Looking forward to mlearn2007

Just about counting down the sleeps before mlearn 2007 in Melbourne. I will be in Melbourne for just 6 days, where besides the conference, I will do a catch up with one of our corporate clients and also have some time with my sister-in-law & family.

Downloaded the programme this morning and there looks like lots to keep me occupied and many papers that will be relevant to my mlearning project. There are papers on mobile phones, mobile blogging plus a few on student perceptions of mobile learning as well. Looks like a busy few days!

I am not sure if the organisers intend to set up a conference blog, like the one set up by Brandon Hall Innovations in Learning conference. It has a couple of slideshare shows embedded which are very interesting and provide a bit of a feel of what the speaker presented. Of note are the slideshare on an open-source approach to rapid authoring of e-learning by Rueben Tozman and the development of elearning 2.0 by Stephen Downes. Stephen had 77 slides (not sure now long presentation time), so being able to look at the slides on the blog, must help bring much needed ‘reflection’ space to his presentation. The blogger who put the items on the blog also commented on how she ‘zoned out’ part way through the presentation and was also distracted by the ability to input comments which were presented synchronisely on another screen. A bit like my experiences thus far with video conferencing / elluminate type presentations. Too much happening all at once – powerpoint, questions, audio output plus the video images of the presentation. I will need to find out how many others (who are usually efficient multi-taskers) find their experiences with this method of interaction.

I hope that there will be wireless access at the conference as it will allow me to blog about the papers as they are being presented at mlearn2007. They form a valuable memory jogger for when I find time to reflect on the individual papers and their contribution to the way in which our mlearning project develops.

digital storytelling: Will it catch on?

A wet weekend provided me with the time catch up on organising my photos from the tramps over the last couple of summers! Sorting through the photos got me reflecting on how technology is changing the way we do things in so many small but life changing ways. One of the quaint customs members of my tramping group indulge in, is to have a reunion a few weeks after we have completed a long tramp together. It’s a way to share, as a group, the good & bad times of our tramp.

The usual ritual is to have a shared tea (evening meal), chat about the highlights of the tramp & share photos that some of us have taken of the trip. In the past, we will have slides and hard copy to view. Orders would be taken of various photos, so that the owners would be able to reprint the chosen photos and post them to the people who have selected them. The most organised of us would arrive at the reunion with stamped / addressed envelopes and enough small change to pay the various photographers for a copy of the photos selected.

In the reunion for my January Stewart Island trip, all the photographers had used digital cameras. We were a group of tail-end baby boomers, with most of us working in non-techy jobs. However, when it came time to viewing the photos, out came a couple of laptops & the photos were viewed on laptop screens. Sharing of the photos involved transferring the photos on to CD or in my case, on to my memory stick. I could also have used my mp3 player for storage. So, the more organised of us now come with post-it notes with our email addresses on them, blank writable CDs or memory sticks.

One of our group archives all her photos on to scrap book based photo albums. She is working on album number 40 plus. She printed out digital photos that she thought worthy of inclusion & organised them as usual, into her photo album. As for the rest of us, most of us transferred the photos on to our computer’s hard disk where they formed the basis of our screen saver display.

Like it or not, we are witnessing the change over from hard copy into a digital environment. The above is but one example of many small but important changes in the way we do things that lead on to a ‘tipping point’.

The next stage is to move on to a digital story telling format. I am awaiting this development to see how long becomes this becomes mainstream within our tramping group. As such, no one in the group blogs on their myriad tramping trips. Time is usually the excuse. We all have busy lives revolving around work, studies and family. However, as more of our tramping memories are collected in digital form, then more of us will eventually be recording our trips for posterity in digital format.

youth hostels and learning about the use of technology by young travellers

Since receiving the nice amount of money as part of my award for tertiary excellence, I have had some light hearted ribbing from my colleagues about my predilection for staying at backpacker type accommodation when I travel out of town for work related conferences (in NZ & overseas). So this is a good place to explain my fondness for youth hostels.

The major reason I enjoy staying in youth hostels, is the opportunity to indulge in some serious people watching. It is too good an opportunity not to make use of as a mLearning researcher! The majority of people who turn up at backpackers are young travellers, usually in their twenties. Over the last five years, I have noted the increase in and a change in the types of technology that young travellers carry with them. Digital cameras used to be standard, but now, not everyone carries a digital camera, instead mobile phones and an mp3 players seem to be the de riguer. There is also an increase in young travellers who travel with a laptop.

Asking questions about a young person’s mobile phone, or mp3 player is a good conversational starter. From my travels, I have found that NZ is not mobile phone friendly for the foreign visitor. However, most young Asian travellers now use their mobile phone as a camera, so loosing the use of the mobile phone as a communicator is not too much of an inconvenience. I have also seen the mobile phone used as a calculator, currency converter, translator / dictionary, memo pad, map, torch etc.

Internet linked computers at most youth hostels are in use 24/7. Many young travellers make use of computers to organise all of their travel, completing their bookings for transport, accommodation and activities via online bookings. Savvy backpacker entrepreneurs have websites not only in English but in Spanish & Japanese. YHA’s that I have used in NZ, Australia & Canada all have computers that run off a standard cash card so that travellers can use these cards to pay for the time used on youth hostel computers within each country.

Travellers keep in touch with friends (& family) via email but many I have met recently (especially North Americans & Europeans) maintain their own blogs or social websites. One page on my memo pad in my Treo is filled with hotmail / gmail , blogger / facebook & myspace addresses (plus their Japanese / Korean versions) of people I have struck up conversations with at backpackers. Social site addresses have increased over the last couple of years. The use of moblogging is rare (due to mobile phones being linked to the travellers' home telecommunications provider).

I suppose I might be able to observe similar things if I stayed in a hotel as business ‘road warriors’ are now a common sight in hotel lobbies with their wireless laptops and mobile phones. However, the culture, architecture and organisation of the average backpacker’s, encourages the solo traveller to interact with their fellow travellers. A nosy middle aged woman who asks questions about what sort of mobile phone one uses does not seem too out of place :)

Pageflakes – more thoughts on using as PLE and ePortfolio portal

Last year, I recieved a nice email from Ole Brandenburg from Pageflakes, encouraging me to set up an account and have a look.

Since then, I have been keeping an eye on Pageflakes. The site has been upgraded with the options for adding many more ‘flakes’. There are now thousands of flakes and they include many more options for RSS type feeds and various utilities like clocks, language translators, calendars, games etc.

Of importance in using the Pageflakes portal as an eportfolio type repository is the ability to add an ‘Anything flake’. This provides a WYSIWYG editor to add text, photos, audio or video to the page. There is also an improved ‘page casting’ facility that allows better sharing of your page contents with others.

This means that a Pageflakes page could work in a dual role as a personal learning environment area plus also be used as an archive for documenting your own learning.
I have added it to the list of tools we will evaluate for the mlearning pilot.

Convergence culture & the rise of visual intelligence

Finally finished this post! Over the mid-year break, I caught up with a couple of interesting books. I travelled across the ditch, first to Perth to catch up with family and then to Alice Springs for the annual NCVER conference on vocational education research.

Serendipitously, both the books I took along had a common thread. This being that technology is changing our society in the way people, organisations, governments etc. behave, relate to each other, go about with their lives etc.

The first book was Convergence culture :- where old and new media collide by Henry Jenkins. A good read too. The first chapter is quite hilarious in places. It covers how hard core fans of the TV programme Survivor, go to extreme lengths to try to find out who is left as the final survivor in each series. The fans, known as ‘spoilers’ post their detective work (which is often very sophisticated) on a web site / discussion forum. This forms the collective knowledge that all the fans registered on the website are able to access and build on. The goal of the intelligence gathering is to be able to work out who the last survivor is, before the end of the series. What caught me was the engagement the fans had with this process. If only we are able to replicate this with online learning!

Chapter five on media literacy and the Harry Potter Wars was also another chapter full of insightful findings for the educationalist. This chapter centres on a homeschooled13 year old who started up a web based ‘school newsletter’ for the fictional Hogwarts called the Daily Prophet. This publication has a staff of 102 children from all over the world! The website became an ‘affinity space’ whereby children could immerse themselves wholeheartedly into the Harry Potter universe.

