mlearn doctoral consortium

A good start today. Five interesting presentations from doctoral students researching in the area of mLearning.

quick summaries:-

Christian Hoff from the University of Luxembourgh presented work on a common electronic annotation platform for all documents so that can be easily shared - making mobile collatboration seamless.

From the University of Nottingham, Peggy Shao provided information on a moblogging project to help international students integrate into the university and the city they are studying in. The advantages of using moblogging individually & in groups was presented. Good learning for me on a way forward with my personal learning environment / scaffolding project.

Next, a good application of GPS and visual terrain mapping to the problem of visualisation of navigation and time sensitive decision making from Brian Quinn, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). Using a phone to linked via bluetooth to a GPS which can also be further synched with a PDA or PC and using mobile google map to track a group.

Calvin Taylor, who has just started data gathering based on two classes of 15 - 16 year olds in a rural school in Oz. He is investigating mobile literacy practice of youth, basing his work on Bourdieu - habitus, capital, symbolic and field.

Followed on well by Song Yanjie from University of Hong Kong. A good study on how young undergrads make use of a PDA over the course of a year. Finding that is is very context driven, gender & subject content also play a part in how the students used a PDA to support their learning activities.

Should be another busy day tomorrow!

Test from Treo

Sending this to test possiblity of blogging without having to bring laptop to Melbourne.

Evaluating some moblogging sites

I have started using my Treo 650 to evaluate various moblogging platforms. These include boltfolio, busythumbs, kaywa, lifeblog (Nokia phones only)and winksite. There is quite a comprehensive list of photoblogs and moblogs along with a good introduction on what they are capable of on livingroom.org

I am unable to test the lifeblog site as I do not have a Nokia phone. However, I will keep this site on the list so that an apprentice with a Nokia phone could try it out.

So far I have found that boltfolio & other PC based photo / video archiving applications like fotolog and phlog take a long time to download on to a mobile phone. The pages also do not display very well & there is some difficulty with accessing important buttons / links.

Kaywa has a charge of 99 Swiss francs annual fee to use. Beyond an average apprentice’s budget. So I am down to, busythumbs, buzznet and winksite. I have also decided to see if I can find an apprentice with a mobile phone that is supported by Shozu to make use of flickr.

winksite stands out with its fast page downloads and clarity of navigation. It is a site built for mobile phone access. However, I am finding it tricky to post on to the page I have set up but am working on it. The other three are more straight-forward as the photo I need to post on the site just needs to be MMS / emailed to the site’s email address.

Next week, I intend to assit apprentices sign in to a page that they will be assigned. I am setting aside an hour for the task. During the week, I hope that we will have time to have a play with the sites using each apprentice’s mobile phone. At the end of the exercise, they should have access to the site and have set up a page that they will be able to post their photos to.

Just being able to upload photos into an archive is very much a basic level eportfolio. I need to find out how much text we can embed within each photo and see how feasible it is to put in the text using a mobile phone. I am also keen to explore the concept of attaching an audio file with the photo. This is a better way to input descriptors into an eportfolio using a mobile phone. So I will need to work on finding out how to do this & find some sites that will allow this to be done.