Social Artistry & Culture

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3 months ago
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I skimmed through Nancy White’s blog entry she posted right after her session and her comment on “social artistry” caught my attention.  I wonder about how this applies to online communities that have no association with any physical or other organizational entities, such as opensource communities.  Many people see the potential for similar communities for learning and education.  I wonder about organizational culture in general.  I reflect on the Japanese documentary/discussion show I watched the other day for the same theme.

In the show, the participants in a round table watched some video clips that showed a number of foreign, non-Japanese companies adapting “Kaizen” system wholeheartedly and succeeding in amazing positive outcomes.  All participants were flabbergasted because in Japan during the “lost decade,” many Japanese corporations moved away from the traditional life-long employment practice and tried to adapt American-style meritocracy instead.  In the new system, permanent employee, non-permanent employee, or temporary employee classes are clearly divided that many companies no longer have the same culture where kaizen system and culture flourished in the past.  In that old culture, many Japanese actively engaged in learning new things with their work context in mind by attending workshops even on the weekends. According to the participants on the show, that group knowledge approach cultivated over the years and somewhat in their DNA and it is not entirely lost.  However, the new organizational culture or system certainly does not encourage nor cultivate.

Later on, one participant voiced that Japanese need to come up with their own meritocracy that encourages the new ideas from bottom-up leading to many interesting innovations.  And they actually watched some examples of that in Japan.

I’m all for bottom-up approaches, whatever forms it may take, over the traditional top-down management system.  The traditional approach lacks actual know-how of making things happen while they may have gorgeous abstract policies.  In the context of some of the courses in higher education, the emerging technologies can create additional spaces where you can bridge many gaps between what they say they teach in their course syllabus and various sharing and communications, and other learning activities that need to bring students’ learning.

 

Change 2011 – My Goals & Expectations

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5 months ago
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After myself completing the Connectivism course as a credit course back in 2009, Stephen, George, and Dave kept going at with the open online course (MOOC) in a number of different takes.  I want to participate in the course again this fall because I noticed that the course has a better content with a variety of presenters lined up each week and they seem to offer a better guidance for potential participants and better delivery methods.  The delivery improvements are probably due to the fact that social networking is very much mainstreamed now and also that in general, we have a better environment to entertain and incorporate emerging technologies in our lives.

The theme of the course this time is not necessarily “Connectivism” as the theory of learning replacing the conventional learning or educational theories.  At least it looks that way at this point of the game, and we will find out as the course progresses.  I am looking forward to listening to a variety of perspectives on how new ways of connecting and exchanging ideas can shape our ways of learning in this course.

I noticed this time that the facilitators of the course are directly emphasizing the importance of establishing ownership of one’s own learning right at the beginning.  I believe that this is the most important thing about learning.  We all learn no matter what course it may be, and learning takes place somewhere in the context of one developing the goals and objectives of one’s own learning, and how one can manage expectations.

So my goals for participating in the course are: (1) To get exposed to different perspectives/examples about the new ways of learning that will be presented in the course; (2) Trying to find some connections in the social networking through the course; and (3) To explore the ideas for designing and constructing students -centered learning environments.

I expect that I get lost and overwhelmed with the amount of information, but I need to be highly selective and I will see and monitor how I will be doing on this.

 

Links to Mobile Learning Use & Related Items

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7 months ago
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This is my last learning task for Mobile Learning course in which I will list three links that are informative to each of the following eight regions of mobile use.

Coordinated learning with the global positioning system
Scan learning with camera phones and augmentation codes
Secure proximity transactions (near field communication)
Mobile sensor and accelerometer technology in behavioral learning
User generated, real time content creation
Simulations for learning on mobile devices
Anywhere (context sensitive), anytime (ubiquitous) learning
Augmented simulations on mobile devices

 

