reflections on mlearn 2008 & Hand Held Learning 2008

Spending over a week of immersion in the world of mobile learning provided me with a large amount of information to digest. However, looking back at my notes, I see several patterns emerging that I will carry into the mlearning projects at CPIT.

My basic premise for using students’ own devices (ie mobile phones) & web based platforms is sound. The ongoing work on making computers smaller (ie netbooks like the Asus eee, mobiles more web capable plus increased mobile access to the web means that we are well placed to make use of the building capabilities of cloud computing.

I will need to stay with the overall vision to form eportfolios based solely on mobile phones. There are now many more sites that are mobile accessible, including sites like wirenode, winksite & mob5 which allow mobile phones to be used to set up mobile websites. Capabilities for these for forming eportfolios are still basic but things are moving along to make our vision possible.

Mobile phones will still be the most ubiquitous mobile tool as they now number over 3 billion. The ability of game consoles to take on various operating systems (eg the Nintendo DS) will hopefully be replicated at some stage with mobile phones as well. Although material can be accessed direct via the web, having the ability to distribute content etc on SD cards or similar might be more convenient for some learners. The use of game consoles might be an option to explore with other projects at CPIT

The use of netbooks opens up many possibilities for bringing ICT into the classroom & creating blended learning opportunities in any learning space. In particular, the ability to work on collaborative projects, find information easily, create individual & group resources & to make use of serendipitous learning opportunities. Most web capable mobile phones are also suitable for this teaching method but the cost of web surfing on the mobile phone & the poor reputation mobile phones have in the education sector put mobile phones into the ‘too hard basket’ for this. Will need to lobby for better WIFI coverage at CPIT & to investigate the funding options available to provide class sets of netbooks.

Sharing of resources, content, eportfolios etc. need not be only via the web, bluetooth capabilities on many devices, memory sticks, SD cards etc. are also methods that can be useful for mobile learners to archive & share their work. Need to explore this with regards to the various learner profiles we cater to at CPIT to see which option for transfer of digital material is going to be most useful.

Smartboards seem to be standard in British classrooms. Using smartboards with powerpoint presentations seem to be a real waste of smartboard technology. I will need to have a better play with the ones we have at CPIT to work out the best way to model the interactive capabilities of smartboard technology. In particular, the possibilities for collaborative work in conjunction with mobile devices & blended learning.

There is a great deal of innovation taking place around the world. Passionate teachers are going that extra kilometre to make learning more realistic, authentic, creative & collaborative for their students. Mobile learning enables the classroom to be more easily networked with the ‘real world’ & for students in one geographical location to make contact with students studying similar topics in other places. These are skills we all need to make the world a better place to live in. Teachers who model these skills not only teach their students the importance of these skills but also reap the benefits from their own connectivity.

Flexibility combined with a good underpinning of pedagogy is important when working with any project that is of a cutting edge nature. Persistence combined with the ability to make pragmatic choices are also important attributes!

mlearn2008 day 3 last day

Then I attended an eclectic mix of presentations in the ‘mobile learning, mobile knowledge & mobile societies strands.

Starting off with Dan Passey (Lancaster University) on using mobile technologies to convert ‘digital natives’ to ‘learning natives’. A gap analysis is used to detect learning domains that may be considered in encouraging better learning. Domains are mega-cognitive, cognitive, meta-cognitive, motivation, social & societal. A large number of affordances that supported learning were compared so that affordances that are well supported, poorly supported or not supported by mobile learning were presented. Activities that support learning should therefore be ‘snap & show’, ‘review & reflect’, ‘think forward’, ‘listen to my explanation’, ‘this is what I’ve done & how I have done it’ and ‘tell me how I could improve this’.

Followed by Thom Cochrane’s presentation on the mobile trials at Unitec began with a Vodaphone TV advertisement that has been running recently in NZ. The overall concept is to use access to web 2.0 via Nokia smart phones to collate the evidence of learning and to organise their learning (Gmail, calendar etc.) & to construct an eportfolio using Vox. Moodle is used to hold supporting material for the students. Evaluations from students indicate that students were receptive to the use of mobile tools to provide evidence of their learning.

‘How informal is mobile learning’ by comparing mobile VLEs & mobile PLEs was the topic of Wen Pin (Ben) Chen and David Milliard’s (University of Southampton) presentation. Firstly, there was a comparison between VLEs & PLEs. The key difference is that VLEs place control of learning on the teacher & PLEs on the learner. A four dimensional model of formal learning (why, where & when, who & what & how) along with whether the learning is teacher, student led or negotiated is used to analyse the papers presented at mLearn2007 to see what types of mlearning is currently taking place. Only 3 of the 17 papers presented fell into the formal learning environment therefore mlearning supports informal learning.

