I apologize for posting it late. I completely forgot to upload the last post. What one change would you require to adopt m-learning for your own teaching and learning? I still see some problems and concerns of m-learning. Especially these days, I see many students being obssessed/attached to their cellphones. They just can’t let it […]
Continue reading [DAY 4] m-learning for my own teaching and learning Posted in: Week 11: Mobiles
It has been an interesting week withMobilelearning! week11 team would like to thank everyone for making it all worthwhile. Every contribution/post made is very well appreciated and has helped to create new perspectives. While it is not possible to exhaust all the possibilities that exist within this sphere (mobile learning) in our blog, we hope […]
Continue reading Thanks to everyone as we wrap up this week on Mobile learning Posted in: Week 11: Mobiles Though I am not a teacher, the organisation I work with provides professional support to school leadership across the province. Increasingly these days, some of the support and learning come in the form of web casts. To participate live, some school boards have to come together as a group, a lot of times some group […]
Continue reading Day4:Using Mlearning to create inclusive professional learning community Posted in: Week 11: Mobiles However, I was intrigued that it was a great way to catch up on some reading while on the go. My daily routine requires a lot of moving around, especially at work and most of the reading I do is while in transit. I carry my work B’berry around all the time but what I […]
Continue reading Day1/2: Sans MLearning Posted in: Week 11: Mobiles
Day 3 • On the 522 Blog: Design your own m-learning venture by answering the following questions: • describe a problem in teaching/learning/performance • how do the affordances of mobiles help solve that problem? • what learning theory / approach will you use? • how will your m-learning solution use mobile affordances? • what is […]
Continue reading Day 3 and 4 Posted in: Week 11: Mobiles
What one change would you require to adopt m-learning for your own teaching and learning? This is not really a change, but rather an area for research. I’m not a teacher, but within my work context I would need to hear from our audience that mobile learning is something they’re interested to try and use. […]
Continue reading Day 4 – new directions Posted in: Week 11: Mobiles
I think Steve Jobs would say that people don’t really know what they want (although a UX consultant I mentioned this too beat me up for saying this). But I think it’s true, beyond early adopters. Most people don’t bother with something if they can’t see how it makes a significant positive impact for them.
The multinational I spoke with loaded Blackberrys up with software and put them in the hands of their executives to show them the possibilities. Jobs did something similar when he showed people in Apple the swipe-scrolling function of the iPhone.
Consider the discussion this week… I’ve really been pushing opportunity-based thinking about mobiles for learning while roaming, but I find most people see mobiles through the lenses of their typical lives today… mostly sedentary and mostly using laptops. To engage interest, you have to mock up new ways of engaging with the world… ways that demonstrate value and not just gee-whiz coolness.
I agree that people find it hard to visualize how something will transform their lives or a current practice. (This was my own experience with the iPhone – I never imagined it would be as useful or become as indispensable as it is.)
However, I do think it’s important to ask people how they currently use the tools they have so we know the starting point. From that we can better determine the kinds of support or roll-out that will help people to adopt it. And, if we create something that works for smart phones only to find out that 80% of them are still using the original Nokia phone, we’ve wasted our efforts. As much as, I would love to load some iPhones up with cool apps and give them to our volunteers, but that’s not how health care non-profits usually roll. 🙂
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/creators-canadian-designed-tablet-hope-bring-internet-entire-112507389.html Interesting venture-related article on a couple of Canadians hoping to get $60 tablets (running on $2/month limitless Internet plans that run on cellular networks) in the hands of the entire world. In a somewhat-related story, I was talking about augmented reality with a couple of musician friends of mine before a show yesterday (they […]
Continue reading Tablets for several billion people… Posted in: Blog Café, Week 06: eBooks, Week 11: Mobiles
Read up on what happened with the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Project. It’s considered by some as a pretty massive failure because they didn’t budget for training people how to use the machines, or maintaining the machines, or providing necessary infrastructure for machines.