Coordinated learning with the global positioning system

  • Close-up Gendai (Close-up Now), a TV program covering a wide-range of current affairs topics on NHK, a Japanese public broadcasting organization, equivalent to CBC but without commercials, broadcasted “Prowess of GPS and Its Possibilities in Disasters“.  In this program, a number of GPS applications that played important roles during and after the recent earthquakes and tsunami’s that hit northeast Japan in March 2011.  For example, right after the earthquake, many cities were paralyzed including Tokyo.  Traditional communication channels were not accessible to many.  In many cases, they lost the conventional means to contact family members and friends.  An IT company in Japan developed a similar app to Google Wave/Google Latitude with which you can locate whereabouts of your friends and family members on a map using smartphones with built-in GPS.  Many people downloaded the app on March 11th and quickly tracked whereabouts of their friends and family members.  They could not only locate where they were on the map and but also, to which direction they were moving in real time.  Another example is an open access mapping application where people can contribute to  road conditions or the level of destruction whereby they will have the most up-to-date information in a shared map.  This helped when Japan needed to find the quickest ways to transport food and other supplies to the disaster refugees.  Unfortunately, this YouTube piece does not provide English subtitle.
  • A paper, “Integrating mobile GIS, real-time D-GPS, and high-resolution satellite imagery for land use patrolling,” presented at some conference (2009).  This is a case where mobile technology is utilized for the state, its administrating and policing function.
  • While this is not specifically mobile, but in general GIS technology has a great educational value and if we can apply the same concept in the use of smartphones in classroom, students’ learning would be more personable and become closer to their experiences.  Link: Using Remote Sensing and GIS to Teach Inquiry-Based Spatial Thinking Skills: An Example Using the GLOBE Program’s Integrated Earth Systems.

Scan learning with camera phones and augmentation codes

  • This was presented last year (June 2010) at Mobile Technology Meeting at University of Bolton, UK.  A quick introduction to what are involved in AR technology. Link:  A Look at Mobile Augmented Reality.
  • It’s always interesting to see what MIT Media Lab is up to when it comes to emerging technologies. Pattie Maes & Pranav Mistry demonstrate their 6th Sense project @ Ted.  Wow, this is the ultimate being mobile!  This is an example where camera phones and augmented codes will be surpassed and eventually outdated, no doubt.
  • Another MIT project, “The Future of Storytelling : Participatory Endeavor,” explore how we can be our own producer with TV programs we watch or participate.  We traditionally passively participate in the TV programs we watch.  With the use of augmented reality and mobile devices, we can become our own producer of the event.
  • [When it comes to smartphones and augmented reality codes, it would be more interesting to develop a project of one's own for a specific purpose.  Not every project, but Augmented Reality projects often come across as a glorified encyclopedia and not so interesting.]

Secure proximity transactions (near field communication)

  • I’m not quire sure how this works, but here is the patent information retrieved by Google Search.
  • “ Security Mobile Payments“, a report published by Smart Card Alliance.  Chapter 5, “Interaction Between NFC Mobile Devices and POS Terminals,” is of interest.
  • Near Field Communication (Wikipedia Entry):  ”NFC is a set of short-range wireless technologies, typically requiring a distance of 4 cm or less. NFC operates at 13.56 MHz on ISO/IEC 18000-3 air interface and at rates ranging from 106 kbit/s to 848 kbit/s. NFC always involves an initiator and a target; the initiator actively generates an RF field that can power a passive target. This enables NFC targets to take very simple form factors such as tags, stickers, key fobs, or cards that do not require batteries. NFC peer-to-peer communication is of course possible, where both devices are powered.[2] A patent licensing program for NFC is currently under development by Via Licensing Corporation, an independent subsidiary of Dolby Laboratories. A public, platform-independent NFC library is released under the free GNU Lesser General Public License by the name libnfc.[26]“
  • Google is actively exploring the use of NFC in addition to mobile payment system, for example, “Ultimate Tourist Guides,” and Google Places.
Mobile sensor and accelerometer technology in behavioral learning
  • India’s GOLS, an organization that is committed to innovations in elearning directly associated with a series of mobile technologies/features such as mobile sensor and accelerator technologies help behavioral-based learning.  ”Sensors and accelerometers (accelerometers are sensors or transducers used for measuring accelerations in applications such as navigation, vehicular safety systems) in mobile devices in behavioral based learning (Behavior Based Learning understands the importance of individuality. Behavior Based Learning utilizes principles of Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA), a teaching methodology based upon demonstration, objective evidence, and direct measures).”  Offsprings of Skinnerian behaviorism still alive in the application of mobile learning.
  • Mobile accelerometer technology helps both blind and visually impaired students interact with the mainstream students playing games.
  • Broadly speaking, research in mobile sensor technology involves how to categorize and integrate the data submitted by users to help their learning.  Here is an example from a New Zealand school where a mobile device with sensor technology was experimented to advance students’ “authentic” learning.