The day’s formal presentation sessions ended with Christopher Plimmer from Switzerland who investigated the area of workbased mobile learning to find answers to the question ‘How can mobile devices be used to support employee learning processes’?
Scenarios of the use of mobile learning in the workplace were presented to research participants to find out how feasible the scenarios were. Guidelines that were distilled included the need for content that would be just in case but well integrated into the work that needed to be completed, opportunities for social interaction that included coordination, coaching, collaboration and reflection & the production of learning sequences.

The afternoon was taken up with the AGM of the Association of Mobile Learning.

Conference ended with handover to mlearn2009 which will be in Orlando, Florida under aupices of University of Central Florida. Plus forward information for 2010 which will be held in Malta (organisers are the University of Malta).

mlearn2008 keynote from Yrjo Engestrom

The day started with a much anticipated keynote by Yrjo Engestrom who discoursed on the new patterns of mobility and learning which he terms as ‘wildfire activities’.

The presentation started with a ‘reconceptualising mobility’. Current definitions of mlearning tend to still be ‘content determine’ which does not necessarily reflect what takes place in the lives of the learners or the changes in society. He uses the example provided by Kris Gutierrez who posits that there is an official script of the educator and an invisible counter-script of the learner. There often collide but if we are able to to hybridize these two scripts, we have powerful ‘third spaces’ of learning.

A definition of wildfire activities & why are they important was then presented. Wildfire activities are non-linear & multi-dimensional with an emphasis on sideways trajectories & boundary crossing. This is in contrast to the standard explanation (eg Lave & Wenger) which moves novices from the periphery to the centre. Wildfire activities have immerged from very recent observations & studies on on-line social networking, open source movements & peer to peer sharing. These are examples of social production.

He provides examples of activities like skate boarding, birdwatching & participation in relief disaster relief as activities that are difficult to categorise. These activities offer little monetary reward, legal protection or institutional support. They require heavy expenditure of time & energy. They carry high risks of failure, trouble of authorities and even physical harm. They are discontinuous & persist over time. They are dispersed & distributed yet they are somehow coordinated. There is a quick adoption and creative use of up to date information & communication technologies. They are not only wikinomics, or just social networks ie they are not dependent on the web.

The metaphor of ‘communities of mycorrhizae’ was then used to explain the wildfire communities which are hybrid, poorly bounded, & where the centre does not hold. In contrast, craft communities are relatively close & stable & dominated by tradition and the traditional authority of the master. Mass production communites are governed by rules which are relatively transparent & has a known authority

He follows through with a hypothesis on learning in wildfire activities. These activities are examples of horizontal learning that cross boundaries & “ties knots between actors operating in fractured & often poorly charted terrain.” The learning is often subterranean and self-reflective. The learning is high stakes, often requires quick improvisational adaption and it is holoptic control (individuals have access but no single node of control).

Book – From teams to knots: activity theory studies of collaboration and learning at work, provides more reading on the concepts introduced in his presentation.

mlearn2008 day 2 afternoon

The afternoon keynote was from Vanessa Pittard who is the Director of eLearning Strategies at BECTA on assessing the value of mobile learning : the evidence challenge. Very few schools actually making use of the potential of wireless (access of Wifi) & mobile learning. There is a need to provide evidence that using mobile technology would enhance learning. Generally, teachers need to be convinced that using any form of technology will provide for better learning without having to invest more time. There is evidence of success in various mlearning projects in the UK. Of note is the McFarlane (2008) report on the Wolverhampton based Learning2go project whereby there was an improvement in boys ‘writing’, exam revision & games based practice.

Stayed in the’mobile learning, mobile knowledge & mobile societies’ strand this afternoon. There were two rooms with presentations in this strand, so I hopped between rooms.

First up was Christopher Murray (University of Leeds, School of Medicine) on capturing transformative learning using mobile devices. Digital stories were created by first year medical students of their first patient visit. The ELGG platform was used to collate the photos etc collected using PDAs. The taking of photos of the experience & creation of their digital stories provided the impetus for students to face transformative attitudinal changes required of them as future health professionals.

Mlearning initiatives in the British army was then presented by Major Roy Evans. iPods were used to learn Iraqi by soldiers posted to Iraq. The Nintendo DS lite console was used to provide remedial numeracy learning to new soldiers and work based learning for upgrading soldiers’ skills & knowledge.

