Teens and Mobile Phones

Text messaging explodes as teens embrace it as the centerpiece of their communication strategies with friends. Cell phones are not just about calling or texting – with expanding functionality, phones have become multimedia recording devices and pocket-sized internet-connected computers. Cell phones are seen as a mixed blessing. Parents and teens say phones make their lives safer and more convenient. Yet both also cite new tensions connected to cell phone use. Cell phones help bridge the digital divide by providing internet access to less privileged teens.

Text messaging has become the primary way that teens reach their friends, surpassing face-to-face contact, email, instant messaging and voice calling as the go-to daily communication tool for this age group. However, voice calling is still the preferred mode for reaching parents for most teens.

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Hyperconnected Education – the human network

When people connect, they begin to share. This happens automatically, an expression of the instinctive human desire to communicate matters of importance. Sharing, driven by need, amplified by technology, reaches every one of us, through our network of connections. We both give and receive: from each according to their knowledge, to each, according to their need. Sharing has amplified the scope of our awareness. We can find and connect to others who share our interests, increasing our awareness of those interests.

We teach children to research, as if this were an activity distinct from the rest of our experience, when, in reality, research is the core activity of the 21st century. We need to think about the era, just a few years hence, when everyone has a very smart and very well connected mobile in hand from birth. We need to think about how that mobile becomes the lever which moves the child into knowledge. We need to think about our practice and how it is both undermined and amplified by the device and the network it represents.

Your students are not alone on their journey into knowledge and mastery. Beside them, educators blaze a new trail into a close connectivity, leveraging a depth of collective experience to accelerate the search for solutions. We must search and research and share and learn and put that learning into practice. We must do this continuously so we can stay in front of this transition, guiding it toward meaningful outcomes for both students and educators. We must reinvent education while hyperconnectivity reinvents us.

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Why HP’s figures point to a post-PC era of tablets and wearable computing

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Hewlett-Packard’s financial results showed falls in PC sales – but tablet owners are more likely to have bought a computer in the past two years. But Forrester says change is coming, and fast.

Versatile Smartphone Dock Offers Three Functions

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This unusual device functions as a cellphone dock, a Bluetooth speaker, and a Bluetooth handset that lets your cellphone act like a landline phone. Here’s our review.

The Moshi Moshi04i Bluetooth Speaker-Handset by Native Union works with any Bluetooth-equipped mobile device. It has a silver-colored receiver, festooned with a honeycomb motif and measuring a couple of inches longer than typical telephone handsets.

That handset rests on its base that also functions as a dock (that works particularly well with iPhones). Once you place the handset on the dock, it touches contacts that charge its battery. Likewise, when we plugged our iPhone 4 into the dock, it charged that as well. Overall, this device, designed by UK-born Michael Young, looks completely original, unlike any dock we’ve ever seen.