Thursday, 16 October 2008
Free international webinar on mobile learning
Yesterday I posted on the Reach Further blog for Blog Action Day on how Online communities bring the world together to share I talked about ELKS, the community of expertise for the UN-GAID run by BDRA at the University of Leicester - a network for e-learning practitioners and researchers to share good practice, ideas and opinions.
ELKS is hosting a free webinar on mobile learning, anyone can become a member (it's free) to join in.Tuesday 21st October from 11 am - 12 noon BST
The webinar will take the form of a 20 minute presentation and a live chat followed by a discussion.
Mobile technologies for education in development contexts - challenging the obvious.
Speaker: John Traxler,
Reader in Mobile Technology for e-Learning, Director, Learning Lab, Conference Chair, mLearn2008 Ironbridge, Associate Editor, International Journal of Mobile & Blended Learning (School of Computing and IT, University of Wolverhampton).In the seminar John will talk about his work on mobile learning in Kenya, the lessons learned and their transferability to other developing country educational contexts.
A short introduction to the seminar:
In 2003, the Government of Kenya announce the introduction of Free Primary Education, leading to an increase in primary enrolment of nearly one million. The subsequent fall of the school population pointed to a retention problem aggravated by over-crowding and under-training. A major challenge was to increase the numbers of trained teachers rapidly whilst at the same time improving the quality of the school system and using it as a vehicle for radical social and cultural transformation across issues that included child-marriage and other tribal practices, perceptions of endemic corruption, poor communications, an over-centralisation and widespread adult illiteracy. Ministry developed an in-service distance learning programme intended to meet needs for 200,000 primary school teachers.
Mobile learning in the form of an SMS service was introduced as part of the in-service programme.
The SMS component underwent field trials in 2006. The system is free to authorised users using a short-code. The messages themselves have a limited and predefined syntax, each type starting with a keyword, and the system has been extended to gather and analyse schools’ enrolment data. At the end of the second trials, the technical and organisational achievements of the system are impressive.
A spin-off of the current system making school exam registration and results nationally more accurate, fast and transparent has already become a self-funding service for Kenyan parents.
This presentation looks these projects and at the confusing insights they provide into the notions of ‘development’.
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The webinar is free to ELKS members and staff of member institutions but numbers are limited in the chat session so please book your place by emailing hw74@le.ac.ukMembership of the ELKS community is free and open to e-learning practitioners and researchers around the world: email hw74@le.ac.uk to join.
The webinar will take place in Adobe Connect and online in the ELKS forums
Labels: e-learning, elearning, ELKS, free, mlearning, mobile learning, online seminar, webinar
posted by Helen Whitehead 11:17 AM
Sunday, 18 November 2007
My new HTC TyTN II
I've been {playing with} learning to use my new PDA/wonderphone: the HTC TyTN II (winner of several Best PDA and Smartphone awards). It has two cameras (both video cameras), voice recorder, music, Windows mobile with various programmes including Word, Bluetooth and wifi capability, synchs with my Outlook on the laptop (though haven't tried that yet) and with my online tasks-to-do application, and has a 4Gb hard disk the size of a fingernail. It has a proper keyboard which makes it much easier to text and make notes.
Plus it even makes phone calls.
Interestingly, there's a really quite good series of Flash elearning tutorials on the Web to teach me how to use it.
All I need now is a good price for an unlimited data contract...Labels: HTC TyTN II, mobile learning, mobile phones, PDA, smartphone
posted by Helen Whitehead 4:58 PM
Wednesday, 7 November 2007
Decisions on the mobiles and PDAs
OK, so it's taken me a while to make the decision! My colleague has purchased a Nokia 95 (as recommended in this blog by James Clay).
I am about to play with this one, and if I like it I'll buy it!
HTC TyTN
So I will soon be better-connected than ever...Labels: mobile learning, mobile phones, PDA
posted by Helen Whitehead 9:51 AM
Wednesday, 3 October 2007
Mobile learning - issues and opportunities
Having just been interviewed about mobile learning for the new WolF project, I thought I'd jot down some of my thoughts!
Good examples of mobile learning:
There are several good examples of podcasting in the IMPALA project
Students doing work-based learning and work placements benefit from mobile learning in a variety of ways:There are some examples of research projects in this area at the Assessment and Learning in Practice Settings CETL
- contact with tutors
- contact with other students
- maintaining contact with the learning community even while out on placement
- making notes for reflection, e.g., moblogging (could include an assessment element)
- taking videos for own use or to feed back to the class
- small formative assessment tasks
Adding a Mobile Dimension to Teaching and Learning is a network of researchers diedicated to the use of mobile learning.
The Kaleidoscope network also has an mlearning Special Interest Group.
Issues with mobile learningHow I would like to use mobile learning in my teaching
- Cost of technology and of connections - who buys the PDA and pays for sending the student's video back to the course wiki at £1 per megabyte?
- Security of technology - "what if I lost the PDA?"
- Lack of familiarity with technology - especially for mature students
- Preferred learning styles - I would myself prefer a written or web version of a lecture rather than an entirely audio podcast for example (unless it's of Radio 4 quality!)
- Students preferring to use iPods and phones for leisure and not for learning, however informal.
- Issues of identity - who is handling the phone?
I teach writing to lifelong learners in an entirely online course. One of the tasks that I like my students to do is to get out into the outdoors, the countryside if possible, and go on a "haiku walk" using nature as inspiration. At the moment they take notebooks and pens, and write up their haiku in the forum in the VLE when they get back to their desks. Maybe they use laptops or PDAs, I don't know! It would be interesting to have them create their haiku and share it via PDA while still out "in the field".