The other book, is In a Mind’s Eye: Visual thinkers, gifted people with dyslexia and other difficulties, computer images and the ironies of creativity by Thomas G. West. A bit heavier reading, but worth the effort. The book looks at why gifted people like Einstein, Rodin, Lewis Carroll, Edison, Patton etc. had learning difficulties. The author argues that even though these people have made major contributions to science, art etc. they usually struggled at school and yet they blossomed in their careers, going on to become leaders in their field. For instance, Einstein struggled with arithmetic but excelled at the higher levels of maths.

The book then goes on to explore the ‘new’ literacy, that of ‘visual literacy’ that the information age has brought about. This ‘visual literacy’ advantages the lateral thinkers who do not fit into the factory schooling model. This is especially important now that we are on the cusp of the ‘knowledge revolution’, we need people who are able to find out, intuit about and learn things that were never known before.

From a tertiary teaching point of view, we need to provide advantages for all potential students into our programmes. When re-documenting our one year full time programme, we were asked to look at raising our entry requirements. I resisted this because from experience, school results bore little correlation to future success in baking. What mattered most was aptitude for the trade and an interest in learning about baking. I have learnt from many experiences, NEVER to write off a student at the start of the programme (or at the end of it!). Making a change during the programme is something I continually work at but sometimes, that change in an individual comes later in life. We therefore need to continue sowing the seeds so that when the time is right those seeds will germinate.

Renaissance elearning

Have been dipping in & out of the book by Samantha Chapnick & Jimm Meloy called Renaissance eLearning for a couple of weeks. Then put a weekend into reading it more intensively as it contained many interesting ideas that would make eLearning more energised, personalised and effective.

This book has a good overview of Csikzentmihalyi’s psychology of creativity from his book Flow and the Psychology of Discovery & Invention and then goes on to provide examples of how eLearning can be used to encourage more creativity in learners.

In particular, the use of ‘emotional eLearning’ via the use of narratives and drama in eLearning is a new concept for me. I am especially taken by Freytag’s triangle which plots the classical dramatic structure of rising action, climax and crisis and then falling action and unwinding. They then form the basis of plot and story to the structure of a whole course or part of a course which involves the setting up of the genre, setting and characters to the overall storyline. I suppose similar to how we set up a learning session with the introduction, learning in increments using scaffolding teachniques that leads on to reflection and application, but all done with much more soul and feeling.

The other thing that is promoted, the concept of heutagogy which is self-directed learning in it’s purest sense. Learners are owners of their own learning process and learn by “organic or informal” learning.

I enjoyed reading the book as it had arrived at a juncture in my learning about eLearning. I had been looking for some way to add more pizzazz into my eLearning courses as I was working through converting them from being hosted on Blackboard across to Moodle. I suppose the title ‘renaissance’ stuck out as I browsed the book shelves in the library.

At the moment, I am percolating all the new ideas in my head to try to find a good fit between the ideas of using story telling within the context of my content area plus make it engaging to the learner profile I have. I have always been interested in the use of games to encourage learning but finding the correct scenario / game type and the development dollars required to built a good interface have always been the challenge. I will use the structure of a ‘solving a bakery problem type scenario’ in some of the courses but will have to think through scenarios that will be engaging enough. Not sure if the students themselves will be able to find their own ‘problem’ to solve but might also give that a go. Will have to do more thinking on this!

Top Ten Tools

Jane Knight maintains a very good resource that brings together, on one site, resources that are useful to users of technology in education. I look forward to all of her daily postings on my bloglines.

Over the last few weeks, Jane canvassed various technology uses to name their top ten resources. Now, there is a comprehensive list of the top 100 resources voted by 100 educational technology users, with the majority of the resources being FREE. It’s a good one stop shop introduction for new comers to using technology in teaching.

I have not had the time to browse through all the individual top ten choices yet but will do so in due course. I plan to use the recommendations at a workshop that I have been invited to present at the ASTE conference in early October. ASTE is the union that represents tutors teaching at polytechnics, universities, wananga and private providers.

I expect a wide spectrum of tutors to attend the workshop, so will need to provide a broad range of tools that can be useful in helping tutors use technology not only in teaching but in administration, research and their own personal development. I am also keen to evangelise the use of technology with face to face classes. Blended learning, done in a studied manner often reaps many benefits for both students and tutors.

Starting on mLearning pilot

Nick Ford & I put in a joint application to the CPIT Foundation for funds to run the mLearning pilot. Our bid has been successful, so it is now time to put our pilot plans in place.

As a forerunner, the local paper did a write up about the project. The main goals of the pilot are to test out the various parts of our mlearning project with a cohort of first year apprentice bakers. It will be a bringing together of all the things we have learnt thus far with the various trials reported on this blog.

A couple of interesting items which I will explore in the next couple of weeks before adding into the pilot as possible eportfolio repository alternatives are:-

• Comic Life (via Thomas Cochrane’s blog that points to Joao Rivera’s blog on using comic life to chronicle boat building
• Mahara, the NZ open source eportfolio site and
• Slideshare, since a few apprentices have started to use powerpoint for their year three portfolios on gateaux / torten and breads.
  

It will be exciting times ahead!

NCVER conference - preparing teachers for elearning and elearning mentors

A couple of stimulating days at the NCVER conference in Alice Springs this week. There was a good collection of papers on various vocational education issues. Of note for this blog were a paper on web based conferencing (which also covered the need to prepare teachers for using the technology) and a paper on setting up a elearning culture within an institution (using elearning mentors).

Both of these papers remind me of the need to continually do the ground work before exposing tutors to the razzmatazz of Web 2.0 and elearning tools that I now take for granted. Food for thought as per usual.

Will extend more on the above when I get back to home.

Excellence in online teaching - what is it?

What actually makes an excellent teacher? The past couple of weeks have been filled with celebrations of my winning the supreme excellence in teaching award and caused me to think again about what excellence in teaching is about. In particular, the role of technology in learning. If technology is a tool, how do we use it in a manner that enhances excellent teaching?

One of the fears tutors have when they put their material online, is that they might loose that element of having their personality shine through. The lack of immediate feedback on whether the students understand the concepts being delivered makes it difficult for online tutors to gauge the progress of their students. Some beginning online tutors also find that they loose that ‘buzz’ that they get from teaching f2f students. I have been through all of these scenarios as an online tutor and see if again and again when I support tutors putting their courses online.

I must admit that teaching online is less satisfying in some ways. However, I am lucky to have only a small number of students and I have been able to build up a good rapport with them via email and phone conversations. Excellence in online teaching requires a different focus from f2f teaching. In particular, the way in which online content is structured and presented is important. This is the main interface the student has with a topic whereas with f2f, it is often the tutor that is the main interface. Therefore, the content has to be well thought through and the strategies that need to be used to help students engage with the content and relate to the material is paramount.

There are many ways to structure online content. My belief and learning from experience is that each subject tends to have ‘set’ ways of introducing novices to concepts important in the practice or application of that subject. However, it pays to have a good look at the content and see if it is actually the best way to approach the subject. Having a non-subject expert who understands good pedagogy is one way to take a fresh view of the subject to be converted from f2f to online delivery. I have had the privilege of being able to contribute in this way as elearning facilitator. However, the subject tutor needs to also be amenable to trying new approaches, otherwise, there is no commitment to carrying the process through. I have found that small changes need to be made over a period of time. It is less intimidating to the tutor who is converting from f2f to online teaching. As far as the students are concerned, they become accustomed to the course as it stands. As most have little experience with online learning, student evaluations tend to concentrate on the amount of content rather than the online learning experience.

I plan to transfer my existing online courses from the Blackboard platform to Moodle over the next 6 months. I have also completed a conversion of online content from elearning to mlearning delivery. Both of these present opportunities to improve on the way the current content is structured and presented. With the move to Moodle, I plan to restructure each course so that each ‘learning module’ is a ‘concept capture area’. Several of these ‘concept captures’ can then be linked together for a learning module on ‘application’. In my case, it will be to apply the theory of baking to what happens in the bakery. An example would be to have concepts like ‘ingredient functions’, ‘recipe balance’, ‘processing methods’ etc. all linked to an application ‘to produce a ‘new’ or healthier or firmer / softer / crispier etc. product.