I’m familiar with the project – even used one of the devices once. I haven’t read much about its downfall, though – maybe when I’m done of this program and have some extra time!
Hi Stephen,
There was quite a lot of reading on the OLPC for ETEC 510, one of the core courses in the MET program. You could even develop an Augmented Reality entry for the UBC Design Wiki, if you are interested in taking this course sometime soon.
Kyle
I was tentatively planning to post my own A3 relative to one of my emerging ventures, but I’m not sure I’ll have time to create a pitch worthy of our upcoming Venture Forum (!). However, as one on my ventures fits comfortably into the Mobiles discussion I thought I’d introduce it here, possibly for good […]
Continue reading A Venture for Accountable M-Learning Posted in: Week 11: Mobiles
Hi David….
This looks really neat. Would I be able to use these kinds of Apps/services with my ESL students in China? Part of our focus, is to offer BC Brand teaching and the BC curriculum. I’m assuming that your partners would be in BC? Would this mean that students from all over might be able to experience BC field trips through m-learning?
I would love to learn more….if my assumptions are correct….
Verena 🙂
Hi Verena –
The Internet is essentially the same everywhere, yet one of the unique features of m-learning in this context is that it couples intimately with specific real-world contexts. In other words, these apps will be very place-specific: they will be available from anywhere but essentially meaningless and inoperable except in the place(s) in which they are staged. So this approach to learning will work anywhere, but these specific apps will only work here. While this might sound ‘limiting’, the learning benefits of coupling directly with everyday experience are enormous…
“think in terms of field trips staged on mobile devices where each portion of the lesson plan requires some action by the learner at some place in the real world, and each step of the learning journey is validated and ‘scored’ in real time”
Very cool! This is the kind of m-learning creativity I’ve been pushing for this week… leveraging the affordances of mobile to support and encourage going out into the real world to learn (rather than doing a lot of reading on a tiny screen).
Thanks very much for sharing!
Really great David V. I am very interested. And yes David W-P I think it is a great example that frames your questioning this week. I particularly like the aspect of situated cognition and contextual learning while being interactive, engaged and empowered through technology in real world, real time activities.
Kerry-Ann
Hi David
I absolutely like your network. I think it is a wonderful network in Jamaicans and other people from the Caribbean could definitely benefit from this project.
The problem my app addresses comes from personal experience — when I lived overseas, and was attempting to learn the local language, I would often learn new words through conversation with people (and make note of them in my phone). However, these words were often not *everyday* words, and I would quickly forget them because I […]
Continue reading Day 3 – Language on-the-go Posted in: Week 11: Mobiles
This is a very exciting area.
Another venture launched by my Mobile Muse Network is in this space. The company is Linguacomm and the product is Supiki. They’re just starting to market internationally. Have a look.
Wow – that is a really cool tool! I hadn’t considered how the development of affordable voice recognition apps could change mobile language learning. I’ll definitely check it out when it launches next week.
Great idea, Andrea – a dictionary that teaches you what you need.
Great idea… it leverages the affordances of mobile by focusing on words that you decide are important. Nice! I’ve found my own efforts to learn languages get very frustrating because of all the esoteric vocabulary that the programs force me to learn. This sounds more interesting!
It has been a very revealing week of discussion on mobile phones, and while I understand the reasons not to limit to the discussion to the latest technology, the smartphone (or if numerous wireless providers are taken seriously,the superphone), there is still one distinction I would like to explore in this post. A smartphone is a […]
Continue reading Smartphones or dumb nodes Posted in: Week 11: Mobiles
Hello kstooshnov,
I certainly feel that I can relate to your post. I have the world in my pocket, but I rarely visit it.
I have been a Smart(Super)phone owner for a few years now. Over that time people have asked me whether it is worth it to upgrade their ‘regular’ phone. I usually say that I could definitely live without all the bells and whistles, but there’s just something comforting about knowing that at anytime you access the info you need or communicate with anyone in many different ways. But, I’ll admit that I rarely do any of these things. There will be times when I download the latest useful apps which I never end up using. Or, I could sit while I commute to write that email I have been meaning to send, but I usually just wait until I can sit at my laptop.