And it's not my course - but I'd love to see the "pondcasting" that a colleague suggested as a way of assessing the field work his students do on water ecology.
Mobile learning and assessmentThe future of mobile learning
- definite possibilities for formative assessment
- sending multiple choice questionnaires via PDA
- moblogging to create a reflective journal
I guess I'm a bit controversial here. I'm expecting that mobile devices and the PC will converge and a small wearable computer - that is also a phone - will become the norm. The affordances for learning will be related to but different from current mobile devices. Perhaps I've seen too much Sci-Fi...
I am about to purchase a PDA for personal and professional use - does anyone have any recommendations? I'd like one with a slide-out keyboard, Bluetooth, camera, radio, etc. that does WiFi where it's available as well as 3G.Labels: mlearning, mobile learning, PDAs
posted by Helen Whitehead 9:00 AM
Monday, 24 September 2007
Final reflections on the ALT-C conference #1
I was looking through my notes from the ALT conference and realising that I hadn't quite finished reflecting on the sessions. It seems unfair that the later sessions should miss out on reporting.
I tried to attend some sessions that were relevant to my areas of expertise and some that were new to me. A session on reusable learning objects made me realise that there are some things I know next to nothing about yet. Understanding RLOs requires quite a high degree of technical knowledge in XML etc. I have just enough knowledge to appreciate what the developers were doing, and the principles behind it, and how they can be used - but I don't think I'll be creating RLOs any time soon without further training! One of the sessions covered use of the XML editor (plus) software Xerte, free from Nottingham University.
Generative learning objects were the next new thing - they can be reused to adapt to other uses. One example was a "Who wants to be a Millionaire?" game template which could be used with questions sets from different subject areas.
One of the important messages was to separate design from content so that new content could be easily be put in. I certainly found that the case at NCSL last year when I was editing the XML files in the introduction to learning course to update the content: I didn't have to alter too much of the Flash.
Finally, I learned about umbrella learning objects (ULOs)
Key features of RLOs:
* can be placed in a different course or VLE
* can be edited by the tutor to update it (not just by a techie)
* can be repurposed, e.g., in a different subject area
My favourite session was an early morning session on Mobile technologies for Learning and Assessment. Gareth Firth from the ALPS CETL and Rob Arntsen from MyKnowledgeMap told us about the use of PDAs for learning and assessment (both summative and formative) in IPE by students during hospital placements.
We got to play with the PDAs, download a video, take a picture and upload it to a website. An internet-ready PDA went immediately on my birthday list - unfortunately the cost of using the mobile internet probably means I won't use it much! The PDAs in the study were run on an unlimited data contract and text and voice were disabled. Ultimately, text and voice should be billable to the students themselves while data is still paid for by the institution. I AM going to get one though.
Interesting to think of students accessing their assessments everywhere from hospital (are they actually allowed to use mobile devices in all hospitals?) to home to Tesco! (The pharmacists in the study were working on placement in supermarket pharmacies.)
Reasons for using mobile technology include:
* record assessment IN the workplace
* don't need to re-key anything later, e.g., reflections
* integrates with VLEs, e-portfolios, etc.
I learned more from this than from Dylan Wiliams keynote, also about assessment, because his was about assessment in the classroom. Still very important, but perhaps not as exciting as in Tesco!Labels: ALT-C2007, altc2007, inter-professional education, IPE, m-learning, mobile learning, PDAs, reusable learning objects, RLO
posted by Helen Whitehead 10:34 AM
Tuesday, 11 September 2007
How they do mobile learning in Japan...
This is a 2D barcode of the URL of the ELKS community.
Apparently these barcodes are all the range in Japan where people use their web-enabled mobile phones to read them and then surf to the URL. They are used, e.g., on a poster for a radio station to encourage people to listen, on the doors of public libraries to direct users to a page that shows opening hours, or on tutor's offices to direct students to a page that shows opening hours.
As 100% of students have web-enabled mobile phones and data transfer is cheap, they can be used for all sorts of learning applications from voting on which of the videos shown in the lesson they preferred, to assessment quizzes, to sending a question randomly to one of the students in the class (of course - you could just point at one!).
Thanks to Keiso Katsura for introducing me to these tools in a seminar at Leicester University yesterday.Labels: e-learning, elearning, Japan, Keiso Katsura, learning technologies, mobile learning
posted by Helen Whitehead 8:58 PM
Tuesday, 4 September 2007
Tensions between personal space and social space in mobile learning
The session on mobile learning by Dr Agnes Kukulska-Hulme, Dr John Cook, Professor Tom Boyle, Mr John Traxler was very interesting. Agnes and her colleagues were good presenters.
I did, however, find my personal devil's advocate surfacing. So much of mobile learning seems to be about the devices, and it seems to me that as technology moves on, and converges, we will all have devices that unite TV, phone and computer technology and we will laugh at the days when we tried to deliver learning via SMS.
I've tried to decide on a meaning for mobile learning - or m-learning before - at much length, with others at a conference. In this presentation it seemed to be mostly about the location interacting with the person - and the person interacting with other people's responses to that same location - great for studying the architecture of a building, or an ecosystem on a field trip, but not much use for "studying chemistry on the bus".
I liked the idea of social space as hyper-local - but I'm still not sure about the local emphasis. Am I not m-learning if my wearable computer is connecting me to a seminar on psychology from Australia while I am walking down the road? Not connected with the location but very much mobile learning.
Like Tim Rudd earlier, John Traxler reminded us to think about the future in new ways - not just to design a faster horse (from the quotation from John Ford).
A very interesting and practical symposium.Labels: ALT-C2007, alt-C20071216, altc2007, m-learning, mlearning, mobile learning
posted by Helen Whitehead 7:57 PM