Then attended a session on evaluating mobile learning by Giasemi Vavoula (University of Leicester). Six challenges in evaluating mobile learning are presented. These are capturing learning content across learning contexts, mobile learning outcomes, changing ethics, technology, seeing the bigger picture and formal or informal learning. A three level framework (micro, meso & macro) & 3 stages (design, implementation, deployment) can be used to assist in measuring the six challenges.

Day ended with Gill Clough from the Open University on informal learning amongst geocachers:mobile & web 2.0 technologies in action. Data was gathered via public domain data from geocaching website, web survey with recruitment via geocaching forums and a case study of 5 of the survey participants. The entry trajectory of novice geocachers was studied. Geocaching sites are social networking sites which allow the geocaching to share their finds & to learn more about the site via links provided by other people. This is then an example of how technology can now be used to enable collaborative forms of knowledge to be formed.

mLearn2008 day 1 morning sessions

The conference begins with a keynote from Professor Diana Laurillard, London knowledge lab. Her topic is – towards a pedagogy – driven account of mobile learning which sets the scene for the rest of the conference. She argues that technology are optimised for business & leisure, not perhaps for education (in the form of guiding inquiry, structuring discussion, adapting collaboration, adapting learner practice etc). Pedagogy needs to be a focus in how technology is made use of to contribute to optimising education and students’ learning. She advocates the use of technology to help capture informal learning that takes place in learning with digital resources, discussions, practice environments, group work /projects, learning through production of design, products, solutions etc. She calls this process the ‘conversational framework’ and continues by making links to how learning can now be enhanced using mobile technologies which encourage cognitive and affective forms of motivation.

Stayed put in the ‘mobile learning, mobile knowledge & mobile societies’ strand for the mid morning sessions as I was presenting in the 11am slot.

Other papers included Christoph Goeth from the University of Zurich on designing tasks for mobile learning. Starts with good overview of how mobile learning links with social constructivist frameworks. Uses a continuum of an engagement framework from transmissive to interactive to explorative learning and provides examples of how mlearning maybe used in each part of the continuum. The mExplorer is a mobile learning game that supports the orientation day at a university. Game involves finding items, interacting with others and orientating themselves to the facilities at the university eg using the library catalogue. Additional information is accessed once each item is found or place is visited.

Richard Kenny from Althabasca University and others from North Island College, Courtenay, Vancouver Island presented on the feasibility of using mobile devises in nursing practice due to changes in health care & models of teaching using Koole’s framework model of elearning. Fields trial were evaluated comparing a small group of 12 students with excess to mobile learning with another group of students without access. Results indicated that nursing students found the ability to surf the web & use their drug database the most useful but the communicating options like audio (skype), email etc. not as useful. Costs involved in accessing web was seen to be a barrier.

Elizabeth Hartnell- Young from the University of Nottingham reported on the use of ‘mobile phones in mainstream schooling : resistance & change. Studying how to bring mobile learning into secondary schools when large number of schools ban mobile phones from the school grounds using Giddens work on structure and agency as a framework. Although the three schools who took part did not allow the use of mobile phones in the classroom, there was already surreptitious use of the mobile phones already! A wide range of ways to use mobile phones in learning was used 24/7 by the students over several months. After the trials, 42% of the students saw a use for their phones in learning compared to 12% before.

Ian Watkins reported on a project making use of Pocket PCs at his school from his perspective as the school principal of Highvale Secondary school in Melbourne, Australia. One objective was to have teachers who have been teaching at the school for many years to share their teaching practice, improve teaching methods, integrate technology into their teaching & making their teaching more student focused. Uses of mlearning included production of vodcasts / podcasts for revision of concepts and mlessons to assist students with study skills.

Debra Polson from the Queensland University of Technology provided background information on the MiLK (mobile informal learning kit) project which involves providing tools for teachers to build mobile learning games. Important to have buy in & agreement from all stakeholders involved before the project is structured. The project / game is successful when the result provides users / teachers with excitement about greater possibilities for future learning applications. MiLK originated via work done on other projects www.scoot.com www.newishmedia.com

Great to see many examples of actual mobile learning projects. Almost all the above presentations indicated plans for future projects, investigations and research along with some mention of the pedagogical foundations of the project. This provides good indication that mobile learning has progressed well beyond the novelty phase.

mLearn2008 launched

Hand over from mlearn 2007 to mlearn2008. Organised by the University of Wolverhampton to be held at Ironbridge Gorge from 7th to 10th October. Followed with Handheld2008 in London from 13th to 15th October.