Excellence in Tertiary Teaching Award 2007

I attended the annual NZ Tertiary Teaching Excellence Awards dinner on Tuesday.
I had been awarded one of 10 tertiary teaching excellence awards for this year. The national award follows my award for teaching excellence at the CPIT autumn graduation. CPIT’s internal nominee then puts in a portfolio towards consideration for the National award. Criteria for the portfolio includes evidence of sustained excellence in teaching practice, assessment and evaluation. I was tempted to put together an eportfolio but was advised against it, in case some of the panel were not used to working with digital media.

It was with some excitement and trepidation that I arrived at the Beehive in Wellington as one of the 10 award winners would also find out that they would be the winner of the Prime Minister’s Supreme Teaching excellence award. Each awardee receives $20,000 towards their professional development fund (or towards whatever would enhance their future learning). The winner of the supreme award receives an extra $10,000.

I then found out that I was this year’s Prime Ministers Supreme excellence in teaching award winner. Yippee! All the other awardees were very supportive and collegial. The dinner was very well organised and attended by various vice chancellors / CEOs of polytechs plus the members of the selection panel were also present. All in a good celebration of teaching excellence in Aotearoa.

The award means that I will be able to use the money from the award towards further enhancing my personal professional development. First off would be a studied look at what is available in the form of conferences on mlearning and then a plan to work out how to fit them around my teaching commitments. The money is a great help as I will not have to go through all the usual form filling related to having conferences etc. funded by my school, a big saving in time and energy for me which I can re-focus on to more productive things (like maintaining this blog!)

Technology & young adults

I have just come off a couple of energising weeks of teaching apprentices plus several good teaching sessions with my full time students this week. At the end of each teaching day, I catalogued my informal findings about the use of technology amongst apprentices (these ones were in their third & last block course) and full time students.
An example is that all the apprentices had heard of Skype and several have used it but none have it available at home (only 30% had ready access to computers at home).

A couple of days ago, George Siemens posted his thoughts on using Facebook for enhancing student learning, who writes:-
"As educators, we are often drawn to tools and spaces that have a high level of activity. If everyone has a mobile phone, we explore ways to teach with the phone. Or a large percentage of our student population has a Facebook account, we start looking for ways to use Facebook for teaching. I'm not sure our learners always agree with our urge to use their tools of communication for our goals of teaching and learning. It's a challenging line to walk - to what degree do we try and educate in the spaces in which our learners exist...or to what degree do we want our learners to come to our space (school, LMS)? Libraries and Facebook: "More librarians, however, felt that Facebook should serve as a space exclusively for students and that librarians, professors, administrators, police, and other uninvited folks should keep out." "

Plus I also attended a lunch time seminar given by one of our CPIT staff, Dr Micheal Edmonds, on why students choose to study chemistry. He surveyed year 13 school students and year 1 University of Canterbury students. Over 300 students returned the survey. One of the things he looked into was how students ‘studied’ chemistry. The use of the internet & DVDs was one category. Less than 50% of the first year university students used these digital resources to study chemistry.

All of which concurs with my informal surveys. Student / apprentices use technology (especially mobile phones) a great deal. However, technology use is focused on their leisure and social activities. Students with mp3 players use it to listen to music, NOT to podcasts of their lectures. They will use their PCs to play games, download music etc. but NOT to surf the internet for the latest trends in chocolate design.

So how can we change things? Educators need to first become familiar with the technology in order to see the possibilities. Then, they need to model the use of the technology. For instance, I had a laptop with internet access in the bakery on the day the apprentices were working on their chocolate ‘show pieces’. I showed them several sites with good photos & articles on chocolate work & examples of chocolate showpieces. The showpieces produced varied (as usual) in standards but the apprentices did get the message about layout & the need to be very clean in their displays. Also, several confirmed that they would look at the resources again in their leisure time. If I had provided the links & asked the apprentices to look at them the day before the class, the number who would actually do it would be small. The ones who would make the effort would be the ones with a passion, a burning desire to learn / improve / be better then the other.

I see that the key for me is to inculcate passion so that students become self-directed. Then everything, including the use if technology to further enhance one’s own professional development becomes easy. As a tutor, I then just need to provide the ideas and resources, the rest is done by the individual. The hard work is in igniting the passion!

Issues in mLearning & Zooming in on learning in the digital age

Another bit of ‘Easter holiday reading’ from the University of Nottingham. It’s a report of a workshop by the Kaleidoscope Network of Excellence Mobile Learning Initiative. The report collates ideas thoughts and discussions and is a good resource cum update of the current developments in the mlearning area.

I found reading through the report a good refresher plus a good anchor for reflection on the pros and cons of mlearning. I especially found the statement that ‘mobile learning applications are best viewed as mediating tools in the learning process’ to be very much where I had based my mlearning project.

Also good to see so many practitioners involved in feeding back their thoughts and perceptions. In the long run, educators still have to be the ones to lead the use of mobile technologies in learning. Our students are extremely competent users of technology for their own, usually leisure and social objectives. Some of them may baulk at educators capturing their social networking tool to use for class based exercises. However, feedback from my own students indicates that they are often curious to try out new things as well. Also anything that helps them learn more effectively in a more efficient and convenient way appeals to their way of living. I think that our role is to use their phones as a conduit for helping students to learn but that we also need to be careful how we use the phone.

I also had a read through a NZ Council of Educational Research report that studied the young NZ ‘digital age’ learner. The report is the first one of a series that will be looking into learning in the digital age. One of the findings that I have found to ring through is that digital literacy in young people spans a wide range. Some of us early ‘digital immigrants’ may actually be more digitally literate that the generation Y digital native. Just because a young person is born into a world surrounded by digital technology, does not mean that they are conversant with the whole spectrum of digital technology use. However, on the whole, young people are more comfortable with digital technology, they are not afraid to fiddle and experiment with a new piece of equipment. Therefore, before beginning on sorting out a ‘learning scafffolding’ / personal homepage / portal / dashboard project for the school, I will need to do a survey of the students to find out their depth and breathe of interaction with current digital technology.

wikinomics & becta's latest report

A book by Don Tapscot & Anthony D. Williams called Wikinomics (available via Amazon & ereader) provides a look at how business practices are being changed by the way in which commercial enterprises have started to use Web 2.0. In education, we are on the cusp of tapping into the capabilities for collaboration that are a hallmark of Web 2.0. Business enterprises have started to use the capabilities of Web 2.0 to make use of the social networking to enhance their bottom line. The story provided in the first couple of pages of the book is an illuminating example of what can happen when you share information and ask for help. It describes how, in 2000, a gold mining company used the open source idea of developing the Linux operation system to provide access via their website to all the geological information that they had available. A large prize was offered to the participant who could find the most likely place to mine for gold that would yield good returns. The data was then taken on by other geologist as well as a whole raft of students, consultants, mathematicians, experts in physics, intelligent systems, computer graphics etc. who all came up with many targets for exploration, 50% of which the company itself had not previously identified. 80% of the new targets yielded substantial quantities of gold!

The above is brought into focus by the release by Becta of volume two of their Emerging Technologies in Learning series. There are articles on emerging trends in social software in education by Lee Bryant, learning networks in practice by Stephen Downes, the challenge of new digital literacies by Jo Twist with Kay Withers, how to teach technology by Marc Prensky, computer games in education (two articles, one by Keri Facer, Mary Ulicsak & Richard Sandford & the other by Tim Dumbleton) and ubiquitious computing by David Ley. In the first volume, mobile learning, the ambient web, human computer interaction, social networking and the broadband home were covered. There is therefore a definite move towards mobility, ubiquity, social networking and Web 2.0. Aligned with the aspects of social connectivity and networking are the underlying currents for personalisation. People want to choose who they connect with and how they socialise and learning within networks.

I need to think the various concepts through so that I can better align the mlearning project I am working on towards encouraging more learning amongst my apprentice groups. How can we connect, using mobile phones as the main tool, so that individuals in the group can have access to each other’s ePortfolios. At present, downloading of the personal portals we are trialling is very difficult and expensive on mobile phones. Perhaps we need to build portfolio show and tell sessions into year 2 and 3 block courses using the facilities we have available at CPIT. Will access to viewing the ePortfolios of other apprentice lead to better portfolios, more reflection of one’s own portfolio? I think it will but the mechanism to allow this to happen needs to be easy to use, cost effective and still provide privacy for apprentices who prefer to keep their portfolio to themselves.

