Learning How to Travel with Smartphones:
Bay Area Innovation and Mobility:
The subtitle of my 2024 book (Amazon) is “The Must Have Conversation about Homes and Driving.” The time has finally come when people too old to drive or too young to drive have mobility options beyond the personal car. This was, and remains, the vision!
EVs & Hybrid for Sustainability:
EV Issues in the Community:
With or Without Rebates, EV Market Grows
Redwood Industries and the Recycling Reveal
The WSJ: Getting to the Bottom of Consumer Demand:
A Framework for Digital Training: Provisional Licenses
Jane Gould, PhD
What’s the safe path for teens and preteens once the law suits and congressional hearings on social media wrap up? There will be talk about using guardrails to keep young kids offline. Some will say that content on social media should stay in its lane. Most of the fun metaphors will come from the transportation field.
The most important, and useful metaphors come from programs that teach driver education.
A provisional digital license is something I have campaigned for as ‘DearSmartphone’. Before we let kids go online, they need to be fortified with targeted classroom instruction, parental guidance, and real-time experience- just like in driver’s education. Earning a phone is not automatic– kids need to commit to the homework and complete challenges before they are safe online.
There’s history to back this up. It takes a decade or more after a technology emerges for the instructional need to be recognized. It was not until 1932 that drivers education classes were taught in the U.S. In the case of digital education, it took nearly 12 years after the debut of the iPhone to get digital education on the boards.
Curriculums:
Currently, at least four states have a mandate to teach digital education in the public schools. These are Texas, Delaware, New Jersey and California. In California the state’s Instructional Quality Commission will slowly roll out a curriculum while considering how to incorporate media literacy into language arts, math, science, history and social science.
But, if we are going to have an effective program in digital education, we might want to speed it up and borrow some more ideas from driver’s education.
In the following table, I drill down on the metaphors and compare the two programs on some basics:
| Driver’s Education | Digital California |
|---|---|
| Roughly 10th grade- Ages 14, 15, onward | K-12 |
| Requires direct parental involvement | Primarily Teachers in Schools |
| Practice: inside the car, hands on | Practice: throughout the curriculum |
| Special Problems: DUI, drugs, speeding | Special Problems: Sexting, bullying, privacy |
| Safety: Car Seats, Seat Belts, Air Bags | Safety: COPPA (13 and under) |
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ABOUT JANE GOULD, PhD
I started the DearSmartphone column in 2018. It is a traditional advice column with a modern twist. Readers discuss digital issues and the problems they present.
Be Mobile Smart continues in the DearSmartphone tradition. It drills down on the unique ways that our mobile devices channel our behaviors and collective intelligence. Be Mobile Smart is my personal calling as I have been a researcher in both the transportation field and communications. Feel free to read more about me.