Wireless Reach/Qualcomm

As we explore the potential of mobile learning, especially as it relates to reaching out to disenfranchised students, the most recent results from Project K-Nect seem that much more relevant.

The pilot program based in North Carolina, which we covered here on MindShift, was designed to make math more engaging for low-income kids with the use of mobile phones in Onslow County School System.

In its third year, the program has more than proven successful. Some stats from the most recent report, released last month, quoted here:

• By the end of the fall 2010 semester, 89 percent of the Algebra I students reported they are more motivated to learn math compared to 76 percent at the beginning of the semester.

• 90 percent of the Project K-Nect students in Algebra I and 100 percent of the Algebra II students demonstrated proficiency on their end of course exams.

• By the end of the fall 2010 semester, 89 percent of the Algebra I students reported they are more motivated to learn math compared to 76 percent at the beginning of the semester.
• The majority of students reported they are also more comfortable learning math (83 percent), felt more successful (72 percent) and better prepared to take the end-of course exam (72 percent).
• By the end of the semester, the number of students who thought, “math is easy” more than doubled from 29 percent to 61 percent.

• The first cohort of Project K-Nect students successfully completing the college level AP Calculus college curriculum and took the AP exam last month.

• Algebra I students expressed an interest in taking additional math classes, including Advanced Placement courses.
• They also said they are more interested in attending college (56 percent) or pursuing a degree or career that would use their math skills (33 percent).

What’s more, the report states that “students’ increased use of and familiarity with technology through Project K-Nect helps students easily integrate the use of technology to other curricular areas.”

Students in the program use smart phones to solve math problems, and collaborate with each other through blogs, instant messaging and email. They use photos and videos to “capture their problem-solving strategies and post them to the Project K-Nect site” for review.

And this is just a math program. Imagine how it could play out with other subjects.

This video, produced by Qualcomm’s Wireless Reach Division, provides a perspective of how it works.

Lenny Gonzalez

A student at Napa New Tech High uses his mobile phone at school.

In my quest to understand how a mobile phone can be considered a learning tool, and whether it can actually help bridge the digital divide between low-income, at-risk kids and those with access to computers, I had an illuminating conversation with Mimi Ito, a cultural anthropologist who studies new media use in young people. Ito is co-author of Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media, and has been studying the subject of how kids interact with mobile devices.

My conclusion: When it comes to the traditional definition of “learning” — studying a subject like chemistry or literature — mobile phones are not necessarily the best facilitators. Though kids are remarkably facile with phones — texting, researching, Facebooking, Tweeting — it’s hard to imagine anyone being able to focus on a complicated subject with any depth of thought using a four-inch device.

The potential magic of the smart phone when it comes to learning lies in its ability to provide instant access to facts and the ability to collaborate with others, as well as provide a fun, mobile platform for educational games.

Take Project K-Nect, for example. The program is a social-media-based curriculum that combines project and collaborative learning with new media learning for 3,000 high schoolers in three states. An Algebra 1 curriculum has been distilled into mini apps that include instant messaging and blogging, assessment tools for teachers, supplemental activities, project-based learning components, problem sets, and cartoon animation. “Students [take] control of the learning process and create personalized learning communities,” said the founder Shawn Gross.

But even Gross doubts that for very high-risk students — such as those who are homeless or are attending school primarily for a free lunch — the technology-integrated math class is as beneficial. In those cases, there’s much more to contend with than academics, and a mobile-phone curriculum alone won’t change that.

I asked Ito to put some of these different pieces of the puzzle into perspective.

Q. Do you see any evidence of mobile phones being a legitimate way for low-income kids to learn?

Mimi Ito: It’s really too early to tell based on technology adoption trends. It’s more like a glimmer on the horizon. We’re pretty early on the research trajectory. We don’t know empirically exactly what’s happening.

What we’re seeing is that things are trending a certain way in terms of tech adoption. The fact that black and Latino youth are leading the way in mobile social media is an interesting trend, because they weren’t the population who have  historically led on new technology adoption. What that means for learning and development, I don’t know if there’s any research on that.

Q. Based on your research and expertise, do you want to make any predictions?

A. I do think the next big trend in the digital technology space is going to be when we see widespread adoption of mobile social media by teenagers. We’re just starting to see the adoption curve, but it’s early. With Internet-enabled phones, we’re just at the tip of the iceberg for it to be affordable for kids. So we haven’t seen implications on the behaviorial level yet.

Adoption of things like texting, when you see a marginalized group adopt and pick up new technology, you often see interesting shifts and innovations. For example, text messaging in teenage urban girls in Tokyo. They were the first to ride this wave of technology and a way of communicating that’s now really ubiquitous. But the fact that suddenly young teenage girls were the face of technology changed the tenor of what it meant to be a technology user.

Flickr:Joi

Mimi Ito

You still have a very gendered landscape in terms of certain kinds of computer-based technology use. What you saw with text messaging and social network sites in the U.S., suddenly you have a high adoption of new technology that were led by girls rather than boys, and that’s changed the whole public face of what these technologies are and who these technology users are.

That’s where if you see technology trends defined not by stereotypical technology users or advanced technology users in this country, which is a white, male, fairly privileged profile, it’s going to be fascinating to see how that plays out. The early trends seem to show that we’re seeing shift in these country.