Also need to think through how to package the above information into an accessible form for tutors here at CPIT. Tutors with limited awareness of how the web has changed are totally overwhelmed by the new concepts. This is proving to be a barrier to their uptake of Web 2.0 type technologies to enhance their teaching as they cannot see the applications until they become familiar with at least one aspect of web 2.0 (ie blogging or using flickr or an RSS feed).

ePortfolio seminar at University of Canterbury

Yesterday, I attended a short seminar organised by the University of Canterbury. The University was piggy backing on CORE Education bringing to Christchurch, two of the speakers from the e-Portfolio conference in Wellington. They are presenting at CORE in the morning and then at UC to speak specifically on e-Portfolios in tertiary education.

The two speakers were Dr. Helen Barrett & Dr. Evangeline Harris Stefanakis. We also had chance to have a play with the New Zealand ePortfolio project, Mahara.

Evangeline’s presentation covered a good foundation of how portfolios could be constructed to allow the multiple intelligences in people to flourish. Her book on multiple intelligences and portfolios is one of the best resources on eportfolios. She provided a good number of guidelines of how to set up portfolios, underpinned by good rubrics to ensure that the learning outcomes were met and the portfolio creator’s voice came through. She pointed us to a good resource set up by LaGuardia Community College that provides staff and students with information about eportfolios and examples of eportfolios compiled by students.

Helen’s presentation in Melbourne covered why ePortfolios are the way to go due to chances in which society has been impacted on by globalisation and increasing competition from developing countries. I see that I have been thinking along similar lines but Helen puts a slightly different, more generic slant on the impact of a ‘flattening world’, the development of Web 2.0 and the need for education to keep up with these changes. Her presentation at this seminar focused on the nuts and bolts of eportfolios. A good update for me.

I was heartened with the number of CPIT staff who attended the seminar. Almost half of the audience of just over 30 people, were from CPIT with the rest from the University of Canterbury & Lincoln University. Also, most of the CPIT staff developers and staff educators were at the seminar, another good sign that the use of technology is becoming less threatening and more of a mainstream item. The two years of presenting workshops and seminars in CPIT on mlearning, use of Web 2.0 and eportfolios is starting to pay some dividends. The more people in the institution we can get on board, the faster the uptake will be. CPIT will then become an institution that is open to ideas that students pick up from their leisure activities (using social software & games) and using these to enhance learning for both students and staff.

Keynote presentation at Industry Training Federation forum

Yesterday, I presented a keynote on the Impact of technology on future skill needs: Mobile phones and workplace assessment by the Industry Training Federation (ITF).
I have presented at most of the ITF’s vocational education research forums and it is a good yearly catch up with the NZ industry training area.

The ITF is a collaborative organisation that all the Industry Training Organisations (ITOs) in NZ belong to and support. It is staffed by a small number of staff who have the brief to bring the ITOs together in a synergistic way. The ITF has completed several research projects on industry training in NZ and represents the ITOs as a collective body to lobby the NZ government for ongoing support of industry based training.

This year, there was a range of interesting papers on encouraging young people into trades based careers, workplace literacy & numeracy issues, building capacity in industry training research, forecasting skill demand and labour market information and skills development. On the research front, the ITF have connections to the National Centre of Vocational Research (NCVER) in Australia.

My keynote was the first presentation & because my project was a mashup of mLearning, ePortfolios and Web 2.0, I spent some time introducing the audience to these concepts before presenting the findings of the various trials undertaken thus far with my mLearning project. The audience was very receptive to the use of mlearning in workplace learning. There were many questions from the floor at the end of my presentation & many people caught up with me between sessions to ask more questions & to learn more about the CPIT project.

The knowledge level in the audience on technology was mixed, with some having a good handle but the majority only using technology via email and PC based applications. There was a smattering of knowledge about web 2.0 but many were not users of or contributors to Web 2.0 applications. For instance, many people recognised the name wikipedia, but did not know how it was put in place & that they could also contribute to wikipedia or set up their own wikis.

There really seems to be a niche for good ‘technology stewards’ to help bring relevant technology into areas like industry training. Many industries are users of technology in a workplace setting but not for staff training. There are also many industries where mlearning and even just msupport would be a good way to connect with and engage workplace learners. It’s an area I will bring up with the ITF in the near future.

Book Chapter on Mlearning and the workplace learner

I have been invited by Dr. Mohamed Ally to contribute a book chapter to a book on ‘mobile learning in education and training’ to be printed by Althabasca University Press. The book chapter will essentially be an expansion of my paper submitted to the mLearn 2006 conference. It will centre on the use of mLearning with workplace learners and in the use of web based resources to compile ePortfolios with mobile phones.

Re-working the original paper has caused me to realise how quickly things move in mLearning. When I wrote the paper about 6 months ago, I was still working on Windows Live as a possible ePortfolio consolidation site. We have now moved on to evaluating personal portal 2.0 sites, with Vox & Multiply being the main contenders.
I intend to test out the use of Vox & Multiply with my full time students later this month to see how rigorous they are for the purposes of setting up ePortfolios.

We have also moved on with the integration of all the collection and collation into Moodle. This process has been interesting for the eLearning team as it provided them with an opportunity / excuse to tweak Moodle and to learn more about how Moodle is put together.

I have also had a chance to look into various other sources of information on ePortfolios, Web 2.0 and personal learning systems. On the ePortfolio front, the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC), as part of their eCDF initiative, are putting in place a ePortfolio portal called Mahara. At the moment, Mahara is PC based and if the launched version is available in the next few months, I will be keen to trial it as a possible ePortfolio tool for our project as well. There is a good literature review that underpins the project which provides good background information on portfolios in general and case studies of ePortfolio use in education.

Mobile vs computer literacy

This blog on computer vs mobile literacy turned up on keitai got me thinking. I had a discussion with my year one apprentice block and my full time Certificate in Baking course to see if I could work out which one they were most literate in.

In the apprentice class, there were 12 apprentices ranging in age from 17 to mid 20s. On the computer literacy front, all except one would be pretty literate. They used computers mainly for downloading songs and videos. So they are familiar with how to download programs that would allow them to store songs, videos and then to transfer these to their phones, DVDs or CDs. Only 2 had mp3 players and none owned ipods.

Over half of them had web enabled phones but did not use them to access the www due to the cost of web surfing on the phone. Several owned two phones (a telecom one and a vodaphone one) & used which ever was the cheapest at the relevant time. Cost of access is therefore definitely an issue. It is also the reason why SMS is so popular with young people in NZ and why they do not use the phone to make voice calls. All the apprentices were on prepaid, none were on telecommunications plans. I will need to see if we are able to work out a cheap alternative / plan for educational mobile phone use so that mlearning can work more cost effectively for students in NZ.

The Certificate in Baking group were a more diverse. Ages ranged from 17 into the mid 50s. There were 10 international students in the group of 28. All the young ones under the age of 25 had a similar profile to the apprentices. They were comfortable with a computer and use them mainly for playing games and downloading songs and videos. All the students have a phone. The international students were the most technically adept and owned the widest variety of gadgets – ranging from hand held translation devices to the latest model phone to high end mp3 players and access to DVD players and computers at home. All the older students (above 25) owned a mobile phone and were more likely to use the voice functions of the phone that just SMS.

About 2/3 of the full time students were on vodaphone and the rest on telecom. 1/3 were on a plan with all the younger ones on prepaid. Just over ½ has a camera on their phone with 1/3 of these having video capability. Only 1/5 thought that they are web access via their phone. Web access is not too commonly used in NZ due to the costs involved and many mobile phone user seem to be unclear as to whether their phone had web access or not.

So I think that we are still heading down the right path with our mlearning project. SMS is still the lingua fraca so using SMS for completing formative assessments will work well. Collecting evidence using phones is achievable. We will need to check out PC familiarity by trialling the use of vox or multiply as an eportfolio collation tool with a group of students.

MoLTA 2007

I attended and presented a paper with Nick Ford at the Mobile learning technology and applications conference at the Albany Campus of Massey University on Monday 19th Jan.

It was the first NZ mLearning conference and therefore attended by a select group of just under 30 people. There was a good mix of papers beginning with Kay Fielden from Unitec presenting an interesting paper on ‘cell phones in NZ secondary schools’. She wanted to find out why IT & in particular cell phone usage was not made more use of in a school setting. Many schools in NZ ban the use of cell phones within the school grounds. She used an interesting adaptation of Prensky’s digital natives / immigrants analogy to categorise principals & teachers. Her main finding was that there was the need for a person in power within the school hierarchy to support the use of cellphones within the school & that this person did not have to be very digitally savvy but would have a good educational background to understand the issues involved.

