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.

Looking forward to mlearn2006

I leave NZ in a couple of days & am looking forward with excitement and some trepidation to my trip across to North America for the mLearn2006 conference. I need to put down some goals that I would like to achieve so that my trip is more focused and I come back with concrete objectives completed.

I do not enjoy long air flights. Being confined me to a small space for a long a time is not something I enjoy. Hence my travels thus far have been limited to frequent short trips across the ditch to Oz & obligatory trips back to Singapore to catch up with family. As with other trips, I have set up several items that I plan to catch up while on the plane. I have downloaded several ebooks on to my Treo plus photocopied readings etc. pertinent to the three research projects I am working on so that I can do a bit of a catch up. Keeping my brain busy will help while away the time.

My itinerary includes:-

• A few days in Los Angeles with my aunty and uncle. They immigrated to the U S or A 27 years ago. Apart from catching up with them, I will be visiting several artisan bread bakeries and farmers’ markets.
• Next will be a couple of days in Calgary with friends. R. is an academic researching road safety who has lived in 6 countries in the last twenty years. Always interesting to catch up with R. & his wife S. as they represent the ‘travelling academic family’. Their views on life in various countries is always refreshing as they can take on an observers viewpoint while being part of the country that they live in.
• A week at Banff for mlearn 2006 follows
• Then three days in Vancouver, staying with my mother’s cousin plus visit to Vancouver Community College and other foodie places.

I see that Gary Sewell from Hunter Institute of TAFE & Caryl Oliver from William Angliss TAFE will be presenting as well. It will be good to catch up with them on their mlearning projects.

Things I would like to achieve for my mlearning project include:-

• Find best practice examples of converting content to mlearning on mobile phones
• Look out for anyone else doing any work with integrating Web 2.0 applications to mlearning
• Find out if there is anyone else thinking of using mobile phones to coordinate eportfolios
• Brush up on mlearning operating systems and mobile phone programming software
• See the latest offered on PDA platforms & work out if relevant to mobile phones
• Source LMS or CMS that others have used for mlearning and information on assess, compatability, usability, costs etc.
• Make contact with hardware suppliers to see if there are possibilities for collaboration with piloting out eportfolio trials next year
• Allow serendipity to do its thing
• Network, network, network
  

Thoughts from efest 2006

Had a busy and enriching time in Wellington for efest 2006 last week. There was a thought provoking keynote by Steven Downes on the difference between groups and networks. The next day, we had Diane Obinger’s live streaming video keynote from the US of A. A good demonstration of technology working to lower the boundary of distance. Her quick fire presentation provided a great overview of how we should be asking our students about how they would like to see their learning structured and the role of learning spaces in helping to bring about a change in the teaching styles of teachers.

Also managed to catch up with the open space conf. for networked learning, On Thurssday they had set up an open space in one of the rooms for a couple of hours and people could come in and engage with the participants of the networked learning road show. I met up with Alex Hayes and we had a very fruitful conversation with regards to his work with rural aboriginal communities in Australia and my work on mlearning.

Efest has certainly grown each year I have attended. The number of presentations has increased and generally, all the speakers were well prepared and the topics were well thought through. There was also plenty of opportunity for networking starting with a breakfast session at 7.30am, lunch time forums and a drinks cum nibbles session at the Loaded Hog (sponsored by Catalyst) on Thursday evening. Along the way, there was morning & afternoon tea plus many of the sponsors had set up booths with their wares for conference participants to have a look at.

During this conference, I saw much more information and awareness of social net working and Web 2.0 type applications as compared to last year. At a panel discussion on Friday afternoon (moving technology), I raised the question about where the panel thought web 2.0 applications would be going. The range of replies was very interesting. Some institutions were unable to readily access Web 2.0 tools due to the nature of their network’s firewalls. There was also agreement that many Web 2.0 tools were put on line to gauge the market for the product. Once there was an established pool of users, there would often be a charge for an upgraded form of the tool. The tools that did not attract the requisite number of users were likely to suddenly disappear, leaving the students who had been using the tool (& the tutor who was relying on the material to assess it) stranded.