I feel I have the tools and potential, but not the incentive. I wonder what you think it would take for people like myself to get a more complete knowledge of everything out of their Smartphones?
Excellent comments.
The issue I’ve been raising this week is our use of tech reflects the underlying habits we have. To the extent we are sedentary or spend time in locations with more convenient access types (laptops), we don’t bother with our mobiles.
To truly explore the potential, we have to work from the affordances of mobile outward and ask ourselves how those affordances match needs in our daily lives.
For many, phones are simple conveniences. For some, they represent the only viable option to conduct an activity: in developing nations, a dumb phone is their link to English lessons; in rich nations, a basic smartphone is their link to just-in-time refreshers and performance supports while in a taxi or before they walk into a client meeting. Christian Abilene University provided students in one class with a meeting facilitation performance support for their mobiles… and then sent the students out into the community to facilitate community meetings and capture data to bring back to share with the class.
We live in wealthy nations with an embarrassing array of choice. That choice means many of us buy tools we don’t really need. A way to turn this on its head, however, is to ask us how our choice can change the entire way we live and learn. If we can spend a majority of our time out in the real world collecting data and interacting with people face to face and finding out way through new places… that is a real choice for us.
A provocative thought, Kyle –
From my perspective, the ‘dumb node syndrome’ has increasingly impacted most technologies for more than a generation. There used to be rampant jokes about the tiny percentage of the full functionality of the home VCR (now PVR, etc) that the average person ever understood or used. Now that everything from cars to toasters are essentially networked computing devices, we’re rapidly loosing the (once comfortable) perspective that the conceptual models we build for the objects in our lives have any bearing on how they actually work, or what they can do. I’m reminded of the line in Ghostbusters where Bill Murray dryly states, “Generally you don’t see that kind of behavior in a major appliance” – we’re now living in a world where our major appliances are routinely possessed of paranormal behaviors.
Part of the reason why desktop computers (as an example) don’t seem so overwhelmingly ‘smart’ to us compared to our smart phones is that their cornucopia of affordances are better hidden. The range of needs I might have while sitting at a desk are also infinitesimally small compared to my complex existence in the real world. Interface design and user experience design for mobiles is still in its infancy, and therefore most devices are incredibly frustrating to use to anywhere near their full potential, even for the functions that really matter to us. People inevitably derive simpler usage patterns.
I’m also reminded of Sir Arthur Clarke’s third law that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. One of the reasons I’m so committed to innovation in this space is that I see mobiles in the context of magic wands in a society that doesn’t yet have a Hogwarts to teach us how to use them…
Needs do influence functionality and I agree with David V and David W-P that needs are lessened/increased based on where we are and what we are doing? Unlike Kyle I have become very intuned with my smartphone in many ways because I am constantly on the go and need smartphone activities to help fill the gap between sit down time in front of a PC. It was actually the reason I got a smartphone. However, in trying to navigate and manage LMS and CMS I have found that my increased needs have left me demanding more from my mobile particularly easier user interface, presentation of sites et al., typing and responding capabilities. I even downloaded a new browser for improved navigation and presentation of LMS and CMS, suggested by my blackberry help line.
Increased needs will significantly affect device design. I wonder if this thought went into the accompaniment of the Blackberry Playbook to its mobile phones. I believe also that Kyle is right in that content organisation and presentation into smaller bite size chunks will also be significant considerations
Kerry-Ann
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David William Price 7:27 pm on November 20, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
What if your students’ mobiles provided them with ways to practise and test their speaking with the people around them out in the real world? My studies of ESL and anxiety show that perfectionism really holds people back from even trying to speak… a mobile might be able to provide them with enough of a crutch to keep them pushing through simple conversations with the people in their neighbourhoods!