User generated, real time content creation

  • A blog, User Generated Education, has an entry specifically on mobile learning explaining that teachers should take advantage of many mobile devices  already carried and used by students and with which they can leverage students’ informal learning.
  • This article addresses how to design learning activities with the use of mobile devices.
  • This blog entry, entitled, “The Future of Social in Learning,” predicts that most learning will incorporate use of a mobile device.   It’s getting blurry, however, when is that future or is it already here.  Or the real future will belong to somewhere else?  Anyhow, this blogger explains that more social interactions enabled with mobile device would play a key role in  learning.

Simulations for learning on mobile devices

  • This blog entry refers to another blog defining what is simulation and what is not and also refers to an interesting simulation example, Inside the Heiti Earthquake.
  • “Towards an Understanding of the Virtual Context” – The authors refer to the importance of  a “virtual context, ” the learner-created cognitive space within which the activity takes place and where play an important part in learning together with physical and social contexts.  It is often said that “everything is context” for learning in digital age.  But there are different layers of context and it’s complex how people relate to them.  The article includes “a case study of mobile simulation learning using SMS text messaging.”
  • This is a in-stu mobile simulation program implemented in the context of obstetric emergency and teamwork skills in a hospital environment.

Anywhere (context sensitive), anytime (ubiquitous) learning

Augmented simulations on mobile devices

photo1

Final Project for ML11

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7 months ago
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Project: Tweet While Brainstorming – Meanings of “Health”

 
Description: I have created a mobile site for a foundational undergraduate course for the Faculty of Human Ecology at the University of Manitoba  that is scheduled to be offered in Winter 2012 session.  In this course, students will learn to relate to the literature as they explore the concept, “social determinants of health.”  Before students actually refer to research sources, they will first reflect and brainstorm the questions of 1) what “health” means to them; 2) what one needs to do to be “healthy”; and 3) what conditions or factors have to be in place for one to be “healthy.”

In order to ponder on these questions, they will tweet three to five times for 4 consecutive days using a designated hashtag.  They will be able to monitor the feed as well.  [I provided the link to the twitter feed on the course mobile site.  I have a fake twitter feed for demonstration purpose right now, but students will add a designated hashtag (#hmecw2000) in their tweet and will see the real feed.]

Learning Outcome for this activity is to develop personal connections to the topic students will explore in the literature.

The course will be designed as a blended learning, so the above mobile interactive exercise will be followed by a brief disucssion in class where the instructor and the class as a whole will develop a mind map of what “health” means.

 

Product:

I developed an insructional blog for the exercise.

Here is the mobile site for the interactive exercise.

 

 

 

 

 

Mobile Learning Survey – The Actual Use and the Perceptions of Potential Use of Mobile Devices in Formal Education or Institutional Training Settings

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7 months ago
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We conducted a survey to understand what are the actual use as well as the perceptions of potential use of mobile devices in formal education or institutional training settings as a part of Mobile Learning course offered at the University of Manitoba.  Of 153 respondents we received, the largest group is from K-12 sector (49%), followed by university (32%), college and training and alternative education sectors represented 5.9%, respectively, and the other sectors that were not listed represented 7.2%.  The majority of respondents (59.9%) are involved in teaching in formal education sectors, followed by administrators (17.8%).  A small percentage (1.3%) of respondents are students, 6.6% are trainers, and 14.5% represents other positions that were not listed in the questionnaire.  More women(62.7%) responded to the questionnaire than men (37.3%).   The majority of respondents fall in the age groups between 31 – 60 years of age and a similar number represented each of the 31-40 years, 41 – 50 years, and 51 – 60 years age groups and they are 22.8%, 28.2%, and 26.2%, respectively.  Only one teenager responded to the questionnaire, and relatively smaller, 9.4%, represented the 21 – 30 years age group.  In other words, more than a half of the respondents were older than 40.

