We had the opportunity of meeting well-known technology expert Siddhartha Paul Tiwari. As part of our interview with him, we went into detail and asked him what role mobile technologies can play in education and what impact they can have. According to Tiwari, increasing productivity, coordination, and transformation are three specific areas in which mobile technology creates value in the education sector. The likelihood of all of these being influential in the process of education is on the rise, and a growing number of countries are trying to recognize the benefits of mobile applications in the education process.
Despite the fact that we consider ourselves to be fully literate, in the 21st century, technology has become such an integral part of our daily lives that even literate people now include a whole range of skills related to “mobile literacy.” Tiwari has been involved in developing, designing, and implementing high-quality curriculums, courses, and study material for educational institutions and universities in Asia on the themes of artificial intelligence and mobile technologies.
As a result of the advancement of mobile technologies, both informal and formal education settings can benefit from the enhancement of collaborative learning, an aspect that is facilitated by the establishment of mobile technologies. We can observe this in situations in which people are learning about content, for example, while watching television or performing other activities that are part of their daily activities. As mentioned earlier, mobile technologies can also be used for the enhancement of collaborative learning by sharing content in groups with two or more participants using the technology.
The topic of this field of research pertains to the idea that learning, as a means to enhance communication between individuals, is associated with togetherness. Despite the emergence of numerous innovations in the technology sector over the last decade, most educational organizations are still heavily focused on the management and cost reduction of legacy mobile applications and systems. As a result, decision-makers are unable to pursue the more strategic objective of creating greater value by leveraging analytics, systems, and mobile applications to gain a competitive advantage. Even with the rapid rise of networked technologies around the globe, mobile devices are quickly becoming an increasingly integral part of teaching and learning in higher education for the purpose of providing unique and highly effective strategies for delivering and assessing instruction.
Since there has been widespread adoption of networking technologies among students in many countries, the once-ubiquitous lecture approach has now been replaced by active methods that emphasize both learning for deeper comprehension as well as the use of technology. As educators and curriculum innovators, our challenge is to understand and explore how best to use these resources in order to best support learning and attain the best results for students.
Tiwari elaborates on what the latter means and discusses the importance of developing a reflective lens with which to view these materials. As mobile technologies advance, it is expected for mobile devices to become more embedded, ubiquitous, and capable of interacting with users on a social level, be aware of context, and be able to access the Internet at a greater speed. As far as the impact of such technologies on education is concerned, it is without question that they can be quite valuable. University education is going to become less dependent on campuses in the future, and more focused on students’ immediate or virtual environments, therefore becoming more personal, more collaborative, and more lifelong. There will be a challenge in figuring out how to integrate the use of mobile technologies into education, thus becoming a seamless part of everyday life despite the fact that mobile technology is no longer regarded as part of education.
