Adult and Community Education conference 2009

On Saturday, Nick Ford, Robin Graham and I presented at the annual ACE conference, held at the Wharenui at CPIT. Nick presented on the 21st century learner, I did a short spiel on cloud computing, web 2.0 & mobile learning and Robin completed the loop with a session on design for learning.

Our session was well attended and there was lots of interest shown along with lots of questions generated. I experimented this time by using a Word document with logos of web 2.0 sites and other hyperlinks as a base to the presentation. As the session was so short, the hyperlinks could then be useful to participants for future self directed exploration of the various sites and links.

Learning from mlearning pilot participants

Nick Ford & I had an invigorating session with a group of apprentices who are part of our mlearning pilot. The session is an introduction to the apprentices who are keen to take part in the pilot on how to archive their evidence so that we can have access to their work.

All of the apprentices own a camera capable phone. Three are very conversant with phone capabilities and especially up to date with how to ‘work the system’. If you know how and when to do it, there are ways to access the web via your phone for very little payment!

Our advantage with our mlearning project, is that we are using a form of personal expression that is natural to our students. They find photo and video blogging to be a normal way for them to share their leisure activities with their friends. Half the students had their own webpage. Their perception of webpage layout & navigation is different from ours. They are not phased by a page with is cluttered with video clips, photos, advertisements, text snippets, multiply search boxes etc.

The introduction was also to familiarise the students with how to transfer their evidence or link to their evidence on to a Moodle page set up for each student. All the students are provided with ‘teacher’ access to their page. Almost all the students understood how to work Moodle very quickly and were linking to flickr, youtube and other websites (like their own Bebo page) within a few minutes of being shown how to work the editing icons. In fact, they picked up on the possibilities much faster than groups of tutors who would be given a similar introductory session to Moodle.

We also showed the students the possibilities in using Vox and Comic life to lay out their portfolios. Students familiar with Bebo appreciated the cleaner Vox interface and most thought that laying out their evidence in the form of a comic book would be something they would give a go.

It will be interesting at the beginning of next year to see what has eventuated with evidence collection and to see how the collation of the eportfolio will take place when the time comes for the evidence to be presented.