Obstacles to Mobile Learning #2: Photocopying

I had a conversation in Twitter about the high costs of photocopying and how these costs consume so much of a school budget.  The waste is so high that it reduces a school’s ability to invest in technology.

Let’s take a look at some rough numbers*. Let’s peg the cost of one photocopy at $0.10 CAD.  This cost includes the cost of toner and photocopier maintenance.  Let’s also say that a school can purchase a laptop for a school for $1000 CAD.  To be fair, there are infrastructure costs to consider such as network costs, switches, cables, etc. Let’s say that infrastructure costs bump up the cost of that laptop to $1500. Using these rough numbers, 15,000 photocopies = one laptop. In a school of 500 students, that works out to 30 copies per child per year!  That’s right.  If in the course of one year 30 copies per student were eliminated, the savings would allow a school to purchase one laptop for it’s students!

If we take this line of thinking a little further, an 8GB iPod touch currently retails at $319 CAD (as of August 29th, 2008). If we increase the cost of each iPod Touch to $400 CAD to include the cost of infrastructure, then eliminating 30 copies per student per year would save enough money to purchase about 4 iPod Touch units.  When I think back, I can easily identify places where I could quite easily save one sheet per student per day.  Multiply that by 195 teaching days for a class of 28 students and that’s 5460 copies or over 1/3 of the cost of one laptop.  That’s just one sheet per student everyday saved by one teacher.  If a school had 20 teachers with similar class ratios saving one sheet per student per day, the savings would allow a school to buy 7 laptops or 27 iPod Touch units (coincidentally, one class set).  Incredible!

So my question is this: Why are we not taking advantage of this opportunity to invest in technology at the local school level?  Why are we consuming all this paper which, inevitably, ends up in the recycling bin.  It appears to me that schools really do have enough resources to make modest investments in technology.  The problem is with how that money is spent.

The sacrifices are minor but the payoffs are quite large.  At the very least, we can make the argument that we are reducing our consumption of paper to reduce energy usage for the good of the environment.  At best, we can make the argument that we are reducing our consumption of paper to give us the flexibility to invest in our schools and in our students.

* Disclaimer – while these numbers are not exact, they help us gauge how photocopying is reducing a school’s ability to invest in technology.

My Wordle Word Cloud

I’ve been experimenting with Wordle and have been impressed with it’s simple, yet powerful service.  Worlde takes a blog website or even a simple block of text and creates a word cloud from it, making more commonly used words larger than less commonly used words.  Here is this blog’s Wordle word cloud:I was quite surprised that RSS is most commonly used word but there you have it.  A nice way to analyze writing.

iPods in Education Part 9: RSS Feeds

RSS has been an indispensable tool for me.  Being able to subscribe to web content and have that content come to me instead of me having to continuously find it has provided me with extra time to keep up with more content that I could have ever kept up with in the past.  If you are unfamiliar with RSS and subscribing to RSS feeds, take a look at this RSS guide.  It will explain what RSS is and how it works.

But RSS on an iPod?  You bet.  If you happen to have an iPod Touch with WiFi capabilities, you can essentially subscribe to RSS feeds using an online RSS feed reader as you would using a computer.  However, how about for the rest of us that have an older model iPod or an iPod without WiFi?  The world of RSS is open to us as well my friends.  If you or your students are Mac users, you can install iFeedPod onto your Mac.  It’s free software and can be found here.  For Windows users, you can download PodFetch for free or for $15, you can purchase iGadget. Any one of these desktop applications will allow you to take your RSS subscriptions and download all the new and updated content to your iPod to read later. Once you subscribe to an RSS feed using one of these pieces of software, all you have to do is periodically sync the software with your iPod so that the new content can be uploaded to the device.  Everything else is done for you!

The educational applications of using RSS in a mobile way are huge.  Students can use a device they already own to subscribe to newspaper feeds, or feeds from educational content providers and keep up with curriculum relevant information from wherever they are.  Uploading content to their devices is as simple as syncing their devices as they would using iTunes. At its most simplist, RSS allows students to spend more time with content and less time searching for it.  Since the information is online, much of that content is relevant and up-to-date as well.

