Goin' Mobile

by Shelly Blake-Plock

category: Education and Technology

Published July 11, 2009 @ 11:16AM PT

I’m headed out on a road trip next week.

Will be visiting Knoxville, Memphis, Hot Springs, Austin, San Antonio. The return journey will course through Houston and New Orleans and then on up through Mississippi before heading back due east.

Haven’t been on the road in a while, so I’m looking forward to this trip.

I started going out on the highways of North America back in high school. A sleepless drive from Baltimore to Louisiana; a precarious midnight ride through an Ontario blizzard; mornings waking up in the parking lots of the great charms of this land -- Nashville, Atlanta, Mobile. More trips meant more adventures: taking in the grandeur of Texas; driving off-road into the deserts of Sonora; seeing the lights of Las Cruces seemingly gleaming as bright as Los Angeles after days spent wandering the moonscape of New Mexico.

I never spent much money traveling. My wife and I once picked up a drive-away from San Diego and drove it to Richmond, VA for the cost of gas. I’ve tented in deserts and I’ve tented in the hollows of Appalachia. I’ve asked strangers if I could camp on their front lawn and I’ve met folks living in their vans, endlessly re-describing ‘home’.

Starting at three months of age, my children became accustomed to the inside of a tent. At eight years old, my twin boys can set up a two-man shelter on their own. My wife is even more of a camper that me and can easily turn any 15x15 patch of land into a kitchen/living room/bedroom in minutes.

As we’ve traveled the national parks and forests of this continent, we’ve come to know the different types of folks who make them their home. The fishermen who angle in the dark hours before dawn along the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay; the older couples whose RVs become miniature mobile civilizations; the rangers who always seem to know when you’re low on firewood; and the ones who warn you about dehydration, heatstroke, and rattlesnakes before you trod off into the cactus forests of Arizona.

I like to think of all of these trips as being part of my education. Indeed, you haven’t really been educated in the ways of the world until you’ve had a Copperhead crawl up your boxers late at night, the soft glow of the full moon present like a portrait gauzy just beyond the film of your tent and your screams.

Back in high school, the only way to see the world was to fill up the tank and drive out into it. Nowadays, “goin’ mobile” has more to do with juicing your iPhone.

And despite the fact that I realize that I’ve probably come across the last few days guest blogging here as something of a tech geek, in day-to-day life I still tend to organize my worldview not by what I can find on Wikipedia, but on what I’ve found out there on the real highway.

And I’m nervous about whether our kids are able to make that distinction.

Which is why I’ve been reassessing my thoughts about the way we structure school itself.

Most of our school buildings are made for the Industrial Age. They were meant as incubators of local society, which is precisely why folks like Woody Guthrie and Jack Kerouac resonated with the sorts of kids for whom that localized industrial structure just didn’t cut it.

Today, our kids are living in two worlds. One is the local community of friends, family, neighbors, and marketplaces. The other is the world they enter into when they get online to share likes and dislikes of recent movies or music; the world they enter into via their online gaming consoles and MMOGs.

Schools still function as though kids are still only living in the former.

When technology is applied in the classroom, it’s often done in a didactic manner not so dissimilar from the overhead projectors and filmstrips of our past. So much of what teachers tend to miss in evaluating the understanding of their students has to do with missing what’s going on in that second world. And much of what the students are missing has to do with understanding how that second world relates to the first.

That’s another disconnect.

And the only way we’re going to splice real learning into this problem is by changing the way we structure the educational experience.

Let’s consider the camping metaphor.

When you make that campfire, you tap into something primal. Something communal and creative. A place where you redefine your environment by civilizing fire. There is no technology more powerful than that.

So why do we force our students into environments that are as isolating and uncreative as possible? Have you looked recently at the aging schools comprising what we laughingly refer to as the centers of education for our communities?

Most of our school buildings have more in common with Romanesque fortifications than with the open and creatively vibrant campfires of our empowering human core.

We need the campfires.

We need to set the kids up with what they need and then send them out to spark campfires in our communities and beyond.

We don’t need kids rotting in old buildings being shown how great the world ‘out there’ is via a glorified overhead projector.

What we need is to put the power of mobile media into their hands, teach them how to use it, and then send them out into the world to engage with both their physical and online selves.

We need to stop complaining about the time away from classroom learning that fieldtrips represent and start complaining about the time away from fieldtrips that classroom learning represents.

Very quickly, technology and social media is shifting away from the old clunky hardware and towards easily mobile and very powerful forms. We need to harness this shift and make it a natural part of the learning experience. After all, you don’t need to sit in front of a computer in a school building to learn about farming when you could just as well take your smartphone to the farm itself and get the best of both worlds.

We need to get away from the school building mentality. This doesn’t mean we don’t need school buildings, but it does mean that we need to re-evaluate their function.

Rather than have 2000-student high schools, let’s break it down into community-centered ‘homebases’ of learning. This is where teachers can go directly into the communities. These 'homebases' will be the safe jumping off point for all extensions of learning into both the physical and digital worlds.

We need students to engage both the digital and the real highways of this world, and we need them to apply what they are learning in the ways that really matter.

Why do we go out of our ways to make contrite lessons seem more ‘authentic’ when there are so many real lessons to be had just beyond our classroom doors?

Now, where does this road lead? I don’t know. I’m hoping that you have some ideas, some things you’ve picked up along the roadside stands of your life that you could share. Because it’s time to rethink this whole thing.

The tank is full. Let’s go.

Photo by Matt McGee cc 2.0.