Kathryn MacCallum from Massey has been looking into the feasibility of mobile access to discussion boards. She covered a good range of design issues related to the use of mobile technology and provided a good list of the things that need to be taken into account when customising content to mobile delivery.

Hokyoung Ryu (one of the organisers of the conference) from Massey, Albany looked at answering the question “does mlearning lead to learning?” He described the Massey project that could lead to using mobile technology as a bridge between formal and informal learning. The project used mobile technology to help new students familiarise themselves to the campus and university life. A survey of students who had made use of the technology found the students found that the provision of the technology showed that the institution provided them with support and pastoral care.

Thomas Cochrane made used of multimedia to promote the use of Web 2.0 applications via mobile to be used in the delivery and assessment of learning. He introduced the concept of the use of a ‘technology stewart’ to help put an educational slant on to the use of technology for students as well as for teachers.

David Parsons (an other organiser of the conference) delved into the software architecture issues for mlearning. He presented four generic software architecture that could be applied to mlearning including non-adaptive, adaptive (for more than one type of browser), client side & smart client with server connectivity. A bit over my head but Nick saw great possibilities with non-adaptive architecture, Moodle and our mlearning project.

Nick & I then presented our session on integrating our eportfolio work using Web 2.0 applications on to Moodle. I did the introduction of the background to our work and the Web 2.0 tools we were using. Nick then followed on from how he had customised our Moodle course site to make it clean and lean for display on a mobile phone. He also provided the tip of using Firefox and Firebug to allow the Moodle code to be displayed so that the modifications could be made to the Moodle course site display.

Anna Wingkist from Vaxjo University in Sweden presented a research study conducted at Canterbury university. The research looked into the effectiveness of using podcasting to improve learning for year one computer science students. In general, podcasting was found to be an effective, low cost & low effort supplement to lectures.

Bev Mackay form Northtec then presented her work on supporting nursing students using SMS. Again, the technique was low cost, effective and time efficient. Students also appreciated the contact. M-support will be an important part of my mlearning programme, so it is good to see the students point of view on m-support.

Mustafa Man from Trengannu in Malaysia presented his work on using a system called Smartchecker to monitor student attendance and performance. It is a PDA based system that replaces a manual system used in Malaysian schools.

Eusebio Scronavacca from Victoria University then presented his mobile phone feedback system called text-2-lrn. He uses this to enhance student interaction with lectures that have over 300 students in them. With the system, students are able to text comments and questions to the lecturer during the lecture. Students are also able to feedback answers to questions posed to them by the lecturer while the lecture is in progress. An interesting concept that goes beyond the ‘clicker’ type of feedback system that is used overseas.

Evangelising mLearning or use of technology in learning

My work over the last couple of years as a elearning facilitator plus several opportunities for me to present my findings about mlearning to staff has taught me a couple of things. Caryl Oliver, from William Angliss TAFE has brought up some salient points about bringing mlearning into the culture of a training college.

From my perspective, people will only make the time and effort to engage with the use of technology if:-

• They have to or have been told they have to. In this case, some people do the minimum to keep their heads above water. A few grasp the opportunity with open arms and thrive but many do the minimum to keep their managers happy.
• They have some external motivating force that makes them look outside the square and using technology brings with it opportunities that do not exist if they just stick with the status quo. External motivating forces could be a decline in student numbers due to more competition in the market for students or an increase in international students who need more counselling and support.
• They have an internal motivation to keep up with the play and to try out new ideas to improve learning for their students.
• They are inherently geeky / techy and enjoy exploring new methods for delivery content .
  

Without at least one of the above happening, the teaching and learning process would continue the way in which it has always taken place. The teacher shows and tells & the student imitates, practices and perhaps learns. For me, external forces pushed me into looking into alternative modes of delivery as CPIT was geographically removed from where most bakery apprentices in NZ are employed. The journey first into elearning and then into mlearning triggered my internal motivation to try to find something that would work well for my students and also help CPIT retain student numbers. So, first there was a push, & then the pull into the challenge of working out how to make things work better.

Some of the above is resonating with my Phd research as well. The first year apprentices I interviewed in 2005 had all fallen into the trade. None of them had any inclination to take up baking before they found themselves signing up into an apprenticeship. Through the end of 2006 and into 2007, I have been working through another series of interviews. The year two apprentices are progressing well but what has been enlightening is that several have found a passion for the trade. It is making a noticeable difference to their performance at work and onblock course. They have become self motivated in their learning and practice. All of them have had sort of an epiphany, a realisation that there is something in baking that likes them. This ‘fit’ into the trade is powering their work ethics, encouraging them to make the most of learning opportunities at work and outside of work and bringing into their lives, whole new fields to look into. I feel very privileged to be witnessing this as part of my research project.

One way in which we can make use of mlearning is to make use of the opportunity to 'catch' the learner in the process of workplace learning. These 'support' session could be used to help motivate the learner further in their skill learning. This can be done by using the situated learning opportunities presented when contacting the learning while they are immersed in their practice and making use of these to enhance learning.

Plans for 2007

Several good tramps away plus time with the family has provided me with time to revive, refresh & rejuvenate. 2007 should be another busy year. I have recovered from the disappointment of not being able to have the mlearning pilot funded via our ITO. I am still working on how to fund the developmental hours required to get the pilot going as it is important to do a good evaluation of the various aspects of the mlearning project.

The use of eTXT to SMS questions etc. will not be the difficult part. It’s the mashing of the various Web 2.0 applications that will present us with many obstacles /learning opportunities. The components include the archiving of portfolio evidence with our chosen CMS (Moodle) and a good showcase for the eportfolio. These will remain a constant unknown until we put the whole package through its paces. We need to do the trial with:-

• a multitude of mobile phone models,
• the two telecommunications providers in NZ, various mobile phone ‘plans’ from prepaid to monthly to ones like ‘best mate’ from Vodaphone,
• apprentices who live in rural areas (who might not have great mobile coverage),
• apprentices who have limited or no access to PCs so that the mobile phone becomes their only access to their eportfolio material and the Moodle course portal,
• apprentices who are tech savvy, and may be able to provide us with ideas on how to go about the exercise in a better way
• apprentices who are not that enthusiastic about using their mobile phones for the task of providing workplace evidence,
  

In short, I am really keen to trash out all the things that are barriers, challenges and pitfalls. All the things that the nay sayers have put forward to say that the mlearning programme will not work. I am a great believer in learning by doing. I also have faith in the ingenuity of our elearning support staff. This is tinged with pragmatism, so that if something really does not work, I am prepared to move on and try something else. Meanwhile, it’s important to keep up with what is continually coming up on the Web 2.0 horizon as these provide us with:

• a pool from which we can draw our eportfolio compiling resources
• ideas of on how to better use web 2.0 sites for archiving evidence or collating eportfolios
• other ways in which we could go about collecting, archiving or collating evidence
• better methods to integrate mobile phones to Web 2.0 sites
• more cost effective /time effective way to do things
• cheaper alternatives to mobile web browsing

Getting back into work mode. Thinking about iPhone & Web 2.

I have had a quiet & relaxing holiday. A couple of good tramps in Kahurangi National Park & on the West Coast (despite the desultory weather) have recharged my mental arsenal. Will be away next week on Stewart Island for another tramp. It should give me time to sort out my plans for 2007.

Meanwhile, I have been catching up with relevant mlearning / elearning type articles and events. Primary of these would be the launch of Apples iPhone this week. The launch has been extensively reported in our local media including a front page photo in the Press (Christchurch paper) & on the TV news. However, what has brought the launch into focus has been the reaction of my daughter (& her friends). The iPhone is already on their list of ‘things to save up for’. They will have at least a year as the iPhone is not scheduled to arrive in NZ until early 2008. They are already enamoured by the overall coolness of the iPhone’s design (thin & slim is in), its colour / feel (although none of them have held one yet) & the ‘funky’ interface (no buttons, touch screen & brilliant display).

Apple is making a calculated move into the mobile computing market because that is one of the futures of computing. Steve Jobs reckons on getting at least 1% of the mobile phone market (currently 2 billion mobile phones have been sold) and Apple shares have gone up since the iPhone’s launch. It all bodes well for mlearning & provides some impetus for me to continue on our mlearning project.

