This brilliantly made movie caught my eye over the weekend. It was the winner of a Nokia short movie contest.

The splitscreen movie tells a love story. Its creator was “limited” by the requirement to shoot it with a camera phone.

This would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. Today cameras in mobile phones rival high end point-and-shoots. They have become so mainstream that, by the time you read this, the dominant camera for Flickr photos will be the iPhone.

Movie director Spike Lee was spotted photographing Obama with an iPad 2 (Cult of Mac) ridiculous as that may seem. Earlier this year, UPI reported how a Korean director had shot a 30-minute movie entirely on the iPhone 4. Vimeo hosts a preview of what might be the first short movie shot and edited entirely on the iPhone 4.

The conventional wisdom among researchers and administrators was that it was not sufficient to just put technology in the hands of users. Doing this would not change pedagogy or learning.

I used to agree wholeheartedly with that. But now the technologies are more powerful and intuitive. New teachers entering the profession have either grown up with these technologies or are more familiar with them.

The user’s unfamiliarity with the technologies or the clunkiness of the tools of the tools might have limited the creativity of teachers and learners in the past. But more and more of them seem to not just embrace the tools but also expect to use them in school.

The grandfather in the short clip said, “Let me tell you a story.” If our learners want to do so digitally, they should not be hindered in any way. It’s their prerogative to do so. It’s our responsibility to help them.