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

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.

Carnival of the Mobilists #155

Photo credit: Creative Commons from Carf via Flickr.

Happy New Year to everyone from technokitten in London Town. I hope all the hangovers are put to rest and you're all raring to go for a wonderful 2009. Yes, the holiday break is over and it's time to get the mobile ball rolling again with the first Carnival of the Mobilists roundup for 2009.

A look to the past and future

Inevitably with New Year there is always an element of looking back on the year just gone as well as a look to the future, and our mobile bloggers are no exception.

Looking back, we have Renegade Fanboy covering Nokia's most important news in 2008, James Pearce gives us a retrospective of the last two years at dotmobi and Digital Evangelist discusses his own mobile usage over the last year (he is arguably a Promobs) whereas Renaissance Chambara tells us what normobs really use (well, the normobs in his life anyway).

Looking forward we have some very interesting posts indeed: Chetan Sharma has completed his 2009 predictions with aplomb by compiling the thoughts of a wide variety of mobile industry folks (including me, in case you were wondering). Rudy De Waele has given us (well me at least) a lot of food for thought with his take on what 2009 will bring. I'm just hoping he knows as many start-ups as I think he does so that number 10 doesn't sound so terrifying. C Enrique Ortiz discusses the future for Mobile Applications in 2009 (including the ongoing debate between native and web apps) whilst Frederic Guarino tells us why 2009 is the year of the Mobile Web.

Mobile Marketing

Looking more at the mobile marketing side of things, Andrew Grill has done a comprehensive review of Social Media Marketing and shares some of his thoughts on its contents with its implication for mobile, and mjelly shares knowledge on mobile internet affiliate marketing schemes and newcomer Dave Levy of MLTDA talks to us about the growth of mobile email and its impact on campaigning (political, marketing or otherwise).

Mobile Development

In terms of mobile development, Tom Hume (rightly) questions mobile context and argues there is more than one mobile context and asks you which one/s you're going to choose. There are interesting things afoot with barcode ticketing for UK railway companies according to Masabi. Vision Mobile tells us about the Adobe Mobile Packager and what that means in terms of where the desktop and mobile environments are headed.

The Industry

Ajit Jaokar over at Open Gardens shares his theory about Net neutrality being like capitalism... covering global connectivity, the fact that human nature is to gravitate towards freedom and what impact that has on MNOs in the mobile broadband world and beyond whilst Steven Hoober of Little Springs questions where the device ends and the network operator starts and what that means for customer service.

Devices and software

Ever thought about how secure your iphone is? Well you can find out here from allaboutiphone.net, and more importantly, what you can do about it whilst Tams Blackberry Blog tells us why the Blackberry Storm is failing and being returned.

Twitter is obviously the new black, in case you were wondering, and Wap Review has done a fantastic review of the best twitter mobile web clients on the market today so there's no excuse now to keep up with your twitter feed. Meanwhile, Igor Faletski takes new mobile browsers through the acid 2 test with some very interesting (and visual) results.

And last but not least, Judy Breck of Golden Swamp (and worthy guardian of the Carnival of the Mobilists) ponders the mobile as a knowledge tool and the part that plays in the Outliers (aka Story of Success).

Post(s) of the week

This is a hard one with such good quality posts and writers this week (as ever). For predictions, then you really must read both Chetan Sharma's and Rudy De Waele's posts. And personally, I'd like to see more discussion around Tom Hume's post on there being more than one mobile context. Perhaps some of you may indulge me?

Carnival of the Mobilists

The last Carnival of the Mobilists of 2008, #154, can be round here and next week's carnival 156 will be hosted by Wap Review. And if you're wondering what on earth the Carnival of the Mobilists is all about, then have a read of this and join us on the ride that is 2009.

Technorati Tags: mobile,carnival,carnival of the mobilists,mobile marketing,mobile web,mobile internet,devices,mobile software,mobile browsers,predictions,statistics,mobile statistics

Seriously Mobile Event on 20th April 2007

Anyone here interested in going to the Seriously Mobile Summit?

"Seriously Mobile 2007 is a one-day thought-leadership seminar for learning professionals and managers to explore the business drivers and solutions to better address the learning and performance needs of increasingly mobile workers."

It looks like it's going to be an interesting event aimed at those responsible for learning in their organisations and in particular learning via digital means including mobile. Worth a look if this is your thing as it's a very reasonably priced UKP395 + VAT.