I was invited to give a talk recently, and one of the questions I was asked to address was: what are the characteristics of a good ICT activity? This is one of the questions which, at first glance, seems really easy to answer – until you get down to thinking about it. Because what the question is really asking, I think, is what makes a good ICT activity good in a unique way: that is, unique to ICT.
BYOT: the policy that dare not speak its name?
A couple of months ago Mike Sharples, a researcher at the Open University, told me that he had looked at the websites of some of the schools I was writing up case studies on in connection with their Bring Your Own Technology policy, but was unable to find any references to it whatsoever. He came to the conclusion that:
BYOT is the policy that dare not speak its name.
I have to say that although there are quite a few schools adopting a BYOT approach, finding them has not been easy.
Bring your own thinking
A few years ago I said to one of my team, having been in the new management post for about a week, “How come nobody here ever takes a decision? How come they always ask me what they should do, especially when they know more about their specialist area than I do?”
“Because”, came the reply, “Our last boss always had an opinion on everything, and stuck to it whatever anyone else suggested. So we very soon learnt that there was no point in doing any of the thinking for ourselves.”
Mobile phones in education revisited
The most popular article on the ICT in Education website is one by a 17 year-old student called The Importance Of Mobile Phones In Education. To give you an idea of its popularity, I would estimate that it has been viewed at least 30,000 times since it was published back in July 2010. So the question is, why is it so popular?
Is it because it was written by a student? Well, there is no doubt that student articles receive a lot of attention, but not usually this much.
Is it because it is about mobile phones? I don’t think so: I have written about mobile phones before, and again, the articles haven’t attracted 30,000 views as far as I know.
I think the answer lies in the combination: an article about mobile phones written by a student who appears to be surgically attached to one.
Bring your own technology
If ever there was an idea whose time has come, it is surely Bring Your Own Device or, to be less restrictive, Bring Your Own Technology. There are at least two comp0elling reasons for this.