The other area that is growing & becoming more mainstream is the rise and rise of Web 2.0 applications. Earlier on this week, there was a TV news article about car surfing. One of the reasons car surfing is growing is the number of people who take videos of themselves car surfing and then putting the videos up on youtube. I went out for a walk with a few friends who are ‘non techy’ & they wanted to know what youtube was. When I explained the concept & expounded on flickr & blogging etc. they were keen enough to discuss the topic at length. They had all come across the concept of blogging (its been in the news quite a bit) and the concept of social networking. This is another indicator that Web 2.0 applications are now becoming much more mainstream. Even though the majority of people are not using them, they are aware that blogs & the ability to put your photos on the web exist.

2006 reflections

How has the year gone? Or should I say, where has the year gone? I have just re-read my blog from the beginning of the year to see if I have made any progress on making use of mobile phones and Web 2.0 applications to set up eportfolios. I think that I have made some progress, enough to make a bid with our ITO to set up a pilot for using mobile phones to complete theory of baking units and to collect workplace based evidence with mobile phones. However, the bid has been unsuccessful. My school is now not prepared to support work on mlearning until a review is undertaken to see if there are other avenues we can use to deliver learning & workplace assessment completion to apprentices in the workplace.

I am disappointed at the outcome. Also frustrated at the lack of support for what I can see is an initiative that can have wide reaching application for trades based training. One of the arguments put in place is that the numbers in baking are too small to warrant investing in expensive development time. Point taken but the numbers involved are also ideal for running a pilot plus with a group of young people representative of workplace based training.

The registration of new National Qualifications in Baking has proceeded at a snail’s pace. The new qualifications are now just about to be registered, a year to get them through the ITO & NZQA hurdles! We need to put in place some way of assessing apprentices in the workplace that does not cost us or the apprentice too much.

I now realise the limitations of mobile phones & Web 2.0 applications and am focused on working around these challenges. I am optimistic that most of the limitations will disappear or become obsolete as mobile phone & Web 2.0 applications improve, innovate further and become even more user friendly. However, with no funding support for the interim, it will be a case of chug along on whatever time becomes available.

It also still leaves the question of whether mlearning is the path to take. From the start, we have understood that travelling out to apprentices to complete their workplace based assessments would not be financially viable. A really easy option would be to just have a ‘tick & flick’ logbook type option. Apprentices come to us with a list of products ticked off (by their employer) & they undertake a practical assessment at block course. If they do not make the grade, then they have not met competency. We could insist on photos being added to the ‘logbook’ but the question of authenticity arises when the evidence is being moderated. With mlearning, the date / time the photo was archived would be recorded, our plans were to contact the apprentice at some of these occasions to set up a ‘situated learning’ opportunity. We would know that the apprentice is working with a certain product based on the photos they were posting on to flickr or similar. At our next fortnightly check on them, we could go through the underlying knowledge questions linked to the product to see how well they are actually understood how to put things together.

Anyway, I am looking forward to the summer. A few good tramps will help me recollect my thoughts & reflect on alternative delivery methods to mlearning. I will still continue blogging as many of the tools I have discovered (like personal portals) are useful in my teaching context. I plan to use vox to set up scenarios on competency judgement for hospitality students and pageflakes to help novice bakers build scaffolds that will help them keep up with their learning during their full time programme. Plus, I will still maintain investigation into mlearning as I am ever the optimist!

Moving mLearning forward

I have been thinking about how to move on with mlearning over the last couple of months. This has come about as my mlearning trials have started to pay off and I now have firmer ideas of how to go about delivering mlearning supported distance learning courses & mlearning based eportfolio compilation. Next year, we will pilot what we have been trialling. I will be evaluating and re-evaluating the various ways in which we will go about delivering the courses & compiling eportfolios.

I have been dipping in & out of several books on eportfolios, globalising and ubiquitous computing over the year. They are all providing me with food for thought so that I can work at sorting out how we can move mlearning further along.

Thomas L. Friedman “”The world is flat” is a good read about the way in which technology is changing society and the pace at which globalisation is moving. From an educator’s point of view, it opens up many challenges and possibilities.

Adam Greenfield’s “Everyware: the dawn of ubiquitious computing “is another interesting read. His concept of ubiquitous computing predicts that we will be surrounded by ‘smart buildings, smart furniture, smart clothing’. We will be wireless, networked and tagged whether we want to or not. I am not sure if I will want to be as connected as the image he portrays. However, parts of the future he envisions are already with us. We can either ignore it, allow it to creep into our lives or keep up with the play & contribute to the concept in a more educated way.

Elizabeth Hebert’s “Power of Portfolios” & Deborah Meire & others “multiple intelligences & portfolios” are both books that provide examples of how portfolios are used to build up rapport with students and to allow the narrative of the student’s learning to come through in the form of the portfolios that they have put together.
This is also supported by work by many in early childhood & primary education, an example from Buckland’s Beach School in Auckland being Ian Fox’s learning to learn model.

These are three different but intertwined areas. John Seeley Brown’s work provides some direction for educators. He brings together ideas learnt from many organisations on now to ‘manage knowledge’ and increase innovation to counter some of the disadvantages wrought by globalisation on developed countries. Some of solutions involve the use of socially networked software (much of Web 2.0) and the ability to harness the power of many. Eportfolio’s are one way for individuals to collate their strengths (especially innovation and creativity) into an accessible form that can be readily showcased.

The Press (local Christchurch paper) had a front page article on how schooling would change in the next 20 years. (oct. 12th 2006) They were summarising a report made to the Ministry of Education about the future of education in NZ. There was a distinct move to student centred learning and a move away from the current ‘factory’ model of schooling. mLearning mashed with Web 2.0 applications are one way to provide ready made / relatively low cost tools for progressing the vision of schooling without walls.

Promise fo Web 2.0 for mLearning

A light teaching load this week but I am catching up on all the usual paperwork that has piled up. Interspersed with wrestling with spreadsheets & trying to work out where the $$ have been spent on our various research projects, I have been browsing the net in an effort to update myself on what is happening out there in Web 2.0 development land.

What I have found so far has been heartening. In particular, I see a real move towards ubiquity in the way information is accessed. Mobile seems to be the way in which many Web 2.0 applications are focused and all of this only means good news for the pilot I will be working on next year.

Stephen Downes article on eLearning 2.0 summarises many of the developments on the WWW that have and will impact on how we learning takes place in both formal and informal learning environments. It’s a good article to read for background. Recent blogs by both Will Richardson & Derek Wenmouth lament the slow movement of the use of IT into the formal education area. Both of these bloggers also show the many ways in which the WWW could be used to held enhance learning. Will blogging recently on the uses of blogs in research, pageflakes as student portal and wikis & Derek with his thoughts on personal learning environments & ePortfolios.
Unfortunately, as I have learnt time & time again with staff presentations, the majority of teaching staff are still unaware about what Wikis or personal portals are, let alone how to use them in helping their students engage with learning at a more personal level.

I caught up with Ajit Joakar’s article, summarising how mobile devices and Web 2.0 could work together to change the world as we now know it. It provides for an optimistic picture for the future of mLearning using Web 2.0 applications. I also found & read the blog on whether mobile 2.0 will rival Web 2.0 which provides some reality in the form of the usual questions about the closed nature of mobile due to the constrains put on the phones by telecommunications providers. There is a way still to go but VoIP, WIFI & sheer consumer pressure to have these services will coax manufactures and telecoms providers towards cheaper and more use friendly mobile phone browsing of the WWW.

It’s surely interesting times ahead for all educators who are pushing the envelope with regards to using Web 2.0 type applications via mobile phones.

mLearn2006 presentations now available

The presentations from mLearn2006 are now available online.

My presentation can also be downloaded via the above site or via this direct link.

Evangelising ePortfolios

I presented a session on ePortfolios @CPIT to the PASM forum yesterday evening. This is a group of principal academic staff members (PASMs) who are promoted to the position through proven academic leadership at a national / international level. This year, staff development at CPIT convened several forums (there are others for Heads of Schools, programme leaders, administrative managers etc. ) to try to move the institution towards a more horizontal way of communicating as many vertical silos of subject and administrative expertise had become entrenched throughout the institution.

