mlearning2008 extras

Slight frustration at not being able to get to all the sessions due to two or more interesting sessions being presented at the same time or overlapping. A trawl through the conference proceedings reveal the following :-

James Cook from the London Metropolitan University on ‘appropriation of mobile phones for learners’ which was on how mobile phones are made used of by people to assist them in their daily lives. The paper uses socio-cultural frameworks & will have relevance to my work on mportfolios.

Jackie Haigh & Chris Dearnley from the University of Bradford are about to undertake a survey to identifying the student attributes that impact on mobile learning. They plan to find out what aspects of the student profiles & learning practices promote or discourage sustained use of a mobile device as a learning tool both in work based and university settings.

Andy Pulman from Bournemouth University reports on an evaluation of using Nintendo DS along with software around ‘brain training’. Findings include that mobile devices are ‘personal’ and help to develop familiarity, expertise and confidence in users. Using a Nintendo DS has proved to be a reliable & robust form of mobile learning and it has identified the potential of portable game consoles as a platform to help with the development of numeracy skills.

Adele Botha & Madelein van der Berg from Pretoria & Steve Voston, John Kuner from Stanford University present examples of their students’ work. Students created videos that reflected the culture of the country & city they lived in to share with another group of students living in a different country. Student work was archived in Vox.

Many of the poster sessions were of interest too. Of note were :-

Canberra Primary School a ‘future school’in Singapore in a project led by Nadiah Abdul Hamed in making use of mobile learning via UMPC / netbook tablets to extend learning opportunities for their students. The teaching & learning framework includes preparing students to be attuned, global & discovery learners who are able to integrate their skills & use these in a ethical manner. This is a laudable goal supported by sound pedagogy & research. It will be interesting to visit this school in the next couple of years as they implement their project right across the school.

Of the various companies / advertisements etc. that were displayed, the following will need to be further investigated.

Using playstations in education was a brochure I picked up. There was a session on the Friday morning which I was unable to attend. The brochure highlighted learning objects available on the playstation that would be useful in education. The playstation supports audio, internet access, has video & photo capabilities, text messaging & is able to access a wide range of file types including word, excel, html & txt files.