Tuesday, July 19, 2005

More learning about mlearning delivery

My blog explorations and contacts with colleagues in Australia have yielded information on mlearning projects that is relevant to what I am trying to also achieve in New Zealand.

Attendance of two recent conferences have also provided me with much food for thought. At the CTA show & share seminar, held at the University of Canterbury on June the 24th, several presenters presented interesting applications that had relevance to m-learning. One of the most important insights I gained, was the use of voice recording capabilities and mp3 sound files. As I am so much a visual learner, I had been mulling over how to distribute our current text based content over mobile phones. Well, we could use text to voice software to transfer the text into audio format and distribute content as text or sound files.

The NCVER conference (5th - 8th July) went well in Wondonga. I made contact with several people working in the flexible delivery area. Margot McNeill of the New South Wales Dept. of Education and Training provided me with several contacts of Voc. Ed. Teachers working with mlearning delivery. She also pointed me to the work of Marcus Raggus in horticulture. Which let me to the EDNA mlearning site. This site was also introduced to me by Caryl Oliver of William Angliss TAFE. The EDNA site had an interesting discussion on how to work through one of the inherent disadvantages of using mobile phones for mlearning. The small screens on most mobile phones often make it difficult to show images. Well, how about using the mobile phone as a projector?

So two important mlearning challenges – distribution of text based content and small screens on mobile phones, now have alternatives that can be further explored.