Heres an interesting article from readwriteweb about whether mobile phones should be used for learning in the classroom.

Personally I can’t see much prospect of this right now in schools, however at some point in seems inevitable. I’ve just done a peer review for a Guide on Digital & Social Media that Tim Davies is writing for Participation Works and added a comment about mobile phones. The barriers people used to have to making films, taking photos etc. aren’t the same anymore. On my phone I can record video, edit it and mix it with different film clips and audio and send it to my computer.

Most phones take photos (at a higher resolution than many dedicated cameras did not so long ago), most also have the ability to record audio. The majority of new phones can easily access the internet and those of us with blogs can write posts and administer our blogs from our phone. Then of course theres the likes of twitter that uses sms messaging and the many applications we can now download to our phones to make life easier or more interesting (like gmail on your phone or syncing with gcal).

Something thats being increasingly trialled is sending payment by mobile phone. You can now purchase parking tickets (and extend them), train tickets, and send money via paypal using your mobile phone.

Then theres the thing that I find most interesting which is phones using GPS - being able to find places and help people find you using satellite mapping.

My point is that phones if not already, will become indispensible, and being able to use them effectively will be just as valuable as learning to use computers and the internet. So at some point it seems inevitable that schools will have a role to play to make use of the technology students are already carrying around in their pockets.

Mobile phone use is something we’ve discussed a lot within OnTheUp development chats, particularly because of the potential for young people to be able to give instant reactions to activities their involved in - not so much reflective feedback as ‘in the moment’ feedback! This is likely to be much more forthright and honest and so could provide some very interesting data about young peoples experiences.

In terms of recent development we now have an example site up and running and Ana has created some example applications. It still needs a bit of tweaking so it will be a couple more weeks before we open it up to have a look at but hopefully this will help to provide a better idea of what the sites about (soon!………..)