France to ban mobile phones in schools

Photo: AFP via The Local FR.

Following on from yesterday's post about mobile phone etiquette at the theatre, I read a post this morning about France banning mobile phones in schools. Apparently phones are already banned from classrooms, but from September next year, students will be banned from taking them out at breaks, lunchtimes and between lessons according to this news report from The Local.

"France's education minister announced on Sunday that mobile phones will be banned from schools in France.

Jean-Michel Blanquer confirmed that the ban, which the government had been mulling for some time, will be implemented in September 2018. Phones are already banned in the classrooms in France but from September next year, pupils will be barred from taking them out at breaks, lunch times and between lessons.

"These days the children don't play at break time anymore, they are just all in front of their smartphones and from an educational point of view that's a problem," said Blanquer."

Amazingly this was in the manifesto that helped elect centrist, Emmanuel Macron. It was seen as a matter of public health. I get the reasons why they want to do it - lessen the chances of cyber bullying, allow pupils several hours away from a screen, it avoids distraction from learning so helps discipline, reducing reliance on social media and encouraging students to establish relationships in person rather than virtually, reducing isolation and reduce mobile phone addiction, lessen incidents of RSI. I'm sure there are many more good reasons for the ban.

I just don't see how it can be done. Can the genie be put back in the bottle? Pupils already admit to breaking the rules about using their phones in the classroom. There were no mobile phones in my day at school, but we routinely broke the rules about passing notes to each other, reading banned books during lessons (Christiane F and Flowers in the Attic are the two most remember) amongst other transgressions.

And where do connected devices come into this - the smartwatches, the Fitbits, the connected medical devices (for those that need the)? Or what I think is most likely to happen, is that pupils will start having more than one device. They'll check one phone in in the morning and get it locked away and keep another one on their person.

There have also been calls for this in the UK. If you click on this link to a letter in the Guardian on the topic, you'll see a whole bunch of other related articles on the same topic.

Of course, this approach goes against the grain of mobile learning which can be extremely powerful. Thinking back to my experience with Woebot, I'm wondering if something like that could be used to help a child dealing with stress or bullying at school during school hours. Equally, I think Chatbots could be useful to help children with revision or to learn a topic they may be having trouble with learning in a classroom environment.

This always on thing isn't without problems and I guess we're still learning about how to integrate it into our lives. Hmmm.

Day 12/25 Blogmas

What three things should we teach at school?

It's not often that a stranger talks to you when you're travelling on the tube in London, but it happened to me the other night on my way to the theatre. A man, who had clearly had a drink, plonked himself into the seat next to mine. He had his open can of booze in a brown paper bag which is never a good look, and moreover, drinking alcohol is illegal on London Transport. He seemed harmless enough though.

And then he started talking to me. I felt a very mild panic. I mean, it's just not normal for anyone to talk to a stranger on the underground and I'm wondering why on earth he'd singled me out for a chat. I don't remember what he began to talk about. He was having a moan about something or other and I was humouring him a little. And then he asked, if there were only three topics you could teach at school today, what would they be? This was putting me on the spot a little and was completely out of the blue. I'd never given it any thought previously but my answer was more or less instantaneous. I guess this was based on instinct.

The three things I came up with were Reading, Writing and Thinking. The reason being that in our digital world, reading is a universal requirement. I read things all day, every day - on a phone screen, on my laptop, in the freebie newspapers, on posters, in shops, on road signs - the written word is everywhere. Writing - whether that's handwriting or on a keyboard is also a necessity. Learning to touchtype back in 1994 at South Thames College is the best £7 I ever spent. I know new voice-enabled interfaces are coming and even though I have Cortana on my laptop and OK Google on my phone, I still can't bring myself to use them, even if there's no-one around to listen to me.

On the third subject, Thinking, he challenged me asking if it could be taught. I was about to get off the train at this point and I said 'yes'. I didn't really think about it but my hunch is you can teach people how to think by giving them the space to think and giving the right examples and encouragement to do it.

When I was running my own mobile marketing agency, I recruited many young people, most of whom were still studying and were doing a placement with me, or they were new graduates. The ones who were successful were the ones who could think for themselves. Many of the young people I interviewed lacked critical thought and lacked the ability to work things out for themselves. We're talking 13 or 14 years ago now. Online social networking wasn't really a thing at that point for the mainstream. Flickr was the social network I participated in most. LinkedIn was a newish company. Streaming music wasn't a thing. But we did have email, we had Google and Amazon and we had mobile phones with SMS and java games and apps and the first cameraphones.