Some notable findings of the survey are:

  •  More than a half of the respondents (55.3%) responded that they use mobile learning device(s) in their formal education or institutional training settings.  (All respondents except one answered the question).
  • The following pie charts show the use of their mobile device(s) in details:

Cellphone=4.2%


[Legend: Course or Institutionally Prepared Content; Online Public Resources (i.e. Wikipedia, YouTube); Fee-based Content; Proprietary Content (prepared for specific group only); Open Educational Resources (OER)]

[Legend:Respond to Polls; Access Learning Resources (or transfer files); Connect to People (send email, IM, SMS); Publish a Blog Entry; Access e-books/Print Content; Publish a Podcast or Video; Play Interactive Games; Use Twitter or Other Microblog Sites]

  • When the questionnaire asked to list the top three favourite  apps, only 20.4% of the respondents listed all three, 22.2% listed two apps, and 27.4% listed one app only.
  • When the questionnaire asked about personal use of mobile device(s) rather than the use in formal education or institutional training settings, the percentage of respondents jumped to 69.3%.  The results are shown in the following pie chart:

      • The questionnaire included a set of questions that was designed to gather the perceptions of potential use of mobile device(s) in formal education or institutional training settings.  Although at least over 44% of the respondents indicted that they were not currently using the mobile device(s) in formal education or institutional training settings, more responses (70.3% – 73.2%) were received in this section than any other sections of the questionnaire.
      • For example, to the question that asked what would be the most likely reason for the increased rate of adoption of mobile devices in formal education or institutional training settings,  72% of the respondents answered as follows:

In conclusion, although there is a diversity or a different degree of the use of mobile device(s), the results of the questionnaire indicated that more than 50% of the respondents already use mobile device(s) in education or training settings. We also managed to gather interesting data that reflect the perceptions of potential use of mobile device(s) in formal education or institutional training settings and they are subject to further analysis. One notable characteristic of the survey results is that although the respondents may not be using any mobile device(s) at this point in education or training settings, at least the half of the same group seem to perceive potential use of mobile device(s).

My recommendations to support further development of mobile learning in one’s own teaching & learning community are:

1) To organize drop-in workshops, social neworking groups, webinars on campus and develop a community of practice.   I believe that the interests are there and they will continue to grow.  We need to have many options and a variety of ways to learn and adopt mobile learning for the campus community as one of the pedagogical strategies on campus and extra campus.

2) To invest in grant money by many units that involve teaching & learning support on campus to promote collaborations, explorations, and experimentation with some unique angle of their own regarding innovative use of mobile learning but support interesting collaborative work across campus.

3) To cultivate sharing and exchange of a variety of mobile learning experiences through aggregating blogs, Facebook, microblog, etc.

Different Learning Outcomes

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7 months ago
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I had less than 2 weeks, including my precious weekend, to make the due date for a grant proposal that was set at the end of June.  Luckily, we made it in time, but it was quite a struggle to put together a literature review that accompanied the proposal.  In order to read and digest relevant articles I selected, I used Mendeley on my laptop, and iAnnotate on my iPad, working back and forth between two applications.  iAnnotate is a superior tool for annotating and making notes right on the articles.  I felt like carrying a pile of articles on which I could highlight and make notes in a wide range of styles. This is normally my comfortable ways of reading and researching.  Yet, it’s all organized and indexed with iAnnotate, so it did not get as messy as it could have been if it were actual papers.  And I didn’t waste any papers on my research!

When it came to the time of making a bibliography, I searched Mendeley pool and cut & paste the citation given in APA style.  Unfortunately, all the citations I compiled with Mendeley had to be corrected by my co-investigator.  The APA style given by Mendeley is APA 5th edition and I needed the latest, the 6th edition.  Mendeley’s Word 2008 plug-in was not working for my computing environment, so I couldn’t use it either.  I also used Zotero as well and it worked very well.  So in order to complete the literature review section of the proposal,  I was juggling between my MacBook Pro and iPad back and forth, between different applications and browsers (Zotero only works with Firefox for now).

Subjective sense of working a literature review is always frustrating and difficult.  This fact is always the same despite all the computing devices and applications that were in my disposal.  I mainly worked on the couch in the TV room and did read a number of articles in my bed.

I could say that I engaged in mobile learning during the preparation of the proposal, but it is not so convincing if it actually was.  I did use all mobile devices and applications in order to construct the proposal.  However, this outcome format is nothing new.  Whatever tools I use to develop the proposal doesn’t really matter.  Either ways, it would come out more or less the same, the same format and same function, and we expect the same outcome.  Prior to doing research to develop a literature review, my co-investigator and I had a brainstorming discussion @ Starbucks,  and we sat together and went through the draft to finalize it.  These are face-to-face interactions that are important parts of the enterprise.