My presentation centred on what ePortfolios were about and how they could be useful in capturing the reflective part of learning (both formal & informal). I set up a ePortfolio using Blackboard (took about half an hour). The scenario was to use staff promotion as an example. On the Blackboard site, I included sections for a CV, areas for archiving evidence of expert standing in one’s discipline or subject area and teaching practice. In each of these areas, I put in links to Word documents reflecting on why I had used the various pieces of evidence and included evidence in the form of papers / powerpoint presentations at conferences, links to other blogs / web pages that mention my presentations, photos of white board work and a video taken at FLNW by Stephen Parker.

Apart from the above, I also provided examples of how personal portals could be used to bring together an ePortfolio and discussed examples of how these could be used for other teaching and learning uses. These include:

-using something like Pageflakes to set up RSS feeds pertinent to an evolving area for study

-using Vox to set up a teaching resource to build up scenarios for students to access for critique of analysis. I plan to use this methodology to build up a ‘collection’ of ePortfolios to use with students I teach for a unit on ‘assessing a candidate performance using standards’. I am never sure whether students understand how they get to the stage of making a judgement on whether a performance is competent or not yet competent. I plan to have students view several ePortfolios, make a judgement and then reflect on how they came about their decision. In the past, I have been using role plays but the role plays are ephemeral, subjective one-off arrangements and students unused to observing others working do not have time to make a studied judgement, let alone be able to reflect on their judgement.

-Using Vox and Multiply as ePortfolio collators

I received good feedback. It was especially good to articulate my options for personal portals as I have only started looking into them in greater depth. I will have more time to play with the personal portal sites over the summer and will record other uses I find for using them in my teaching.

Portal 2.0 for setting up ePortfolios

Over the last week, I have been evaluating several ‘personal portal’ / portal 2.0 type sites and comparing them with Windows live, the original site I have been looking at using. All of the the sites look very promising, with each site providing opportunities for setting up a good collection of photos, links to blogs, RSS feeds etc.
So here is a ‘first impression’ viewpoint of them.

Pageflakes - Had a nice email from Ole Brandenburg from Pageflakes, encouraging me to set up an account and have a look. Pageflakes is similar to Windows Live, in that is is an aggregation page. It allows you to set up links to a host of other Web 2.0 applications including del.ico.us, flickr and metacafe & youtube video. You can also link up with Google search, Google maps and add feeds from various popular news and techie journals or put I your own feeds.

There are also ‘flakes’ for address book, a dictionary, to do list, chat, sending SMS and email. There are 110 flakes to choose from. Setting up a page with the flakes you need takes a few minutes and the process is very intuitive. Will Richardson describes an interesting way of using pageflakes RSS feed to set up a site that provides students up to date / regularly updated information about topical world issues.

Vox – a personal blogging tool from Movable type. It provides an easy to use interface to blog, store your photos, videos, music, book lists etc. For photos, you can upload from your computer or link to flickr, photobucket & iStockphoto. Videos can be linked to your computer or Amazon, youtube & ifilms. There is also an interesting tool to set up ‘collections’ which could be photos, videos, music etc based around certain topics. This makes Vox quite usable as a eportfolio site as each collection could be an eportfolio with the evidence collated from the photos, videos or blogging area.

Multiply – like Windows Live but allows imports from Flickr, Yahoo, Shutterfly, Kodak live gallery & Windows live. Photos can be emailed directly to multiply so it is possible to email photos from a mobile phone. There is a good interface but not as easy or as fast to use as the others.

Netvibes – provides many RSS feed type links plus links to your email, flickr, writely account etc. This has a more crowded look. It looks very much like my personalised Google page with a similar range of feeds.

All the above sites, are accessible on my Treo 650 using Opera Mini – a java enabled browser. However, not of them display well. I will therefore do some further work on evaluating theses and pick out 2 to 3 to use in our pilots for next year.

mlearn2006 - another perspective

Checking through my sitemeter this morning and came across Bob Harrison's report on mlearn2006 on the UK handheld learning site. He has detailed many presentations that I did not manage to get to & provides a good review of keynotes & panel discussions as well.

efest 2006 presentation now online

My presentation at efest titled 'mlearning with work place based apprentices:- trials, tribulations and triumphs now available via the conference presenter's bio page in .pdf & powerpoint formats.

It summarises the reasons I am focusing on using mobile phones and some educational applications that are currently viable on mobile phones. Findings from the various trials undertaken so far are also detailed. These include question types suitable for dissemination using SMS, evaluation of Web 2.0 applications and the things we have thus far been able to incorporate into Moodle.

More on mlearn2006

I am still catching up on paperwork etc. along with teaching various classes since getting back to work at the beginning of this week. However, I have had some time to digest many of the things that took place during mlearn 2006. So here is a summary of the ones I need to keep in mind.

Multiple uses for hand held devices. I was very taken by Tony Tin’s display of handheld devices each day at morning / afternoon tea breaks. He had tweaked the devices to display pdf files, videos etc. when the original devices were not actually configured to display these files. Hacking the devices does void one’s warranty but if the hacks are not difficult to perform, they provide students with option of using one device (their gameboy, ipod or PDA) to display content that does not normally display on their device. His current favourite is the Sony MyLo (my life online) which allows WiFi access to the net, has built in Skype and is also a MP3 music & video player. However, the Sony MyLo seems to be only available in the US of A.

Mediaboard. I had a good lunch time conversation with Jo Colley from Tribal. The main purpose of mediaboard is to act as a mlearning LMS or CMS, but the possibilities for using it as a eportfolio repository needs to be explored. There are also other mlearning tools showcased, many of them for PDAs but mobile phones are starting to make an impact with developers as well.

Personal Learning Environments (PLEs). Connie Missimer from Microsoft presented an ethnographical study of students using a Tablet PC. She was interested in my use of Windows Live for forming eportfolios & will be emailing me some contacts to see how Windows Live could be made more user friendly for mobile phone users. At the moment, I am also looking at various collaboration / collation sites suggested by Derek Wenmouth PLEs. These include vox, multiply & pageflakes. All look very promising but do not have mobile options as yet. It is heartening to see more of these sites coming up as it means that sooner rather than later, a mobile option will come up.

mlearn day 3

The gala dinner last night was well attended despite the weather changing to rain. We were treated to a good meal & a wonderful display of first nation dancing including the spectacular hoop dance (picture of hoop dancer at bottom of page). Day 3 dawned fine with a cold Northerly wind.

I have had to choose one presentation out of six at each session. There were several papers I would have liked to also have attended but will need to catch up with them once the conference proceedings have been published. I find attending presentations bring life to papers which are often couched in academese. The personalities of the presenters does not shine through in many academic papers, so I find that attending the presentations brings better focus to my later reading of the actual papers.

The day starts with a 2 hour panel discussion on cultural perspectives from around the world convened by Jill Attewell.
Elizabeth Hartnell-Young (now based in at Nottingham, UK) provided the Australian perspective on mlearning.
Herman van der Merwe gave a South African overview & in particular the need of low cost, easily accessible, low threshold applications.
Mike Sharples presented the UK view, starting with the historical background that in the UK, learning taking place in the community & lifelong learning would have be active in the UK from 300 years ago. Mlearning provides greater opportunities for people learning in their communities to share knowledge with a wider audience than before. Check out http://www.infed.org/ on the informal learning network.
Tak-Wai Chan’s 10 minute powerpoint on the Asian perspective provided a great deal of information . Asian countries are producing most of the hardware for mlearning & many Asian governments (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore) have put in policies to introduce mlearning into schools. Many interesting examples were provided on the application of mlearning.
Rory McGreal talked about the North American viewpoint. He posited that due to less discrepancy between the cost of voice & text communications in North America, that the North Americans would bypass the SMS stage & move more fully into the development of 3G based mlearning applications. An example is the elibrary that has been developed at Athabasca University which provides free content not only in the form of text but also in all other forms of digital media.
During the questioning session, the following were brought up:-
the cost of using mobile phones came out. The cost of both voice and text messaging is actually very low, it is the price that is high! So it is important for educational organizations in individual countries to lobby their telecommunications providers for cheaper prices.

What would be the next killer application for mobile learning. Mike thought that language learning using games on mobile devises would push the use of mobile learning in the far east. A member of the audience suggested that it would be using browsers on mobile devices. Another suggested the importance of ensuring that there was interoperability between various devices, applications and systems.

There was agreement that the device that would support future mlearning would be the current 3G phone & the future 4G phone. However, there was a need for phones to have better battery life, more memory, better screen displays and the ability to Bluetooth data to peripherals like data projectors & printers easily.