A couple of invited speakers inspired me. Meegan Hall from Cultureflow gave a down to earth description of how their business filled a market niche for learning Maori and then went on to adapt their product to help learners of other languages. Her can-do attitude epitomised the Kiwi ‘have a go’ capacity. Hazel Gamec and Lin Yew Cheang from Wanganui School of Design presented Lin Yew’s work on interactive audio – visualisation. His work on the manipulation of icons on a computer screen along the lines of the movie Minority Report was visually beautiful. His concept of using icons as a form of language was also very interesting. They provided a glimpse into the possibilities for the future when interaction with a computer would become much more intuitive and pictograms / icons may be used as a form of communication.

FLNZ future of a networked world

I had a great time at the Christchurch meeting of the FLNZ future of a networked world open space conference held at the Christchurch College of Education yesterday morning. Apart from the prospect of catching up with other elearning practitioners in Christchurch, there was the opportunity to meet up with and have in-depth discussions with the group of experts who are travelling around to each of the meetings.

Reflecting on the experience yesterday evening as I biked home, I realised that the title chosen for the meeting was extremely appropriate. We were not only networking f2f during the meeting, but also:-

• seeing examples of how to network with others via Web 2.0 tools,
• learning how to set up networks ourselves for our colleagues and students and
• actually tapping into the power of many people learning together.

I saw how Barbara Dieu was working with blogs to help her Brazilian students learn English. She was building a sound community of student learners as they blogged their way through the various projects she set up for them to do. We had a good discussion about the merits of blogger vs wordpress. We also looked at how she used 43 places and 43 things to enhance the way in which her students could build network swith other students in the United States to help them improve their English.

Leigh Blackall then pointed me to a discussion he had with Tony Hepinstall , a chef tutor at Otago Polytechnic. An interesting concept of using a mobile phone to access a Wiki and then for the student to listen (or read and then perhaps comment or add to) the Wiki entry.

The above idea coming via Tomi Leinonen MobilED project for using a mobile phone as a form of audio encyclopaedia that could be accessed by anyone with phone capable of sending a SMS. Tomi was also helpful with regards to my mportfolio project, pointing me to several other possible areas to explore. More of these once I have had time to look into them further!

Stephen Parker introduced me to the network learning space set up for TAFE teachers and in particular, the one set up for tourism and hospitality. All of these are set up on Wikispaces so that everyone who signs up for each ‘learning space’ is able to contribute to the network. This will be an area I will be exploring further over the weekend and will introduce to the tutors in the School of Food & Hospitality.

All in a very productive morning, a big thank you to Otago Polytechnic & especially to Leigh for making it all happen. I will keep in touch with the group’s journey as they make their way down the North Island and look forward to catching up with everyone again at efest.

moving mportfolios forward

I am still working through the basic setup of our eportfolios. I am working on principles provided by Love, McKean & Gathercool (2004). In particular, I am not keen to see the eportfolios being put together by apprentices as being only level 1 portfolios – just a repository of products they make, along with a few recipes and comments. I would like to move the eportfolios that our apprentices will be producing up to at least a level 3. This means that the portfolio is open to both the tutor and the student. The tutor will then take steps to help the student reflect more on their evidence to work out which images, recipes or descriptions are most relevant to particular competencies that the student is working through. Basically making use of cognitive apprenticeship principles to help apprentices work how how to go about constructing evidence of their journey from apprentice to baker.

If we take one product line as an example, I would not want to just see a photo of the final product, but some photos, videos or aural descriptions of some of the steps taken to produce the product. The recipe should not just be a list of ingredients, but also a detailed description of the method along with the nuances the apprentice has picked up as to how the product will be produced. So the instruction – mix the dough until it is clear and well-developed – might be accompanied by a photo of a well developed dough plus a description (text or aural) as to why the dough in the picture is actually well – developed. Something along the lines of, “the dough is smooth & silky. It is easy to stretch it out to form a thin sheet of dough. The consistency and the temperature of the dough is suitable for making “xyz product” because ……”

I suppose that I am trying to capture the essence of what it is that differentiates a good baker from a competent baker. A good baker uses all their senses to produce high quality products (often in large volume) to a consistently high standard each time. When I talk to third year apprentices, I am often trying to work out if they are good or just competent. My decision is often based on an a build up of my observations of the apprentice’s work methods, the products they make and the way in which they respond to questions I ask them. My decision is then based on my intuitive judgement. The difference between good & competent is often difficult to pin down but I believe that eportfolios, assembled with guidance and care, will help showcase skills, knowledge, attitudes and the convergence of these characteristics.