In order to say, yes we are involved in “mobile learning,” however, I feel that there should be something completely different outcomes that characterize “mobile learning.”   If we are using mobile devices to bring about the things that we always have produced in non-mobile means, then it doesn’t qualify for “mobile learning.”  Since the attributes of anytime, anywhere, and geographically dispersed experiences of the learners involved are the characteristics of “mobile learning”, I would like to see a new form of learning community that is possible because of “mobile learning” and also because we share the things uniquely in mobile ways.

But I know that there is individualized mobile learning.  But this doesn’t really excite me.

 

Moving Forward with Mobile Learning

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8 months ago
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[A] theoretical framework in which to review diverse mobile learning projects in the context of distance learning has been lacking (Park, Y. 2011, p.95).

In general, mobile learning researchers focus broadly defined potentials of mobile technology in education emphasizing the obvious attribute of any time, anywhere characteristic of the technology, and informal learning attributes that facilitate situated, experimental, personalized, or contextualized learning (Ally, 2010; Traxler, 2010; Clough, Jones, McAndrew & Scanlon, 2010).[1]  Koole (2001) further  analyzed potential dimensions of mobile learning from technical and pedagogy perspectives using the Framework for the Rational Analysis of Mobile Education (FRAME).[2]  In this framework, a total of 7 dimensions in mobile learning are delineated taking into consideration of technical, social and personal dimensions, and respective overlapping areas.   Koole wants to help practitioners and researchers understand “the complex nature of mobile learning” (p. 40).

Park (2011] points out that “a theoretical framework in which to review diverse mobile learning projects in the context of distance learning has been lacking” (p.95).[3]  In order to come up with a pedagogical framework for mobile learning, Park  adopts Transactional Distance Theory.  I found the concept, “transactional distance,” to be a very useful concept analyzing potentially complex social characteristics of e-learning in the context of formal learning.  According to the  Theory, the transactional distance of a given learning context is “managed and controlled” by three factors:  1) Structure, 2) Dialogue, and 3) Learner’s Autonomy (p.85-85).  Structure defines how the learning program meets the needs of learners, Dialogue defines what kind of the interactions that take place between the learner and the instructor, and among fellow learners, and Leaner’s Autonomy characterizes what degree of freedom the learner has in shaping his/her learning “goals, process, and evaluation.”  These factors interplay and shape what kind of learning experiences can develop, thus define what kind of the transactional distance is being shaped in a given learning context.

The pedagogical prototypes classification for mobile learning that Park came up contains four different types.  They are:  1) High Transactional Distance and  Socialized Mobile Learning Activity; 2) High Transactional Distance and Individualized Mobile Learning Activity; 3) Low Transactional Distance and Socialized Mobile Learning Activity; and 4) Low Transactional Distance and Individualized Mobile Learning Activity.  These prototypes have some potential for more systematic research.

The first type of mobile learning is characterized as “a highly structured program” and “the rules of the game are determined prior to the activity,” but it helps to build negotiating and collaboratory skills among the learners.  The second type assumes the development of “well-organized learning materials such as lecture (audio or video) files, reading materials, and vocabulary databases” (p. 93).  This type needs to ensure adequate technical and accessibility supports for individualized learning in “different learner environments.”  The third type, on the other hand, is not highly structured, and “[t]he most important consideration is to develop a meaningful collaborative task or a complex situation so that higher order thinking, negotiation, evaluation, reflection, debate, competition, and scaffolding can naturally occur” (p.94).  Park points out about the third type that “[r]elatively few studies of this type exist.  ”Finally, while a teacher controls what is taught and how it is learned in the fourth type, mobile devices facilitate individualized learning.

This pedagogical prototypes classification would be rather useful when one is developing a mobile learning.

References:

[1]Ally, M. (2009). Mobile learning transforming the delivery of education and training. Edmonton: AU Press.

[2]Koole, L. (2009). A model for framing mobile learning. In Mobile Learning Transforming the Delivery of Education and Training by M. Ally (ed.) p. 25 – 47. Edmonton: AU Press.

