Pinocchio
Effect

Geppetto, in fashioning Pinocchio, had very specific expectations for his marionette's future behaviour. Geppetto was not unlike present day educators who believe that by giving their students wireless laptops a better classroom culture will be achieved, but when faced with a class full of connected students may ask them to close their laptops. They, like Geppetto, have cut the strings and given Pinoccio freedom of independent movement but are worried about how to control the results. This is what we call the 'Pinocchio effect'.

According to Levy, 1996 in a network of one-to-one communication, one is almost always outside of the common space. Whereas, in cyberspace, each person is potentially transmitter and receiver at the same time in a space which is qualitatively different, not fixed, explorable, where everyone communicates with everyone, this space is organised little by little as the conversation evolves. This virtual world is secreted by the communication itself. It is not a pre-existing construction with the kind of constraints that would be imposed by a central transmitter. What emerges is a dynamic space of collective subjectivities, very different from that of the telephone or classical media, which is not controlled by any central institution, either political or economic, which decides what we must do. Each new connection to the network extends it by becoming producer and transmitter of new and unpredictable information and reorganises a part of the global connectivity according to its needs.

Steen, 2001 states that in the classroom, with the wireless culture, it is much easier to have students see assignments, exercises, and research on the wireless net, but that it is easier from them to play as well. As a result every classroom can be a computer lab or a major distraction.

Dulaney et al, 2000 believe that wireless applications will not be driven by a single killer application but by an overall killer attitude: 'I can do anything, anywhere, at any time.' Through 2004, growth in the use of consumer-oriented mobile services will be driven more by consumers creating value than by service providers delivering it.

Although it may be argued that the students' preferred uses of the technology should be the starting point for educators in fashioning new learning environments, an even better solution is to propose supporting and aiding students to design environments that they themselves would prefer to use.

Two separate but complimentary learning tools are presented here that attempt to fuse together present student behaviour with their own mobile technologies (i.e mobile phones) and educator pedagogical expectations. Both these tools were designed by students for students, an example of a theory we call Communal Constructivism Holmes, et al. 2000 where students not only learn with but also for each other.

Communal Constructivism encapsulates Piaget's Constructivism and also the social aspect of Vygotosky's theory. "Communal constructivism (is) an approach to learning in which students not only construct their own knowledge (Constructivism) as a result of interacting with their environment (Social Constructivism), but are also actively engaged in the process of constructing knowledge for their learning community".

Suggested ways of implementing a communal constructivist approach are as follows:

• Students become stakeholders in their own learning and in the knowledge that they are creating and engaging with.
• Technology is embedded in practice as a tool for use as appropriate rather than as a distractive innovation.
• The audience for students' work include the peer community in school, children in other schools and the wider public.
• Use of a range of ICTs to facilitate publishing of high quality outcomes through Internet publishing opportunities. These publications are revisited, revised and elaborated on by subsequent groups of learners.

The first of the two learning tools - Knowledge Spaces - is a communally-constructed learning environment; an educational digital library which exploits some of the many possibilties inherent in a wireless networked- enabled laptop environment. The growth in the importance in digital libraries for learning is reflected in, for example, the Digital Libraries Initiative of the US National Science and Technology Council. Over the past year, the US President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) has focused much of its attention on providing a vision for information technology's role in driving progress in the 21st century, particularly progress in education and human development. One of two PITAC panels focusing on educational issues examined the status of digital libraries -- the networked collections of digital text, documents, images, sounds, scientific data, and software that are the core of today's Internet and tomorrow's universally accessible digital repositories of all human knowledge. Pitac "believe that the recommendations in our report can help move the Nation toward realizing the enormously powerful vision of anytime, anywhere access to the best of human thought and culture, so that no classroom or individual is isolated from knowledge resources." National Science and Technology Council (USA)

The second of the two learning tools -Instant Messaging - incorporates blended learning. Blended learning is a concept that has emerged with the onset of e-learning, which combines more traditional methods of teaching with Internet or network-delivered content that is learner-driven and self-paced. Blended learning builds in extensive, one-on-one contact with instructors (via instant messaging, videoconferencing, or chat tools) and also stresses heavy interaction with fellow students (usually via instant messaging or e-mail tools).

Cultural Lag
Fisher and Wright (2001) re-introduce William Ogburn's (1964) theory of the cultural lag as a framework towards understanding the extreme responses in the discourse surrounding the Internet. They argue that the utopian/dystopian dichotomy found in the discourse surrounding the Internet is consistent with what Ogburn describes as a cultural lag. This lag suggests that the effects of technology may not be visible to social actors until some time after its introduction. As a result of this lag between the introduction of the technology and its cultural adaptation, both utopian and dystopian accounts of technologies such as the Internet, are more likely to reflect authors' own preferences and values rather than an account of the technology's impact on the material and social conditions of society. In Ogburn's words, cultural lags exist because

"technology moves forward and the social institution lags behind in varying degrees".

According to this theory, there are four stages to a cultural lag: technological, industrial, governmental and social philosophical. The theory states that industry is the first sector to adjust to and acquire the technology. After the industrial sector responds to the new technology, government structures adjust. It is within the fourth stage of the cultural lag that scholarship understands technology.

The incorporation, within academia, of applications - such as Instant Messaging - currently in use within the "No Strings" environment of the business community and the social environment of the younger generation, and their adaptation and development as an integral element of the learning environment, will assist in off-setting the effects of cultural lag. Applications which may otherwise have been perceived as mere distractive "butterflies" can be integrated as an essential tool in the communally-constructed learning space.