IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

launched a website accessible from i-mode phones. Students use the system
to catch up on missed classwork, ask professors questions, and check
for lecture cancellations. Text-messaging symbols—such as a smiling face
or a broken heart—have started to appear in students’ essays. In other educational
applications of text messaging (or SMS, short for ‘‘short message
system’’), tutors send reminders and alerts to students on courses or send
a daily message to learners, thereby providing them (as one e-learning
website puts it) with ‘‘a daily dose of learning . . . the message is pushed to
the learners so that they don’t have to actually go out and get it every
day.’’ 32
Learning 145
Content push is the wrong way to design the use of learning time. Those
hours do not belong to policymakers or to mobile phone companies. They
belong to the students. Rather than fill up all time with prepackaged content,
we need to make it possible for learners, of whatever age, to use their
own time more flexibly and actively. 33
New technology seems to work best when helping people interact across
time, rather than across space. If students and teachers can access Web
documents—or each other—at different times, they can escape the temporal
confines of the classroom. For Seely Brown and Duguid, ‘‘Learning technology
should be built around a conversational paradigm. The web has its
own rules, rhythms, and speeds; new kinds of documents, and new kinds
of interactions with students, are emerging.’’ 34 Educational providers have
started to offer thirty-minute ‘‘instant knowledge’’ options, twenty-fourhour
cycles, and—perhaps learning from online computer games—courses
that do not end. The best Internet tools, by common agreement, are an extension
of—not a replacement for—face-to-face exchanges.
New links—facilitated by the institution—can be made between students
on campus with time and no money and students off campus with money
but no time. According to Carol Twigg, ‘‘In such a scenario, a student’s
university career would no longer be through a particular place, time or
pre-selected body of academics, but through a network principally of their
own making, yet shaped by the degree granting body and its faculty. A student
could stay at home or travel, mix on-line and off-line education, work
in classes or with mentors, and continue their learning long after taking a
degree.’’ 35 As I stated earlier, companies lead the way in reconfiguring
space-time relations for training purposes. 36 Caroline Nevejan has developed
a map (figure 7.1) to help her institution’s twenty-two thousand students