[3]Park, Y. (2011) A pedagogical framework for mobile learning: Categorizing educational applications of mobile technologies into four types. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning. Retrieved June 18, 2011, from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/791/1788

Assignment #2

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8 months ago
by Asako in ,
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In Assignment #2, I am to “describe three significant challenges that you might face in bringing mobile learning to your learning or work place and post or provide a link to your paper in the Angel forum. “

 

I selected 1) Overall Institutional Infrastructural Support; 2) Seeking the Opportunities to Experiment; and 3) Flexible Collaborations on Campus, as three immediate challenges for incorporating mobile learning in my work place.

 

Mobile Infrastructure Planning that Supports A Wide Range of Mobile Devices and Activities on Campus:

My sense of possibilities in mobile learning has drastically changed when I started using iPad2 at the beginning of May.  While my pick is iPad over iPhone as my learning tool, Stanford medical students experienced it differently.[1]  How could that be?  Stanford School of Medicine lent iPad to all new students in September 2010.  The primary purpose of the project was to cut down the printing cost of 3,700 pages of course materials for each student.  The Stanford students were known for avid and rather obsessive iPhone users.  So why, the transition to ipad failed?! The students found shortly after the beginning of the semester that the experience of iPad was not so great.   Administration, after all, had to go back to print materials to support the course.  Despite Stanford’s forward looking and innovative approaches to incorporating the uses of mobile devices on campus, the problem was not so much about ipad as a device but rather not having enough mobile infrastructure to accommodate the massive consumption of bandwidth by all the iPad users on campus.  The luck of infrastructural support was apparently the same at Cornell, Princeton, and George Washington University.

When I look around my working environment, there are some iPad users among librarian colleagues.  I occasionally see few students with iPad in their hands in my library.  I wonder if there is any future mobile infrastructure planning in place to accommodate more use of a wide rage of mobile devices including bandwidth-guzzling tabloids on campus down the road?

 

Seeking the Opportunities to Experiment:

The big challenge as a learning support professional in higher education is how one can continue seeking and finding the opportunities to try out  and experiment with like-minded colleagues on campus.  The objective is to make students’ learning more meaningful to themselves.  Mobile devices would be one of  many tools and applications that can be used for this purpose.

Behind this thinking is the realization that educational institutions need to face a big shift in their educational mindset.  According to Haythornthwaite (2010), learning in the digital age is more like expert learning embedded in the communities of practitioners and, in their practices and cultures.[2]  Mobile learning would play an important role in the digital age by helping learners accommodate and respond to various situations, circumstances, and contexts of learning.[3] Mobile devices, whatever it may be, therefore could be situated and functioned as important devices to facilitate one’s learning and education in the digital age.

My own recent experience of working with one long-standing foundational research and writing undergraduate course for one Faculty is a case in point.   The collaboration of a librarian, writing instructor and the course instructor (the Faculty) became possible with the Summer Course Innovation Fund from Extended Education.  In order to convert the course, that was primarily designed as a mass-production course, to a blended-learning model, we analyzed and translated the syllabus of the course to bring about appropriate language, added online instructional materials, online interactions among students, and invited speakers from the field for the class.  Although there was no mobile component in this project, in a different course context, it could have been appropriate and worth implementing.

 

Flexible Collaborations on Campus:

Another challenge is to seek possible collaborations with the faculty or professional colleagues by sharing the common interests of supporting students’ learning on campus.  By being knowledgeable about potential mobile or online tools and applications, I could be a resource person in the collaborations.  At the same time, as Koole (2009) delineated, considering many factors that affect appropriateness of a given mobile learning model in a given course situation, we would be more productive working in a collaborative manner with fellow colleagues on campus.[5]

The recent issue of Newsletter, Path to Pedagogy, by University Teaching Services, a unit promoting scholarship in teaching and learning at the university where I work, compiled teaching accounts and innovations from many individual teaching faculty members across different disciplines, faculties, and schools.  There was no mobile learning represented, but no shortage of teaching innovations on campus.  Many teaching faculty members are interested in engaging their students in the subject matters they are learning.

Being an academic librarian, my role was traditionally defined by facilitating the use of library collections and resources in the support of my campus constituencies.  Now we are living in the world of information abundance.  It became more crucial to facilitate understanding of “why” and “how” of the information use, than simply locating the information or information sources.

