Ah … but what are a thousand words worth? A picture you say? Well it is true it has been said of photos that they provide a depth of understanding usually well beyond the richest set of words. But it is not so much that a picture is better when communicating a concept. It is just that it impacts our minds in a different way. Images connect us visually to a physical place. I have listened to my mom tell me often about the house that we lived in when I was a little child. There are a couple of somewhat yellowed pictures of me in that house. I feel like I remember being there but … is it because I remember actually being in that house or is it that the picture makes me feel like I remember? A photo has a powerful way of attaching our minds to an event or idea and changing our understanding of place. In this last cycle of my action research project, I will attempt to discover how pictures taken on mobile devices used in knowledge building might be able to connect the classroom to the rest of our daily lives and … the rest of our daily lives with the classroom.
The Twitter and Glassboard users in this research have been leveraging the mobility of their smartphones and tablets to discuss and collaborate on course related material outside of the scheduled meeting times. I feel that the freedom to be the publishers of their own information channel no matter where they are has enabled their learning and knowledge building. Adding pictures to these mobile enabled discussions has the potential for an increased awareness of how where we are physically and mentally affects the information that we collect and share. The picture and the mobile devices may be used as tools to bridge the gap between where we are and where we might go. We already do a lot of this with audio visual presentations in the classroom to highlight a certain topic and provide learners multiple ways to enact with information. The question in this research is to find out if mobile media technologies might be useful tools in engaging students in knowledge building activities that spill over into their daily lives. It is this space, that is up to this point somewhat uncharted territory. Aside from homework and science projects, most of the official learning of schools is done in the environment of the classroom. If our understanding of place is being changed by how we use mobile devices, can we harness this transformation to enable knowledge building where ever it might naturally occur? A thousand words or one picture? Or what about both?