While traditional search tools and techniques are still important, leveraging new tools and techniques to find relevant content is just as important.  RSS is one of those new tools and being able to utilize its functionality on an iPod takes that functionality and makes it mobile.

Here are some general guides in using RSS in education:

• RSS: A Quick Start Guide for Educators by Will Richardson
• Video: RSS in Plain English by CommonCraft
• RSS Ideas for Educators by Quentin D’Souza

The High Price of Mobility: Can We Afford to be Connected?

I feeling awfully torn these days.  There are so many devices that allow for so many wonderful learning possibilities.  Researching and publishing on the Internet from anywhere.  Accessings RSS feeds from anywhere.  Communicating and collaborating with one other person or many other people using text or voice or combinations of both.  With so many products and services that allow us to live and learn and work on the go, who can afford not to be connected to the mobile network?  Then again, with the sheer cost that comes with this access, who can afford to stay connected to the mobile network?

Allow me to explain. With the iPhone 3G now available in many countries including my own (Canada), I’ve been investigating the possibilities of ownership. I’ve been salivating at the idea of doing everything from e-mail to Internet browsing to communicating and collaborating to reading ebooks, watching video, listening to music or looking at photographs all on one device. All the wonderful teaching and learning possibilities that I’ve discussed in this blog can be accomplished on an iPhone. However, I still don’t own one and will probably not own one in the near future.  The reason? It costs too much.

There is the upfront cost of the device which, while comparable to the cost of similar devices, is still expensive.  However, it doesn’t end there.  There’s the cost of a voice plan, then a data plan, then system active fees and then taxes.  I figure that if I went out to purchase the iPhone model I want tomorrow, it would cost me $340 CDN (after taxes) immediately for the device and then approximately $70 CDN/month just to be able to communicate with it.  True, $30 CDN of that $70 CDN is for a data plan that allows 6GB per month of data usage.  For a mobile device, 6GB per month is huge but so is $30 CDN per month!  Then there is the fact that I would have to lock in for 3 years!  So that’s $340 CDN (phone) + $840 CDN/year for my data and voice plans + $5 CDN/month for 125 text messag es/month (or $70 CDN/year) x a minimum of 3 years.  That’s over $3000 CDN over a three year period and that doesn’t even include the cost of desired apps!   Even after paying all that money, my iPhone would still be locked so I would have to pay even more if I tried to use it out of my home country (you can read my rant about using mobile devices internationally here). I have only one thing to say to all of this – TOO EXPENSIVE!

This got me thinking.  If Apple and Rogers (my ISP and cell phone provider) have priced me out of an iPhone, then they have also priced cash strapped students and school systems from ownership as well.  If it is a reality that some students are able to tap into revenue sources to purchase devices like the iPhone while others cannot, then are we not entering into the digital divide debate once again?  In the late 1990’s, the debate revolved around advantages afforded to those who were able to access computers and the Internet vs. those who could not.  However, these days, with Internet access so ubiquitous, the debate seems to be moving to whether those who can afford mobile devices, or more specifically, mobile access, will be in an advantageous position over those that cannot afford that access.

I’ve thought about alternatives.  I currently have a Blackberry Pearl and an 5G iPod video.  I really love both of these devices as they allow me to do a lot at literally a fraction of the price.  However, I still had to purchase two seperate devices, I’m still carrying around 2 devices, my mobile access is much more limited than if I had an iPhone and I’m only able to make this work because I am comfortable with the technology and am willing find and to dabble with software such as the Opera Mini mobile browser. Many may find this alternative too much of a hassle.  After reading this article, I thought about replacing my 5G iPod video with an iPod Touch to experience some of the benefits of an iPhone.  However, despite the increased functionality, even this alternative leads to one conclusion: true mobility comes with a steep price tag and alternatives, while they may be a bit cheaper, may be too much hassle.

Despite this, I’m not losing hope.  These are the early days of this technology.  Cell phone prices and voice plans were prohibitive when they first appeared on the scene as was computer hardware, software and Internet access.  As these devices became more and more commonplace, hardware/software quality and connection services all improved significantly while ownership and access became more affordable.  We are now at a point where students have steady access to the Internet at home and come to school with devices that can help them learn.  Surely, the same will happen with these all-in-one mobile communication devices.