I tend to fall on the tech-weary side of the digital divide. So I wasn’t particularly pleased one recent day when I found myself with time to kill and no other diversion but my smartphone. I had arrived at a pizza shop to pick up my order — just at the moment that it should have emerged piping hot from the oven — only to have a hassled teenager mutter: “It will be another 10 minutes.” Irritated, I sat down and pulled out my phone. Ten minutes of pointless scrolling on social media seemed in the offing. But before I could open Instagram or Facebook, I remembered a question I’d read earlier in the day that had caught me off guard.
It was from a new book on teaching and mobile technology. While acknowledging that lots of people regard smartphones as an empty distraction, the author asked: What if the source of those feelings “was not necessarily being on our phone, but being on our phone mindlessly?”
OK, I thought, I’ll take the bait: How could I make a more mindful choice while waiting for my order? I swiped my screen over to my less-used apps, and tapped on the one that I use to learn ancient Greek. Within a minute I had forgotten about the pizza, and was drilling myself on the aorist tense and on new vocabulary. Time devoted to my least-favorite activities — being on my phone and waiting around — became time devoted to my favorite thing: learning.
The book that inspired this choice was Mobile-Mindful Teaching and Learning: Harnessing the Technology That Students Use Most, by Christina Moore, a lecturer in writing and rhetoric and associate director of Oakland University’s teaching center.
A lot of oxygen is being depleted from the higher-education ether right now by ChatGPT. While those long discussions play out, it’s heartening to see how writers and educators like Christina Moore and Jessica Early (whose work, on creating compelling writing assignments, I wrote about last month) are extending the teaching-and-technology conversation in other directions. Artificial intelligence has its role to play, but so will these “older” tools like mobile phones. And as summer beckons, the next few months are the best time to rethink your classroom practices for the fall.
I’m not sure what drew me to Moore’s book, published in February, since I have long kept mobile phones at a distance in my life. I was a very late adopter, and still have the habit — annoying to my wife and children — of setting my phone down and walking away from it for a few hours. Not long ago I left it in the seat pocket on a plane; the 48 hours I spent without it felt a little bit like bliss.
But after reading the first few pages of Mobile-Mindful Teaching, I realized — not for the first time in my life — that my settled perspective on this contentious issue needed a shake-up. Moore’s book, based on a solid foundation of learning research, aims to show how smartphones can actually support student learning in our classrooms. She offers dozens of specific examples, from across the disciplines, of mobile-mindful teaching practices, a few of which I’ll share here.
In the first half of the book, Moore invites readers to review their own mobile habits (more on that below). The second half digs into the relationship between mobile learning and teaching practices in higher education. My major takeaways from her thoughtful recommendations include:
- Take a mobile tour of your own courses. My age and eyes make the idea of taking a college course via a mobile phone seem impossible. But that’s precisely the way that many students engage with course materials. If you want to make your syllabus, readings, and other materials available to all students, make sure they are accessible in their palms. Moore recommends that instructors use their own phones to review their course documents on the campus learning-management system, in order to see what stumbling blocks mobile-using students are encountering.
- Give time estimates for completing reading assignments. I jumped off Twitter at the start of this year, and moved over to LinkedIn. The articles posted there, as is common on many media sites, offer a reading time: e.g., “4 min read.” It would be helpful, Moore suggests, to include reading times for required texts on a college syllabus. That information can help students decide whether to read something on their phones at the coffee shop or wait until they are in front of a laptop screen in the library.
- Embrace mobile study guides. In reviewing your courses with mobile accessibility in mind, look for places where phones can support or even enhance learning. For example, we know that the more times we ask students to retrieve information from memory, the more firmly it gets lodged in their brains. We also know that retrieving material learned in a course in different contexts — times, locations, situations — enhances students’ ability to use that information outside of the classroom. With those ideas in mind, why not work with your students to find a flashcard app they can use to make flashcards to quickly review course material while they are outside of class? Moore suggests having students work together on a group project to create shared flash-card decks on Quizlet or Anki. Once created, the decks can be used by students wherever they are, including at the pizza shop.
- Design creative assignments they can do with their phones. Sprinkled throughout Moore’s book are clever ideas for mobile assessments that might rejuvenate any college course. Instructors could have students use Google maps to create a place-based analysis of some aspect of course content. In lieu of a traditional presentation, students could host a “slow chat” on a social-media platform where questions are posed in a timed sequence. For a low-stakes assignment, ask students to take photographs of objects that relate to course content, post the images on the course website, and annotate them in a few sentences for everyone to see and use.
These little machines, Moore argues, have incredible power to support learning — and not just for students. She also invites professors to review their own phone habits. We can choose to let our phones distract us mindlessly, or we can mindfully embrace their potential. My pizza-shop experience inspired a new relationship with my phone, one that has continued to evolve since I finished the book.
If you are one of those folks who have loved your phone from Day 1, you will no doubt roll your eyes at some of my “discoveries.” But I know I’m far from the only Ph.D. to resist the allure of this ubiquitous gadget. Thanks to Mobile-Mindful Teaching and Learning, I’m using my phone in new ways that I think make me a more productive thinker and writer. Among them:
- The first and simplest change I made was to rearrange the apps on my home screen. I realized I had five screens of apps in random order. It never occurred to me that having to scroll through all those screens, or use the search to find my apps, was one of the sources of my annoyance. Today I have all the apps that matter to me on the first screen — including the one for learning Greek.
- A new app that now appears on that first screen is Instapaper, a content-curation tool. I have countless folders of bookmarks on my browser that I never look at. Instapaper, an extension that you can add to any browser, lets me put an article, video, or image — whether I encounter it on my phone or laptop — into a folder, add notes, and even highlight and comment on it. Like many apps, these features are available in the free version (which I have) but are more robust in the paid version.
- I was persuaded by Moore to take a crack at audiobooks. I already listen to podcasts, but I just love the feel of physical books and the tactile pleasure of turning pages. Moore argues that adding audiobooks into our reading habits can expand the places where we pursue learning. I recently downloaded my first audiobook, the autobiography of Loyola University Chicago’s famous Sister Jean, and I was hooked — by Sister Jean’s infectious positivity and by the prospect of listening to books on my phone.
I am still discovering how to make my relationship with my phone more mindful. Of course, that doesn’t mean spending every minute with a phone in hand. Throughout the book, Moore acknowledges the places where phones might be a hindrance to learning or well-being. At the same time, she writes, “we get better results from being mobile-mindful than mobile-resistant.”
For years now, my conversations with students about phones have focused on how we can make sure they don’t interfere with learning. This fall, I will still have that conversation — but it will be folded into a larger discussion about how digital tools can both diminish and support learning.
