Please forgive me for falling into the stereotype trap here, but in my defence I was born in South East London so feel I do have some right to pass judgement on the place. Anyway, the thing is I got this press release today which was bigging up (that’s me trying to be street, or something, and obviously failing) the use of mobile technology as part of a South London college project to tackle gun and knife crime. The LIFEWISE collaboration involves no less than 200 young people from South Thames College as well as six secondary schools across the London Borough of Wandsworth, who were given 200 Vodafone v1615 handsets with unlimited Internet mobile data access to help them work collaboratively on the project.

Very commendable, but am I the only person wondering how many of them still have those handsets? If the reports that hit the headlines only yesterday are anything to go by, then the answer should be 160, as 40 of them are statistically likely to have been nicked during a violent street mugging. The Design Council survey, on which the headlines are based, revealed that 1 in 5 of youngsters aged between 11 and 16 in London had been victim of a mugging where an item of mobile personal electronics (mobile phone or iPod essentially) had been nicked.

The survey also found that two thirds of the youngsters interviewed carried no less than £100 worth of mobile kit around with them at all times, 61 percent of these kids were worried about theft funnily enough. Actually, not funny at all really, especially considering the 20 percent chance of ending up a victim of just such a crime. Rather surprisingly 42 percent of those victims admitted that they did not report the crime to the police, although the reasons are unclear one would hazard a guess that it falls somewhere between not trusting the old bill, being scared of reprisals or that they were using a mobile phone they had nicked from someone else the week before.

So perhaps the LIFEWISE project is coming at the right time, looking as it does for solutions amongst teenagers themselves to fight this type of violent crime. As Chris Nash, Mobile Learning Consultant at one of the sponsors, Steljes, says: “Handheld technology has allowed the pupils to work together on this project, regardless of where they are - whether in different locations or even different schools,” explains. Anytime Learning is about enhancing the learning experience by extending the school walls to wherever the pupils are and whenever the work is done. This in turn streamlines communications and allows students to share their work and ideas and to forge a more collaborative way of learning and working.”

Yeah, but, it’s no good if the mobile phone has been nicked or whatever…

Tags: crime, irony, mobile, teens, Vodafone

This entry was posted on Friday, May 16th, 2008 at 9:33 am and is filed under Rant, Real World Computing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.