If you’re the type who likes to follow trends in technology, you know one of the most remarkable trends in the last few years is the pace of innovation in mobile platforms like Android, iOS, and Windows Phone. If you have a smartphone, it’s probably already become your notepad, your navigation system, and your external memory, and in a few years, it could be your wallet, the brains of your computer, and your home automation system. I have to confess that I spend more than a little time tracking each new development in the smartphone/tablet world.

And every time I see a new component, a new sensor, or a new interface method that gets added to a mobile platform, I have an idea for a use for it in higher education that would enhance learning or enable learning activities that were impossible before. But so far, very few of these technologies are configured in such a way that we can effectively utilize them in higher ed.

In the spirit of keeping an eye towards the future, I’m going to present some educational use cases that utilize the unique technological capabilities of mobile platforms. In most cases, the underlying technology to do these things exist now, but the user options in the software are too limited.

I want to clarify that I’m interested in the new affordances of these platforms. While there’s no shortage of educational “apps” in the Android Market or the iPhone App Store, they’re mostly self-contained programs that could have been made just as well for a computer, with a touch interface added. They don’t tap the new potential of the these platforms, which represent a unique convergence of technologies—portable internet access, GPS sensors and compasses, orientation  sensors and accelerometers, cameras and microphones, touchscreens—and operating systems that make it easy for programmers to utilize and combine them.

As I discuss these use cases, I’ll mostly be referencing Android, as it’s the platform I’m more personally familiar with.

Image Recognition

Imagine you’re an art history teacher. You assign your students to visit the Art Institute of Chicago and look at a special collection of paintings. Your student scans a painting with his mobile device’s camera. The software recognizes the painting and a recording you’ve made about the painting starts playing through his headphones while notes appear on the screen. The notes contain links to related information and more paintings from the artist. The student is then given a short quiz asking questions about the techniques at use in the painting, all while he’s looking at the real thing.

Why We’re Not Quite There

The Google Goggles app can scan and recognize famous works of art today if you take a picture of one—I tried it the last time I was at the Art Institute—but the best it can do is pull up web search results relating to that painting. Which is great for an independent museum visitor who wants to learn more about the artist, but there’s no way for an instructor to leverage that technology to create some custom media or applications for his class that can be played or displayed when an image is recognized—at least, not without learning how to program.

Connected Textbooks

Imagine your student is in a doctor’s office with an unexpectedly long wait. She didn’t know it would take so long, so she didn’t bring her backpack. But she always has her smartphone with her, so she pulls up an academic text that she had been reading on her e-reader. The software remembers where in the middle of the chapter she left off, so she doesn’t have to try to hunt for the last page she read on the small screen. As she’s reading, she highlights a passage and pulls up a menu to make a quick note on her smartphone keyboard. She gets home later, logs onto the book on her computer, finds the note she made and pastes it into the text of a paper she’s working on.

Why We’re Not Quite There

The big problem here is the number of academic texts available in cross-platform e-book systems is severely limited. Also, many popular e-book platforms don’t support user annotations or automatic syncing between devices, and fewer support the automatic syncing of annotations.

Note Taking

Imagine your student is reading a dense, theoretical book that she has taken out of the library for a research paper, the kind of challenging text you need to read aloud in order to grasp and unpack the author’s full meaning. She come across a passage she wants to record in her notes, but she fears that if she stops to copy it down, she’ll lose track of the point the author was making and have to re-read a few pages, and she may have trouble making out her handwriting later anyways. Instead, she takes a picture of the page with her smartphone, which uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to translate the image into editable text and sends it to the notes file on her computer. In the front of the book, the library has inserted a QR code that, when scanned by her phone, gives the full citation in MLA and APA format, which she can copy directly into her works cited page.

(I know that there are technological pessimists out there who would interpret this scenario as a shortcut that would reduce the time and depth of the student’s engagement with the text. That may be true in some situations for some students, but ussually making the process easier allows students to spend their mental resources on the content they’re trying to understand.)

Why We’re Not Quite There Yet

Right now, the Android version of Google Docs can use OCR to translate a picture into editable text that you can copy and paste directly into your research project—kind of. Consumer OCR technologies are still maturing, and the margin for error is high. Right now, Google’s OCR does well for short pieces of text on a flat surface, but it doesn’t recognize text on a curved surface, like a page that curves into the spine of a book. Also, not all smartphone cameras are created equal, and some aren’t reliable enough at capturing crisp images—a necessity if the software is going to be asked to interpret text.

Some people think that print itself is going to be phased out and that this technology will be made moot as more and more texts are published digitally in the first place, but I would guess that the OCR technology will catch up long before we’re in a position to do away with paper books entirely.

There’s nothing to stop libraries from including QR codes containing full citations with each book in their collection now—they would just need to be able to justify the cost.

Map Making

Imagine a sociology class focusing on food deserts in urban areas. As part of their field work, students go out in small teams and walk every block in a given neighborhood. Every time they come to a drug store, convenience store, or grocery store, they use their smartphone’s GPS and map software to make a waypoint that identifies what kind of store it is and to enter other quantitative and qualitative data. After every group has completed their field work, the data is combined to create a complete map, which can be made public as a layer on Google Maps.

Why We’re Not Quite There

Google Maps allows you to star a location, which will save it, sort of like a bookmark, within your Google account. But right now the mobile versions of Google Maps don’t let you combine a collection of starred locations into a map, with labels and descriptions, let alone share those points with others to create a combined map.

Getting There

These are just a few examples. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say the possibilities are endless. Of course, even if the software gets configured in such a way to make it easier for educators to tap into, we’ll still face the obstacles of actually making sure students have access to these devices.

• Cost—Will we ever reach a point where students are expected to have mobile connected devices? Will the prices of cellular data plans drop enough that this is a reasonable expectation of already financially strained students? Will universities be able to provide assistance or lend out devices in cases where assignments require them?
• Standardization—Will the same or similar applications be available in all major platforms? And if not, would a university or department be able to require a specific platform without putting an undue strain on students who may have already bought a different device on contract?
• App stores tend to be geared towards consumers. Will administrators be able to buy apps in bulk and deploy them to, say, a class of students’ devices? And if you could buy apps in bulk, would you be able to disable the licenses on students’ own devices and reuse them on the class next quarter?

I can’t say what the answers to these questions will be, but if the pace at which smartphones and tablets are evolving and being adopted continues, I have little doubt that we’ll see them more and more in higher education.