The world isn’t flat anymore, it fits entirely in your hand.

I dropped into my reader this morning and started to read Jeff Jarvis’ (Blog, Twitter) latest post, Mobile=Local and the second paragraph really caught my attention:

The biggest battlefield is local and mobile (I combine them because soon, local will mean simply wherever you are now). That’s why Google is in the phone business and the mapping business and why it is working hard to let us search by speaking or even by taking pictures so we don’t have to type while walking or driving.

I don’t know about you, but it occurs to me that this idea should have a major impact on rethinking school. I say “should” because not only is the whole of education meandering into the 21st century to see how it works, even the pockets that are attempting to race forward are realistically moving at a mere jog (Check out: Yoda on learning, “You must on learn what you have learned.“). This is more evidence that what we call school is not a place that will prepare students to create their future. This future will be a place where their learning can be carried around in their pockets.

I don’t know about you, but my mind races when I read Jarvis’ paragraph above. What if my high school or university classroom is mobile? Where can I go and still teach (be connected to) my students? At the elementary level (a place where a classroom would still constitute a “base of operations” for teacher and students) where can my students and I go to discover and learn? The idea of mobile learning lends itself perfectly to the process of learning by doing. School can finally become a verb.

The paragraph provides so many questions to play with:

What will school look like for the connected student if local does come to refer to where ever you happen to be?

Will school become a year round reality as students are able to access work, teacher/professor presentations anywhere, anytime?

What will this do to University enrollment models if mobile/local shortens the distance between me and my school to nothing regardless of where I am on the globe?

Will classroom options, like Second Life, be the way students and teachers come together?

Why would I not be able to “attend” any university I desire? Currently I can complete whole courses from MIT, Yale, UC Berkley, Harvard, Duke, Emery, Columbia all available at iTunes University, and others for free and anywhere I have a connected device. How will Universities design an accountability model so they can begin to defer degrees to anyone who completes the work?