Mobile Tech and the Incentive to Learn

 I came across this story in a roundabout kind of way.

Droga5, an advertising agency, has recently won two prestigious black pencil awards at the D&AD awards. The first was for its viral video campaign featuring Sarah Silverman, 'The Great Schlep', which was used to empower and motivate older Jewish voters in America to vote for President Obama in last year's election.

The other award, which is what interests me more, is for a radical educational program currently being tested in New York.

The Million Motivation program sees students from the most deprived backgrounds being issued with adapted Samsung mobile phones. These can't be used to make calls during the school day, but come with a range of learning apps integrated into the phone.

What makes the program most interesting though is the way the contract for the phone operates. Rather than pay with cash, students earn air time and the ability to get downloads via hard work and good behaviour. The more 'points' a teaacher gives out the more time the student can talk, text, web browse, and so on.

There are , of course, always risks related to these sorts of incentive based programs, and the Digital Journal has a good article that outlines the scheme and delves into these. Principally, there's the risk that doing anything for something leads to skewed intellectual and moral values regarding the benefit of study.

On the other hand, with drop out and failure rates as high as they are amongst disadvantaged groups in the Big Apple, anything's worth a shot. Academic support is provided by Harvard University's newly founded Ed Labs, that's looking for scientific solutions to educational problems, taking an analytical R&D multi-disciplinary approach. The results of their various projects should make for fascinating reading.

In the meantime, we shall have to wait and see what benefits or hindrances the Million Motivation program brings. Let's hope, for the sake of the children taking part, it works. 

A Man for Our Time - captured by multimedia

Apart from being inspired by the rhetoric and passion of President Obama yesterday, I was struck by the fact that this was the first time I had watched a huge news story unfold live using the internet. 

I was working at school, I had stuff that needed doing, and so the ideal solution was to use the BBC's live feed from BBC1 online. What struck me was how good the streaming video looked, the fact it didn't crash at all, and also that below the video window were live rolling comments from BBC correspondents and viewers.  It certainly made me feel like I was part of a global village.

I suspect that most people watched the inauguration on the TV, because frankly at this moment in time that's the best medium for such an event. But that didn't stop the various media outlets innovating in the online arena.

I particularly liked the 3D rolling panorama offered by CNN who partnered with Facebook. The technology was supplied by Microsoft's Photosynth software. The end result provides what none of the newspaper photos quite managed this morning - some idea of the scale of the event in the Washington Mall. 

Over at the BBC, technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones tried out as many ways of watching the event as he could. His report makes for interesting reading.

A few weeks ago I wrote about a great online app called Wordle.net. You put in text, it analyses it into a word cloud - a visual representation of the text, based on the frequency of key words. Since then I've noticed it creeping into the mainstream media, and by today both the Guardian and the BBC were serving up word clouds of the President's speech, plus those of former leaders. 

So, a magnificent day for the new President and the nation he leads. An interesting glimpse too into the changing nature of media communication.