XplanaZine

Last week at CeBIT, in addition to new multi-tasking phones introduced by Siemens, Nokia, BENQ, and a host of other announced new phones with advanced features. Add to that RIM’s new BlackBerry 6200 Wireless Handhelds with voice data integration for European customers and it’s quickly apparent that, while 2002 was the year integrated phones were supposed to make a splash, 2003 will be remembered as the year they actually arrived.

But it’s not just the cell phones and their respective and competing OS’s. Today, Texas Instruments announced its new mobile chipset that will allow cell phones to connect to three different kinds of wireless networks (including Wi-Fi).

The battle, of course, is for a big piece of the “enhanced” mobile phone market. For now, it’s a very young market with about 2 million devices in circulation. (By comparison, there were 400 million traditional cell phones sold last year), but it is one expected to grow significantly. By 2006, IDC expects Symbian will have increased its market share in the powerful phones to 53 percent from its current 46 percent. Microsoft will have about 27 percent of the market, with Palm at 10 percent. IDC predicts that Linux could take as much as 4.2 percent of the market.

And whether Symbian or Microsoft wins the OS war regarding the devices, their presence will grow rapidly and they will extend our ability to reach others intelligently with text and rich media. Both Symbian and Microsoft will afford users the ability to read and manage personal information as well as text documents, spreadsheet information, and corporate e-mail, from almost anywhere. This means several things –

1. the technological platform for a completely mobile and interactive society exists now
2. the technology that allows such connectivity is suited best for information that utilizes its assumptions about mobility
3. most of the information currently developed or in development still assumes a non-mobile and non-collaborative platform

This presents a huge challenge for education. Our model has long been one of centralized learning — i.e. we ask students to attend a specific class that meets in a designated geographical location where they will listen to a particular expert on the subject. The centralized model helps us — or so we profess — guard the integrity of information and education as well as support an economic model that favors traditional institutions. The rise of University of Phoenix and other organizations of the same ilk notwithstanding, the vast majority of information and information platforms for education in the United States are based on the old, centralized model.

The point here is not, necessarily, that the traditional, centralized approach to education is flawed, but rather that it is a very large cultural leap from the kind of platform represented and promised by new mobile technologies. In order to take advantage of those platforms, we will need to engineer information that was meant to be distributed. In order to craft such information architectures, we will need to experience a shift in mindsets that allows us to de-centralize the traditional educational experience. Core related technologies that will help bridge the gap between traditional and mobile educational platforms include blogging, instant messaging,, and collaborative environments such as Groove.

We anticipate that 2004 will be the year when information architectures for mobility in education begin making a big push. The movement will be precipitated, more than anything by demand from traditional students and economic pragmatism on the part of universities and other educational entities.