School boards in Toronto ban cellphones and personal devices

[Jianwei Zhang]

Dear G1:1 folks,

I want to share with you this news because I believe it presents a big  
challenge that the G1to1 community  needs to deal with. On Wednesday  
evening, Toronto District School Board, the largest school board in  
Canada, voted overwhelmingly in favour of a motion to force students to  
turn off their cellphones and other personal electronic devices such as  
BlackBerrys, once they walk through the school doors. Another smaller  
school board has already passed a similar ban in February. They also  
have a plan to ban other devices, like iPod in schools. Major concerns  
about these devices include:
--cellphones caused disruptions in class, distracted students;
-- cheating by accessing the internet on their phones or receiving  
answers via text message;
-- Safety and privacy issues as the result of the video and picture  
functions.
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/toronto/story/2007/04/19/toronto- 
cellphones.html

This is apparently not good news for technology developers like Apple,  
who is envisioning the next generation computing based on cellphones!  
This is another example of the conflict between technology as an  
"invading species", using Yong Zhao's term, and the school ecology; and  
the tension between the educational and "childcare" functions of  
schools. Solid research and design work needs to be done to demonstrate  
what mobile devices can do for teaching and learning in order to win  
these schools back. In term of technology per se, I'm thinking whether  
there should be cellphones and other handhold devices specially  
designed for school students that can help address schools' concerns in  
some way.

Jianwei




=================================
Jianwei Zhang
Institute for Knowledge Innovation and Technology
OISE/University of Toronto
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: text/enriched
Size: 1929 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mail.g1to1.org/pipermail/discussion/attachments/20070420/8a4d06de/attachment.bin>