I haven’t had any luck with getting any hard numbers about click-throughs for the local QR campaign run by Mohawk, but coincidentally, a report on QR code activity (PDF) has been made public and I found out about it through this article about using QR codes in social media. RWW then published an article today claiming that barcode scanning (both traditional and 2D QR type codes) are up 700%. While that’s interesting, it’s not indicative of whether this is a real trend or marginal activity. If activity is only at 1% of the population, an increase of 700% is not necessarily significant (7%). The quote towards the end of the article does note “80% of US consumers surveyed expressed interest in scanning mobile barcodes”. Again, that’s within the Android marketplace, which may be skewed towards consumers who are technologically early adopters. It is significant when you start to tie all these loose ends together – there clearly is a trend developing where people are using barcodes and QR codes to link real objects to virtual information. Those that are not doing this now are at least interested in doing this in the future. Now, what will be the killer app for this sphere?
mobile phones
Campaign for “Real” Education
What a crock. The name of the group itself galls me. Campaign for Real Education. Real education? As if the rest of it is fake?
This UK group popped it’s head up (perhaps out of the sand) at the end of the Telegraph’s article about a group of students who were given iPhones for educational purposes. While the article does a good job of outlining the benefits of using iPhones in the class, and the co-operative nature of the experiment – it ends on this sour note.
Katie Ivens from the Campaign for Real Education said: “Mobile phones have quite rightly been banned from many classrooms as they prove to be a distraction.
“The case for learning by computer has not been proved at all.”
I guess Ms. Ivens has never used Word, PowerPoint, the Internet or been involved with an LMS. Or viewed a how-to video on YouTube. Or did any research using any number of newspapers available online. I guess the Campaign hasn’t read any studies about the widespread use of computers to train millions of workers worldwide.
Sure, mobile phones can be distracting, only if there are no ground rules set out by an instructor, and the instructor is boring or even worse, incompetent. The authoritarian nature preferred by the Campaign though will only allow more instructors to get away with this sort of boring transfer of knowledge, which has been debunked seemingly a billion times over. Looking at the battles the Campaign has fought, including such deal-breakers as uniforms in school, trendy teaching methods and nursery rhymes. Talk about wasted money… if they’re so concerned about not coddling children, perhaps boot camp should be for everyone?
Good little capitalists, and only one person graduates a year – that way it’s really showing those little brats what life’s really about! Only one out of the lot of you will make more money than the rest of you combined!