At the time, the education system was still geared up for more traditional type jobs in marketing and business. Even though the web was huge, it wasn't nearly as pervasive as it is today. Perhaps we needed people who could follow instruction more than they could think back then and that's why degrees were structured to produce those results.

In this current climate of constant change, especially when it comes to internet technologies, one of the key employability skills to have is adaptability. We need to see what's happening and adapt. The jobs we're doing now may not exist in the future. Or if they do, they will be vastly different on a day to day basis. And with increasing reliance on Google or Bing as our external brain, critical thought is essential. We need to work out what's fake and what's real, which things to take seriously and which to ignore, which way to build your software and connect your APIs and which APIs to ignore.

Of course, this is a hypothetical situation. We're not going to be limiting any school curriculum to just three subjects. But what I would like to see is some discussion and thought around what skills we need to perform well in the years to come and maybe use the topics such as history, geography, philosophy or physics to exercise those skills whilst learning a subject at the same time.

It turns out, I'm not the only one who thinks that Thinking is critical for being a successful human being. I've just discovered this article and podcast on the importance of thinking. Check it out for yourself. I think there are some good points in it.

Out of interest, what would your three subjects be and why?

Day 25/30 NaBloPoMo

Thursday Thoughts

I'm half-way through NaBloPoMo. It's harder than you think to write a blog post every day. It shouldn't be that difficult, but sometimes it just is. Sometimes, the words just don't come very easily. Sometimes you start a post and it's not the right time to publish it or you need more info or time to work on it before publishing. Today is one of those days. I have a couple of posts in draft that need a lot more work than just commenting off the top of my head. So today, I'm going to share some links with you and things I'm thinking about at the moment instead. You'll have to wait for the meatier posts!

Terence Eden's testcard set up for Shambala Festival

Use a Test Slide
Terence Eden, a fellow member of the NaBloPoMo club, has written today with some very simple top tips on presentations with the main point being about using a test card at the beginning of your presentation. It's a genius idea actually on a couple of levels. By using a test card, if you happen to have to test your AV when some or all of the audience is in the room, it's neutral in content and, Terence says 'easily ignorable'.

I would add that for those of us of a certain age, it will bring back lovely nostalgic feelings and may put me in a more receptive frame of mind to hear from that speaker. It also occurs to me that brands and companies that have nifty graphics, could put together a similar type of testcard using their own graphics. You can read more of Terence's presentation tips here and he's made his testcard available on github too.

Free university courses
Quartz magazine has been keeping track here of the 800 or so universities globally that are offering free or partially free online courses. And in the last quarter, 200 universities released 600 more courses to the general public. That's an incredible resource and goes some way to democratising education.

I don't know about you though, but I find online courses really challenging. My attention wanders, I find it hard to be disciplined about it and I miss the collaborate nature of working with other students, or at least having that personal contact. I think there's also something to be said about going to a specific place to do something. There's something intentional about that that helps me, at least, with the learning process.

But with university fees on the rise in the UK and the cost of living increasing, the demand for cheaper ways to get the same level of education has to increase. I'm no fan of university fees or the debt that lumbers the student in for many years to come. There is an emotional burden that comes with that alongside the financial one. So the future for some kind of online learning looks healthy but maybe the format needs to evolve. Or maybe I just need to get my head down and do one of these online courses. If I can do a daily blog post this month, then I can surely manage to complete one of these courses. Maybe that'll be my next challenge...

Digital Disruption
Apparently 50% of companies don't care about digital disruption. And 10% of them don't think this will affect them at all according to this post by friend and fellow mobilist, Monty Munford. He's citing some new research from Dell EMC. This chimes with a conversation I had with a friend a couple of days ago. He's recently left a large oil company and the main reason for his departure was their utter lack of acknowledgement of the digital world in which we live and the changes required to adapt to that. It's not so much about the nuts and bolts of the software requirements, but the culture change within the organisation. The latter point is so important and the one that so many organisations are missing.

There are plenty of businesses that are rely much more on word of mouth and personal contacts than anything else. And that's absolutely fine. And absolutely right for them. Not everyone needs an all singing all dancing website or mobile app. And some industries may not be affected as quickly as others by the ubiquity of digital. However, internal processes, monitoring and management are increasingly digital or algorithmic and, whatever the size of your organisation, you probably need to adapt to changing customer needs and changing ways in which customers want to connect with you or be served by you. And that's going to mean digital in some shape or form.

Global Mobile Awards at Mobile World Congress 2018
If you want to enter one of this year's 38 categories, you need to get in quick. Entries close next week on Wednesday 22 November. More information about the categories, costs and how to enter here.