Q. In developing countries, where computers and broadband access have been scarce, mobile phones are said to be substituting or leapfrogging that entire step in technology advancement.

A. In countries that didn’t have existing telephone infrastructure much less universal telephone service much less Internet access, mobile phone service has been genuinely transformative in so many ways.

Mostly, it’s based on the bedrock that it enables social connection between people. Social connections are our primary platform for learning in everyday lives. It’s hugely transformative for that context of learning.

Because often in developing countries it’s the only portal that they have to the informational universe, people have been much more creative about using those kinds of platforms like texting and information access and retrieval and other kinds of things in the learning phase than what you’d see in countries like Japan or the U.S. or korea, where people have all these other pipelines and other avenues for information.

Q. Do you have any reservations about mobile devices as a learning tool?

A. One concern with relying heavily or exclusively on mobile platforms is that because of the structure of how mobile services are provided, it’s often more locked down than in the PC-based world. There’s much less overall opportunity for user-level reconfiguration and customization and user level control.

Most mobile services have the walled garden approach, and that’s my one concern with certain populations relying exclusively on mobile access and not having access to PC-based uses.

So the positive outcome of this phase of innovation is that we’re seeing new entrants doing creative things and developing systems that are driven by needs of populations that haven’t been historically well served by information industries.

But the negative scenario is that these systems are not open enough to allow a lot of innovation and learning from street-level knowledge that young people could be bringing to these systems, and it could bring on even more of a digital divide. You have kids who have persistent broadband PC –based Internet access at home, doing much more creative kinds of media production, and sharing and mobilization. And the kids who are reliant exclusively on their hand-held devices let them do a lot of things, but much more on the curated, consumer level experience rather than the activate one. It could go both ways, we don’t really know.

Read Part II of my interview with Mimi Ito.

Flickr: from_ko

When asked what tech tools students would like to use in learning science and math, their reply was no surprise: “They said they wanted something that would utilize social networking technology — something portable. Overwhelmingly, they wanted to use a smart phone,” said Project K-Nect founder and director Shawn Gross about his interview with  Washington, D.C. area- kids five years ago.

“Students told us that the subject matter was too abstract, there wasn’t enough [real-world] application, that they were having difficulty with the instructional methods. They thought technology might be a way to change that,” says Gross.

With that directive in mind, Project K-Nect’s social-media-based curriculum combines project and collaborative learning with new media learning for the 3,000 high schoolers in three states who currently participate.

The initial goal of the nonprofit — launched in North Carolina in 2007 with the support of Qualcomm’s Wireless Reach Initiative and other organizations and now also in place in Ohio and Virginia — was to increase student performance in STEM subjects, particularly in low-income areas. The requirement, therefore, for Project K-Nect’s participating schools, is that at least 50 percent of the student body qualify for free or reduced lunch.

Do smart phones help low-income, at-risk student populations learn math? Yes, most definitely, says Gross. The majority of participating students scored 20 percent higher on standardized tests than their peers in the same school and 30 to 40 percent higher than students in the district and state after a single year. (Click here to see a full research report on the program in Onslow County, North Carolina).

But for very high-risk students — such as those who are homeless or are attending school primarily for a free lunch — the technology-integrated math class is not as likely beneficial, Gross says. There is a lot more going on in that student’s life than academia, and curriculum alone won’t change that.

“It’s hard to just say ‘at-risk students,’ — there are different categories of at-risk students,” he says. “The bottom line is we see increased student achievement and engagement because this is a media that students feel comfortable utilizing. It’s an outlet to be able to express themselves in a totally different fashion.”

ON HOW IT WORKS:

“Initially, we partnered with Drexel University and Florida State University to create the curriculum. We built a comprehensive set of Algebra 1 resources: all the components related to instant messaging and blogging, assessment tools for teachers, supplemental activities, project-based learning components, problem sets, and cartoon animation. There are basically mini apps for every unit of instruction that get pushed out to a student’s device.

Teachers speak for 10 or 15 minutes about the fundamentals of the unit and give some instruction, then pass it to students who work in teams to create videos that describe the steps students need to take to arrive at proficiency [in Algebra 1]. Then, teachers ask the kids to apply the math to something. They post the videos up into the blogs [that all Project K-Nect's participating students share]. When they run into stumbling blocks they create a video and tag it with ‘SOS.’ One of the schools will pick up an SOS tag within a matter of minutes and will respond back, either using instant messaging or a video response.

[Visit Project K-Nect's blog to see example videos of what students are doing.]

WHY IT WORKS:

“Social networking is heavily questioned by adults, so at first, no one thought students were going to be using blogs to actually do math. It turned out that those adults were dead wrong. Students from different geographic regions were communicating socially, sure, but they were also communicating to help each other to achieve this common goal of succeeding at Algebra 1. They were taking control of the learning process and creating personalized learning communities.

And what has been really dramatic are the changes in instructional strategies in the classroom. Teachers have gone from lecture-style textbooks to a completely different approach: It’s project-based learning design that they’re doing, now.

What’s surprising — in a good way — is that the majority of the students we started with in 2007-2008 school year went on to take an AP Calculus course or are currently enrolled in AP Statistics. In this district [Jacksonville, North Carolina], typically only about 2 percent of Algebra 1 students will go on to take AP math course. Now, those students are sitting in an AP class in their senior year.”