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The popularity of mobile technologies among college students is increasing dramatically. Results from the ECAR research study on students suggest that many undergraduate students bring their own digital devices to college, favoring small and portable ones such as smartphones and tablets. 2 Although students still rate laptops (85 percent) as the most important devices to their academic success, the importance of mobile devices such as tablets (45 percent), smartphones (37 percent), and e-book readers (31 percent) is noticeably on the rise. Increasingly, students say they want the ability to access academic resources on their mobile devices.3 In fact, 67 percent of students' smartphones and tablets are reportedly being used for academic purposes, a rate that has nearly doubled in just one year.4

Martin Weller argues that openness in education has been successful in establishing itself as an approach. However, this initial victory should be viewed as part of a larger battle around the nature of openness. Drawing lessons from history and the green movement, a number of challenges for the open education movement are identified as it enters this new stage.

In this video Downes shares his utopian anti-institutional view of education. He pleads for "learning beyond institutions", towards personal learning in a networked world.  Move towards anarchic learning, based on no models, no systems, no traditional ideals. Move beyond institutions and towards self-organised networks of learners. "Content is the McGuffin it's the thing that gets us talking with each other" "its the connections between people and neurones that is the actual learning"