Elaine+Gagne

=Week 4 & Week 5 Storyboard= The first 6 slides pertain to Week 4, the rest are for Week 5. I am still trying to come up with a viable cost analysis. I will keep everyone posted on updates to my project.

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 Manufacturers  initially marketed the mobile phone to company executives. The premiere mobile phones were the size of a brick and quite bulky. Then as this market saturated, the prices dropped, and network availability burgeoned, mobile phones became more popular with families, acting almost as a fashion statement for a segment of the population. Phones became lighter, smaller, and more personalized. As the average consumer demand skyrocketed, more features became available, prices became competitively affordable, and working parents adopted cell phones to keep in touch with their children. American youth quickly adopted the texting feature of phones as a quick method of communication. Quickly, cell phones have evolved into miniature computers with processors and memory capability. Mobile phones continue to improve in functionality as the network expands to reach even remote areas of the country. These improvements provide a great educational opportunity for colleges to capitalize upon because according to a 2007 report by the CTIA Wireless Association, over 250 Million people in the U.S. alone currently subscribe to cellular service (Ziff Davis, 2010, para. 2). With so many individuals exposed to cell phones and their features, the device’s learning curve demands diminishes.

Thank you for your patience with me as I recover from my surgeries. I have posted to each of my colleagues' Week 4 and Week 5 contributions on their respective Discussion tabs. Thanks to Shannon, I have resurrected an old account with Slideshare and will be uploading Week 4 and 5's storyboard here by midnight EST 1/9/2011. In my research, I have located a great timeline relating to my project: "The Analog Cellphone Timeline" by Jesus Diaz. His timeline has piqued my interest and I am trying to also develop my own and add to his initial findings. [] I don't believe I need to go back as far as he has in the development stage and I also want to relate it to use in education.

=Week 3 Criticisms of Diffusion Research= For my contribution, please see separate page that our group completed collaboratively. @Week 3 Criticisms of Diffusion Research =Week 2 Defense of Innovation for Multimedia Presentation =

Introduction
Defined by Everett M. Rogers (2003) as, “an idea, practice, or object that is perceived as new by an individual or other unit of adoption…If an idea seems new to the individual, it is an innovation” an innovation may readily include technological devices composed of hardware and software (p. 12). In education, teachers, librarians, institutions of learning, and students search for and adopt innovations to improve pedagogy, understanding, learning, communication, and engagement. Three relatively recent technological innovations that have reached the educational community are mobile phones, student response systems (SRS or classroom clickers), and citation generators (CGCs). Of these three innovations, the mobile phone appears to have diffused more readily into scholastic applications.

Description of Innovation
As a communicative tool, the mobile phone has infiltrated societies across the globe. Re-engineered from its initial brick-like stature, mobile phones now sport a variety of shapes, sizes, functions, and integrated gadgets. Historically, the cell phone originated as a communication tool for American businesses in the early 1980’s who issued them to employees that needed to stay in touch with clients, co-workers, and business-related entities outside of the confines of an office (p. 259). Expensive and bulky, these initial cellular telephones generally came permanently installed in the company car, allowing calls at any location where satellite or cellular service reigned (p. 260). Ten years later, the cell phone emerged ready for general public consumption with affordable pricing, numerous styles, colors, sizes, and personal computer capabilities (p. 263). These new features appealed not only to business professionals, but also adults and teenagers, particularly with the advent of SMS (short message service) or IM (instant messaging), and finally, Internet connectivity. Integration to educational markets, a logical next step, has erupted. Students, teachers, and librarians have discovered ways to use this new technology advantageously to perform scholastic tasks such as research, communication (email, chat, SMS, video conferencing, social networking, etc.), collaborative projects, document sharing, classroom applications (e.g. Blackboard for mobile), and lectures/Podcasts.

Justification for Selection
Selection of this innovation as opposed to SRS systems or citation generators developed through comparison of Rogers’ five areas of attributes for successful innovation adoption: relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability, and observability (pp. 263-264). Characteristically strong in all five of the attributes, mobile phones surpass citation generators and SRS response systems for educational adoption. For example, in the areas of compatibility, complexity, and trialability, citation generators and SRS systems prove particularly weak. According to Rogers (2008), “From the user’s perspective, a cellular telephone operates exactly the same way as a regular phone, and so it was unnecessary to learn any new skills” (p. 263).

With regard to SRS systems, although the clickers appear similar to a television or VCR remote control, the instructor needs to operate complicated software packages to input student assessment data. Students must also recognize symbols printed on the clickers (e.g. T= true, F= false, etc.), so some instructional orientation becomes warranted prior to use. Although SRS systems have some growing popularity in educational institutions, its rate of adoption has slowed compared to mobile phones.

Representing frustration to students, librarians, and professors, the formation of correct bibliographies, from a number of different styles (e.g. APA, MLA, Chicago, etc.) has challenged software developers to produce a workable solution for creating correct citations. However, citation generators face similar adoption drawbacks as for most software packages available today assume a certain amount of pre-requisite knowledge of the operator in order for the software to produce accurate results and annual changes in format render software quickly obsolete. For example, citation generators available on the market today require the person inputting data to understand how to find the name of the author or editor, title, publication date, publisher information, volume numbers, etc. of the resource needed for citing in the bibliography. If the person entering the data is unfamiliar with finding this data or places the information in the wrong field, the final citation will not conform to accepted citation standards.

With regard to cell phones and trialability, Rogers states, “Further, companies providing cellular telephone service commonly offer an initial month of free service to encourage adoption…A variety of other incentives (such as free cell phones) have also promoted initial trial of mobile telephones” (p. 263). Citation generator software often comes equipped with a short 30-day trial period, but one limitation of this may include that students may only seek to try the product under the duress of a current research project. This compounds the learning curve and may cause additional frustration if the data output does not conform to the instructor’s expectations, resulting in lower grades. Because SRS systems cost several thousand dollars for even a small classroom set, full-scale trials of the equipment remain elusive to educators.

According to one diffusion study conducted in 2009 by Caronia on the use of cell phones by Italian teenagers in a metalinguistic analysis, Caronia discovered that:


 * "According to most studies European teenagers have been the earliest and most prolific users of the SMS (Grinter, & Eldridge, 2001; Grinter, & Palen, 2002). In Italy, text messaging is the main, if not the only way teenagers use mobile phones to communicate with one another in their everyday life…The largest amount of media related learning occurs out of school and out of any formal and intentional educational project. Children’s and teenagers’ use of information and communication technologies in the natural contexts of everyday life for ordinary purposes, can be considered a learning activity per se as it leads to the acquisition of knowledge and to the development of competencies…After an analysis of the linguistic features and the interactional organization of such a language use, the paper concludes with some considerations on the role of the SMS use in improving metalinguistic competence and awareness as well as on the role of this teens’ language in cultural creation and linguistic evolution" (pp. 3-4).

Considering the many possibilities for educational use outside the traditional classroom (e.g. Internet access, communication, Podcasts/lectures, social networking and course platform applications, etc.) and the popularity of cell phones with teenagers and adults, one could reasonably suggest that of the three aforementioned technologies (mobile phones, citation generators, and student response systems) mobile phones would best benefit the education industry.