Cellphones: the flip, slide, touch, and mod monolith of aught odyssey.

Forget Scylla and Charybdis, the Laestrygonians, Circe, and Polyphemus, the real threat to our students' educational odyssey is vibrating in their back pockets. Cellphones have usurped our classrooms! Or we have neglected to acknowledge the revolution. I agree with Liz Kolb, and her variegated strategies for utilizing cellphones as a tool for "constructing knowledge." I do agree with Josh Allen that it sounds absurd for our students to have blackberries and data plans, but the true is that they do, and we should assume that they do not just because we do not. Digital Native students function under a wholly divergent set of values than most of us, and we as teachers cannot suggests or impose otherwise. I agree with Liz Kolb that we must take stock of our students who have certain technologies at hand ubiquitously and ask them to use these devices for learning, especially when it comes to mining a new platform, such as: podcasts or audioblogs.

I head-up the KBOO Youth Collective at the NAYA Family Center, and I encourage students to probe their environment with their cellphones to brainstorm and bring soundbites that illuminate their stories. This initiative goads students into engaging their peers with questions and comments that my otherwise passover unaddressed.

In my class I would seek to engage the student through their technology by developing a database of who uses what technology for what social interaction. In the first week a teacher could learn the circuitous network by which all their students are related and develop an intranet of news, review, and assessment. Furthermore, I would ask my students to devise a egalitarian protocol for using their cellphones, so that we could all expect the same standard of engagement and distraction during our time together and apart. Basically, I would break it down into the secular/sacred argument: what times and topics rate secular and sacred. I view this argument as a perfect transition to discussing secular and sacred texts or the public and private domain. Also, I believe that any breach of this agreement would incite a need for mock trials based on research, oration, rhetoric, logic, and precedence.

Finally, I declare that we should not teach to the phone as Josh Allen's argument supposes, but we should teach the phone to the students. If the student does not understand the extent of the technology quivering under their twitching thumbs, then they will view the technology as one dimensional. We must open up the purview of this expanding platform and make it dance before their imagination.