Therefore, my long term goal is to move the eportfolios into a level 5 scenario. So that the eportfolio becomes “an authentic / authoritative evidence that links the contents of the folio to standards, programmes and other descriptors, including higher order taxonomies.”

Web 2.0 & eportfolios

Over the last month or so, Helen Barrett has been exploring and evaluating some newer eportfolio tools. She has started to assess the use of Web 2.0 type applications as generic platforms for the collection and collation of eportfolios. On her last two blogs this month, she has been looking at WIKIs and the concept of elearning 2.0. Her blog for August the 5th looks specifically at the use of Web 2.0 tools for eportfolios.

It will be interesting to keep an eye on her work as she starts using Web. 2.0 applications to build eportfolios. The number of tools available for aggregating various digital items has been growing. At the moment, I am trialing Windows Live Spaces which is in beta at the moment. I am able to transfer photos from my PC on to my own customised Windows Live page quite easily. It is also possible to sent photos in using a mobile phone. The Window’s live page also allows you to build up a blog, store contact details for your friends, archive your music, online games and book list.

At the moment, the page does not download well on to my Treo, I am hoping that it might not be too long before a mobile accessible version is available. The interface is relatively easy to use & there is space for the collection of visual evidence. The blog area provides an area to enter text, so overall, a good example of what is possible for a eportfolio user interface.

The European Institute of eLearning site provides good resources about eportfolios. A good link to eportfolios tools including commercial and open source tools is porvided. I have only had a brief look at the open source ones, some of them are dated but there are many that have ideas that we can work on at CPIT. Some of these ideas will need to be put together when we sort out a Moodle test site as a customised eportfolio site for our students to use.

I am therefore keen to move forward into the next step of our trials. Collecting evidence on a mobile phone & archiving the evidence on various mobile accessible applications like flickr & filemobile seems to be straight forward. We have also experimented with audio & video files from Springdoo. The next step of the trial is to see how we can now collate the evidence collected into a eportfolio. Then apprentices can access their own eportfolio, using their mobile phones to check on the amount of evidence they have collected.

Organising myself for conferences

July has been a busy month. At the beginning of July, I attended (& presented) at the Australian annual National Centre for Vocational Education Research ‘no frills’ conference. The conference was held on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland at Mooloolaba TAFE. It’s my yearly opportunity to catch up with several other TAFE tutors who have embarked on a similar journey that I have taken. They are often trades based tutors who have worked their way gradually through formal academic qualifications in education and who currently research in the adult learning / vocational education field. My paper was a distillation of the main threads from my interviews of first year apprentices titled – Falling into a trade: Apprentices’ perceptions of becoming a baker.

On returning from the conference, I had a block course with third year apprentices. Two weeks of wonderful teaching & learning. It was good to see how well these young people have become acculturated into the baking trade. The third year apprentices were a mature, conscientious, inquiring and demanding group. Almost all of them have come to the realisation that their apprenticeship is only the beginning of their careers as bakers. A couple wanted to have a break from the long hours and heavy labour. The majority had a career path to work with and 2 were moving into bakery management already.

Added to this all, papers I submitted for two conferences were approved late last week & early this week. So I have been busy submitting conference grant approvals to see if I can get to them. So far, CPIT has been generous, so I should be off to both of them.

In September, there is efest. This is the NZ polytechnic elearning conference. Steven Downes is a keynote & ‘moving learning’ is this year’s theme. It will be a good opportunity to network, keep up with the play with regards to NZ government policy and to learn more from everyone. My paper is on mLearning and the workplace learner:- trials, tribulations and triumphs and based on a report of our trials to deliver mlearning to apprentices.

In October, the international mlearn2006 conference will be held in Banff, Canada. A long way to go but I am really excited about the opportunity to be part of the international mlearning community. I am presenting a short paper on mLearning for workplace based apprentices: a report on trials undertaken to establish mobile portfolios. It will have to be a very quick overview. I have started writing the paper for this and I plan to concentrate more on the eportfolio bit as it is an area that mlearning has not got into very much.

At present, I am also running trials with apprentices over the next month or so to obtain data for the above conference presentations. So a busy few months coming up but things are starting to make more sense, the links are starting to be form and bits of the puzzle are coming together.