Vviewpoints
DOI:10.1145/2976735
Viewpoint
Learning with
Mobile Technologies
Considering the challenges, commitments, and quandaries.
WITH A FEW years of hindsight, the previ- ously ambitious but now notorious rollout of iPads by the Los Angeles Unified School District certainly
looks “spectacularly foolish.”5 Quite
consistently, researchers, industry
experts, journalists, school personnel, and politicians agree the plan was
well intentioned, but ill conceived and
doomed from the start. They lament
that if the school district had a more
comprehensive blueprint for selecting, using, and managing the technology, the enterprise would have been
successful. This cycle of hype and
disappointment continues to characterize large-scale adoptions of technology in schools across the globe.2,12
The accompanying lessons, however,
are surprisingly short-lived. I recently attended an international forum
with participants from across groups
of stakeholders and the message was
quite clear: technology in schools
equals innovation; let’s not waste
time being negative about technology;
let’s just get on with it. Such a cavalier
approach to learning technologies in
schools and the flippant reaction to
any cautions and critiques only serve
to further jeopardize the learning opportunities of students who have been
historically marginalized in schools.
This Viewpoint presents my reflections on struggles encountered in a
curricular reform project that relied
heavily on new technologies in the
classroom.7–11 I am transparent about
the difficulties we experienced in the
hope that our candor will allow for
pause and deliberation as others embark on similar efforts, ultimately
providing them a more advantageous
point of departure. Recognizing the
importance of place and context, I do
not expect that our challenges will be
identical to what others face across varied learning environments. That said, I
sincerely hope that strong proponents
of the “just get on with it” position will
have the courage to not dismiss our
concerns as idiosyncratic.
Angeles area over the last six years. A
defining characteristic of the reform
effort, implemented in high school
computer science, data science, math,
and science classrooms, was to have
students use mobile technologies to
collect data about themselves and
about issues that were important to
them. The collection and the analysis
of personally relevant data were intended to promote computational and
statistical thinking in STEM.
Challenges
Our project was deployed in high
school classrooms throughout the Los
From a learning technology perspective, we faced three top-level chal-
IMAGE BY NESTOR RIZHNIAK
