ALT Mobile Learning event, London - some thoughts

Summary:

Thoughts from ALT Mobile Learning event in London yesterday - higher and further education colleges to come together and look at some of the mobile learning projects done in the last year or so.

From talking to colleagues there, some other options for using mobile phones beyond learning - e.g. social networking, an institution using bluetooth so when students first come on campus, they can use bluetooth to scan who else is around, networking. Re privacy - some people might hate the idea of turning on their bluetooth and lots of people finding them. So far, it seems to have been positive. Another university using bluetooth to find information as part of campus tours - could always use RFID - small cheap tags - can tag objects - stick them on - can link phone to tag and pull down information onto the phone.

Some institutions in remote areas, looking at SMS - even in areas with mobile broadband, amount of time during day when can actually connect….can’t really connect with either laptop or phone for long periods of time because bandwidth not sufficient or ‘drops’; so looking at SMS

Session - language learning pilot - with mostly Nokia N95s - mobile quizzes, mms, cameraphones, iPOD audiobooks, personal tours, mobile interactive learning objects - created mostly with Flashlite and used Adobe Device Central emulators to test them. Note about emulators - they do not always display on computer as you expect to see, so essential to test with real phones - sometimes you can put together a page of html and it doesn’t display in emulator but does on a real phone.

Found navigation was biggest issue, looked at softkeys and used option menu on bottom left hand side of screen already used - so used it for the mobile learning too - more intuitive, frees up screen space because don’t have to put other navigation such as buttons/arrows that need to be clicked. Interesting !

They tried different options with mobile quizzes, mostly required to click on things on the screen - navigate around ’screen’ itself using trackwheel or similar, maybe hotkeys etc Unsure about whether drag and drop available or not on phones at moment, so mostly have to click ‘things’ rather than move ‘things’. Some examples from IgnatiaWebs, Niace and mLearnopedia. No branching in quizzes so have to go back to beginning of quiz each time, if get things wrong.

Evaluation of pilot - majority of students found it useful, students happy to use their own phones too. Students could have 1 or 2 hour journeys to travel into London, so could use the time for this which then frees up their time later, although some students enjoyed using whilst sprawled on sofa / bed. With some of the interactivity with the activities and quizzes, students wanted less of it, preferred more passive activity. Maybe sitting on a tube in London, can sit there in passive ‘fog-like’ state, maybe just ‘absorb’ stuff.

Carl Smith from Learning Technologies Research Institute presented, showed demo of Skyfire (in beta) mobile browser which can play Flash 9 (don’t know of any other phone browsers that do this). Can download Flashlite - which is different - available for some but not all smartphones. Showed mixed reality - putting content into your local context.

Is Flashlite going to stay or go - see previous post, some talk yesterday from couple of people about this, will probably be around for a while but Adobe looking at mobile options with AIR.

Pattern recognition - for visualisation - taking pictures with your cameraphones from which patterns can be analysed e.g. pixels, computer algorithms - also using to identify criminals using facial recognition- Showed Microsoft Photosynth video from TED talk, you can also see demo. Showed Nokia demo of someone in Stanford looking at building - pointing with phone and clicking - then receiving back a picture of cathedral with wireframe of original building on top. Also voice recognition, style, tone, emphasis, stress etc etc - don’t know of analysis but should be possible to collect from public voiceblogs etc

Afternoon sessions - more FE focused. Rebecca from MoleNet presented - a mobile learning project funded from Learning & Skills Council/Network - FE colleges and schools could either bid individually or as consortiums - for funding - used mostly to buy mobile devices. MoleNet provided device training, learning design support and evaluation. Three main strands to their research - impact on teaching & learning, impact on teachers / learners / institutions, impact on retention, achievement and progression. They are producing a big evaluation report for LSC in September but some early figures seem to indicate 75 % felt that using a mobile device had improved their learning, 87% would like to use in the future.

John from Joseph Priestley College presented, opportunity to use pdas and play with during the sessions - looked at activites, also developed with Flashlite - e.g. driving, health and safety, ECDL etc Some were similar to some page turning activities can find in eLearning completed on pc Some nice interactive elements - clicking on items on screen to create e’g road signs with instant feedback whether correct or not. Students reported that enjoyed very much an apparently two classes missed their smoking breaks because so engaged! Have found ways of increasing attendance e.g. SMS reminders to attend classes.

Other examples - construction, mechanics - often had to record portfolios by either writing by hand or pc - could use cameraphones to record pictures, video of what they had done, their ideas about them etc which they preferred. Some using ultraportable pcs to record their work, seemed to work ok in that noisier environment, allowed for more space too.

So overall - lots of opportunities there, issues for connecting people in remote areas, is it going to be mobile web, SMS etc Issues around the mobile device - what are you doing with it, how would you like to use it, what is it like in the environment you are moving around with. Maybe options for students creating content using phones (not just recording pictures, video) could bring in whole new dimension too.

This entry was posted on 10/07/2008 at 03:02 pm and is filed under Mobile phones, mobile learning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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