my GoldenSwamp Subject Sampler.

In the middle of the range is the walled gardens challenge. I hope the mobile community rises against any temptation to wall in learning content so that it is useable by limited platforms and applications.

At the other end of the range are the millions of simple handsets that are in use now where features are limited to voice and text. Of course, those are powerful features for conveying knowledge. Text tutors, podcasts that can be transmitted to the simpler handset and other methods that readers will think of can all be used right now to reach the kids in the mountains of Afghanistan, the streets of Nigeria and millions of kids elsewhere.

- I assume the Mobile Web is not yet implemented or accessible in underdeveloped countries or am I mistaken?

My guess is we cannot generalize on this since underdeveloped areas can be overlapped by developed ones. In the least developed countries there are some wireless hotspots – probably Mobile Web is available in the poorer neighborhoods of Kabul, for example. Even here in New York City, there are neighborhoods where schooling is pretty bad yet mobile transmission is excellent. Also, it is proving true that mobile technology is leapfrogging into remote underdeveloped areas where landline transmission may never go.

- If learning through Mobile Web browsing becomes accessible, how long can people read continuously information on a small screen; how do you see this evolving to an ideal learning process?

Can reading really be done on small screens. This WIRED article from a year ago explains the craze for reading entire books on the mobiles in Japan.

As to the ideal learning process, I feel sure you have readers, Rudy, who can come up with some very great answers to that question.

- Do you know about any concrete examples of mobile learning projects? I mean through SMS/MMS now?

Here is an example of SMS/MMS study system to prep for tests: Sparks Mobile. Yes, this is doable; it is happening. Imagine a tutor like this for arithmetic in the Swahili language that could be text beamed to be shared among students.

As I say a lot in my book 109 IDEAS, about my opinion that the main reason the Internet (and now mobile) are not already the big main thing in education is that the education establishment has conditioned us to keep kids back in 19th century schools.

Why has the education establishment not gone to mobile, creating lessons like the Sparks Mobile? Rudy, my focus in life right now is to ask that question and see if there are smart and able people among groups like your readers who will do something about making it happen!

- Do your see opportunities to develop products for these markets?

Bottom line, we must not do the walled garden thing with learning. That may sound altruistic, but it is not. Closed off learning content atrophies and dies off. Learning content must be open and connectible to stay current and in use. So how do we make money off of building learning assets for mobile? Here are three ideas, but your readers can think of others.

First, education establishments are rolling in cash (even though they say they are not). Get a grant to build an arithmetic tutorial in Swahili. Turn the tutorial loose as open content among African schools and social organizations. Go back and get a grant to do a geography tutorial and repeat the distribution.

Second, go to some of the great open content websites and get them to pay you to mobilize some of their content. For example, approach Mathworld and convince its host to underwrite your work. Mathworld is open content owned and hosted by the software company Wolthram Research.

Third, build a terrific tutorial and then get a paid sponsor whose name goes on to the tutorial. If every student in Asia is learning geography from a tutorial that kids are texting to each other, having a company name on that tutorial should be worth good money

OTHER

- Your ultimate dream scenario including mobile?

I’ve pretty much described it above, and it is actually simple: a mobile with full interactive Internet browsing capacity in the hands of each kid on earth.

- The ultimate tech device not invented yet you would like?

Something that will simplify mobile open content so that it will become fully integrated into what W3C calls One Web with Internet content. This standard should be applied to all learning content.

- Which links would you like to be included?

109 IDEAS book link
GoldenSwamp.com blog
Mary Lyon story
BBC articleMIT Open Courseware
GoldenSwamp Subject Sampler
W3C One Web

NOTE on the picture above: For over four decades I have coached and judged high school and middle school students in debate competitions. This a picture of debate “Judge Judy” taken with some middle school rhetoric students I was coaching in 2004 in New York City.

TAGS: women in mobile Judy Breck Smart Mobs goldenswamp.com m-trends.org

Women in Mobile, womeninmobile