Last presentation was from James Wen from Positive Motion on user-interface techniques for using flash-cards on small mobile devices. He took on the view that the limitations provided by small screen size, limited keyboard etc. actually made the production of customised user interfaces easier.

The conference was officially closed with a keynote from Dr. Mohamed Ally on mobile learning bridging the learning divide. The digital divide is disappearing but the learning divide has now appeared. Who is going to help provide learning material for mobile learning to take place?

Mlearn2006 was then handed over to mlearn2007 to be held in Melbourne from 16th to 19th October. Caryl Oliver & Elizabeth Hartnell-Young invited delegates to meet next year at the Melbourne Convention Centre.

After lunch, the first annual general meeting of the International Association for Mobile Learning (AML) was held.

mlearn2006 day 2

Well, day 2 dawned fine and clear, 3 fine days in a row. I have started to look at the mountains surrounding Banff with some longing. However, day 2 brought with it another batch of interesting presentations. Writing this for blog is a good way for me to reflect on the presentations before the next batch arrives tomorrow! I am writing each section of this blog as each presentation takes place. WIFI access to the web is patchy but sufficient for me to search for and insert hyperlinks.

We began the day with a keynote from Dr. Tom Brown from South Africa. He presented the conference with the challenge of whether we are developing mlearning for the present generation or for the generation that is just now coming into the education system. In particular, we should be working at anticipating what future generation’s learning needs will be. He provided a good overview of Netgen learning needs along with developments in mobile devices, new learning paradigms & new challenges for educators.

I attended the following sessions
Designing a digital internet & mobile phone e-learning environment (DIMPLE) is a concept designed by Diana Andone & presented by Dr. Jon Dron from the University of Brighton in the UK. The design of DIMPLE was based on interviews of young people in the UK, Romania, Finland & Hungary. DIMPLE allows transfer of data between mobile phone (including SMS), PC, Ipod on to a learning environment that includes WIKIs, blogs, forums, IMS, VOIP etc. (integrating many Web 2.0 applications) along with usual learning platforms (email, calendar, diary etc). Its a start at developing a personal learning environment (PLE).

Using mobile to improve the quality of clinical nursing education was presented by Richard Kenny & Caroline Park from Athabasca University & Jocelyne Van Neste-Kenny & Pam Burton, nursing tutorial staff from North Island College, Vancouver Island. They described the pre-study that they have taken to support a pilot mlearning project in 2007. They included a review of the literature of the use of mlearning in health care & nursing that found that PDA use has “exploded” – mainly in the use of pharmacology. This was followed by a study of the needs for nursing education to see if mlearning could meet some of the needs that changes in nursing practice caused by a greater need for community care have brought about. A mobile solution was seen to be feasible due to students being scattered across a wide part of the Vancouver area, with many practicing in isolated communities that can only be reached by boat.

After lunch, I attended another health related technical showcase presentation with Maria Parks & Mark Dransfield (York St. John College) on the topic of using moblogging to support health studies students in the UK. They are using moblogging to assist with the assessment of work placed practice in a clinical setting. The project was to see how well mobile phones would work for the task & to see if their anticipated outcomes (reduction of paperwork, electronic record, enhanced relations between tutor & workplace based educators & targeted support for workplace base educators from the college). A video demonstrating how moblogging worked was used to introduce students on how to use a Imate SP5 phone to blog on blogger.com and flickr. Students had to set up Email, blogger & flickr accounts on the phones. To resolve problems with inputting text using a mobile phone, Bluetooth portable QWERTY keyboards were also offered as an option. students using the Bluetooth keyboards produced fuller sentences (11 pages compared to 3 pages for mobile keyboard) & reflections were in greater depth.

Ilias Lazardis & Matthias Meisenberger from Austria presented eLibera, a mobile learning engine (MLE). This allows multi-media learning to be distributed to almost every Java-enabled (J2ME) mobile phone. It works in place of the browser on the mobile phone. The MLE allows content to be uploaded on to the phone. Then while off line, content can be viewed and formative assessments can be completed. Links to mobile WIKIs, blogs or forums and also mobile wikispedia, news, ebooks etc. are also accessible. A very promising application which we will need to try out. It is supposed to work with a Treo 650, so I will need to test this out when I get back to NZ.

Next a session on knowledge transfer in mobile learning presented by Allan Knight from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Looked at mlearning as not just a subset of d or elearning but a form of learning that uses tools that provide mobility, ubiquity & accessibility. Therefore, mlearning can be used to extend interaction, build learning communities & for the transfer of knowledge. However, performance feedback (are they engaged, are they using the content etc) might be missing for the students & the teacher.
Developed a Moodle module called Moodog (a performance based feedback system (PBFS) that tracks student access / participation to various parts of the course. Students are encouraged to look at the graphs on Moodog so that can find out what other students on the course are engaging with.

Last session of the day was on using a SMS based querying system for mlearning. Presented by Dr. Dunwei Wen from Althabasca University. Their premise was to extend the uses of SMS as it was a popular medium in some countries for mobile phone use. The querying system would provide the possibility to allow SMS to be used for searching content or to set up glossaries. Searches can be made from an existing knowledge base or via the internet. This extends the use of SMS beyond its traditional usage & provides a way for students to ask FAQ type questions.

A very enriching day from my point of view. Several ways in which I could use the ideas from several presentations already percolating in my brain. All of them are generally easy to put into place and cost effective.

mlearn2006 day1

Had a very busy & productive first day. Several enlightening presentations led to a few ‘light bulb on’ moments for me. Also met several interesting people during the wine & cheese on Sunday evening, so one of my objectives to network is a short way towards being met.

First impressions are that there are more papers on mobile phones this year. There was also more work on the use of location based mobile learning being presented with variants on geo-caching / treasure hunting / links to google maps (but no one has mentioned frappr as yet), tagging plus locational social linking (ie you tag that you are interested in mlearning and when someone with the same tag is near you, both of you will be texted) and barcode recognition cum location specific technical information (ie if looking for specific article in store/warehouse, the barcode will generate not only the items name but any important precautions for handling the article etc.).

The day opened with a key note from Mary Lou Jepsen, one of the directors for the $100 laptop / a laptop for every child project. I enjoyed the talk as it again showed how much can be done when there is a concerted effort combined with support from suppliers and various funding bodies. Their timeline is to release 5 million laptops to 5 countries by mid – 2007 and then 50 to 100 million laptops in the following year! The laptop features many innovations that including an improved screen that is cheaper to produce but is still viewable under sunlight conditions.

I attended the following sessions:-
Marguerite Koole from Athabasca University session was on the comparison of various mobile learning devises. It gave me some good evaluative points for choosing mobile learning devices for distance learning. Also an interesting Venn diagram bringing together the aspects of flexibility, portability, usability and student learning needs to encompass the social, physical and cognitive dimensions of mlearning.

Dr. David Metcalf from Walden University and Nova Southeastern University gave an interesting overview of renaissance mlearning – making the best use of existing mobile applications in new ways. These included using bar code readers for workplace learning (walking into a specific area or scanning a certain product produces formative assessment activity), CMA codes and their uses in treasure hunt type scenarios and access to technical information that includes the use of blogs to keep technical information up to date.

Then a session by Glenda Nalder & Alexis Dallas from Griffith University on personalizing mlearning to individual learner needs.

Followed by a lively session from Adele Botha, on the Mobiled project. Using a mobile phone to create a Wiki textbook on science principles by South African secondary school students. As there were 54 different models of cell phones, the textbook was constructed using SMS and then later brought together by the students on to a wiki set up on wikispaces.

The session by David Whyley & Terry Russell reported on a large scale implementation of PDAs in primary schools in Wolverhampton, UK. David made a very interesting remark about the first cohort of students born into the 21st century starting school this year (it would have been 2005 for many young Kiwis). We need to think about whether education in the 21st will now prepare young people for their working lives in the 21st century. Their project – Learning2go seems to have been successful in engaging young people in to doing much of their own learning with good examples shown of student work that exhibited good understanding of basic principles using the tools provided with each student’s PDA.

My presentation was one of 6 slotted into the last session for the day. All went well and good questions were generated with several people staying back to have a chat. I think the use of Web 2.0 applications will change the way they will approach mlearning and lead to more interesting work on eportfolios.