Mobile technology as a tool of education and transformation

Opening Lecture
Mobile phone: An anthropology of communication

David Cavallo - MIT / OLPC
Graham Brown Martin - Hand Held Learning
Paulo Henrique Ferreira - Okto/Alô Cidadão
Heather Horst - University of California, Berkey

Mediatior:
Gilson Schwarz - USP / Cidade do Conhecimento

Mobile technology as a tool of education and transformation

The coming of new communication technologies and mobility-based interaction have brought up an interesting discussion around one of the most central and traditional bounds of contemporary life, education.

This opening table was made by invited specialists and researchers directly involved with projects that aim to use such technologies to develop new educational processes and, to build linked nets. Some just related to education and others as way to incentive and promote a social structure to encourage the exercise of citizenship, like the project “Alô cidadão”, developed in a needy community of Belo Horizonte and, “Cidade do Conhecimento”.
This table aims to discuss two aspects linked to educational process: interaction with content and people, through nets of data transmission and social interaction fomenting.

Regarding content interactivity, we intend to discuss the existing ways of mobile technology use in education and, about the future images that such developments point out to, especially through projects like Hand Held Learning and the possibilities of the project One Laptop Per Child.

That is, what can we expect in terms of new technological devices regarding the future of education paths in more and more mobile a world?

Regarding the social nets built around interaction via mobile media, besides the ones mentioned, the presence of anthropologist Heather Horst stands out. Her study about the role of mobile phones in the lives of people of needy communities in rural and urban areas of Jamaica being a series of examples of experiences of sociability nets that developed naturally from the insertion of these technologies in those places. Such experiences, the ones naturally developed and the ones fomented through specific projects make us face the question: how can mobile technology be a cataliser or a provoker of sociability nets?? How can it contribute?