“‘The miniaturization and commercialization of machines’ is most evident in our various mobile devices for communicating, creating, and sharing information” (Mackey and Jacobson).
Walter Benjamin and the Mobile
“The notebooks are a medium that connects author and work. They are stages where thinking and writing take place, quarries, fields for experimentation, on which thoughts can be gathered, structured, discarded, formed anew — creatively and sometimes chaotically” (Marx, et al. 153).
“He had a weakness for small forms, quotations, and aphoristic diminutions. And he did not want to carry out work in enclosed conditions, sealed off from reality. Rather he loved to write while on the move, on the street, in the cafe, on his travels–wherever he happened to find himself” (Marx, et al. 153).
“To miniaturize is to make portable — the ideal form of possessing things for a wanderer, or a refugee. . . .To miniaturize is to conceal. . . . To miniaturize is to make useless” (Sontag 19 – 20).
Mobile Learnin
g Initiatives (MLIs)
K-12 and higher educations across the country and world have begun (partially) adapting to a mobile world through Mobile Learning Initiatives.
These initiatives range from institution-provided devices to BYOD, and the initiatives involve significant administrative, infrastructural, and pedagogical undertakings for them to work well.
Role of Composition Researchers in MLIs
Administrative Concerns
“Perhaps more than any other faculty, those of us teaching composition are acutely aware of the challenges to retain students, support their intellectual growth, and guide them in the development of critical literacy. We teachers should seek out ways to contribute to the broader campus initiatives to integrate wireless. . . . All of these efforts can help to challenge the rigid subject positions of on-demand teacher or computer police officer constructed by deterministic wireless programs” (Kimme Hea 216).
Pedagogical Possibilities
“Further, we can enact classroom pedagogies that include critical and rhetorical examinations of local campus and community mobile and wireless technology integrations. . . . The hope is that such prompts can enable students and teachers to question and even enact situated — rather than placeless — pedagogies of mobile and wireless technologies” (216-217).
Josh Herron, PhD, PMP 