We have many learning support professionals on campus.  They are housed in different units and departments of the University including Information technology and computing support staff, librarians, writing or study skill instructors, student advocacy staff, and the faculty involved in scholarship in teaching and learning to name the obvious.  It would be quite a challenge to build criss-crossed working network among these professionals, but if we can find the right working collaboration on campus in the support of students, we might be able to achieve much more than when we stick ourselves to each unit.

 

References:

[1] Keller, J. (2011, May 8). The Slow-Motion Mobile Campus – The Digital Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved June 14, 2011, from http://chronicle.com/article/The-Slow-Motion-Mobile-Campus/127380/

[2] Haythornthwaite, C. A. (2010, February 23). New Theories and Perspectives on Learning in the Digital Age. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/2142/16311

[3] Koole, L.M. (2009).  A Model for Framing Mobile Learning. IN Mobile learning:  Transforming the Delivery of Education and Training by M. Alley (ed.) (Chapter 2). Retrieved June 8, 2011, from: http://www.aupress.ca/books/120155/ebook/02_Mohamed_Ally_2009-Article2.pdf

[4] University of Manitoba. University Teaching Services (2011). Path to Pedagogy. Spring 2011. Retrieved: June 13, 2011. From: http://intranet.umanitoba.ca/academic_support/uts/resources/86.html

[5] See [3].  Koole delineated 7 mobile learning intersections to consider when we are designing a mobile learning model:  1) Device Aspect; 2) Learner Aspect; 3) Social Aspect; 4) Device Usability Intersection; 5) Social and Technology Intersection; 6)Interaction Learning Intersection; and 7) Mobile Learning.  (Appendix A, p. 45-47, Alley, 2009).

What is Learning?

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8 months ago
by Asako in ,
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In the Mobile Learning course discussion (ML11), it turned to whether the nature of what we consider to be “learning” is changing:

Has retention been relegated to rote learning and therefore dated? Does the fact that most of the information we need are available on the mobile device, in our hands or the computer hard disk at home, prevent us from retaining knowledge? Where do you think the future of mobile learning could lead to when we consider what is retained and what is not? When can we apply the “sixth sense” as provided by our mobile devices and when are we allowed not to? Can we ask our job interviewer to wait while we contact our mobile device for a response to his/her question?

We are increasingly facing more complex situations in which we need to come up with appropriate solutions; not necessarily right answers because there is no such a thing as a “right answer” most of the time.  The skills that are in demand in the current century are those that bring about certain solutions not just in paper but actually mobilizing like-minded people as well as those with different perspectives or opinions from their own and accomplishing socially meaningful actions.  The focus in education should probably be shifted more towards what to do with gathered information, rather than what information one is getting or how much.  If we can draw from the Anas’ cooking example, the discussion would be more interesting if people exchange how they improved upon Betty Crocker’s original recipes (although she is not my kind ;-) ) or modified them to meet their needs, for example.

Mobile devices are suited to providing just-in-time information and responses to the right recipients.  At the same time, the technology advancing the “sixth sense” creates a lot of noises.  In this context, how one filters the flow of information and contributes becomes important, but what is the actual impact one makes is nebulous.

If one is only responding to the incoming information or the information one happens to find, the mechanics itself is not so important .  We all need to be educated to have certain values or perspectives with which we can screen what is important and what is not important in a given situation or purpose.  So in a job interview situation, the interviewer would be interested in whether the interviewee has a set of values or perspectives that are crucial to carry out the tasks associated with the job.  The image of locating the answer to the interview question using a mobile device would come across odd.  However, in a different context, this situation might not necessarily be odd.   If the job requires a flexible attitude in gathering quick responses from a target group and quickly present the result to the interviewer, it would not be odd, for example.

Rote learning is definitely out, but which rote learning?!  I do not rule out everything because I believe that there is a place for repetitious drills and practices for many basic skills.

How Informal Learning Is It?!

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9 months ago
by Asako in
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Traxler (2009) listed keywords, “personal, spontaneous, opportunistic, informal, pervasive, situated, private, context-aware, bite-sized, portable” (p13-14) as the characteristics of mobile learning he found in the literature. I am most interested in “informal” or “personal” learning aspects  in mobile learning.  For Assignment #1, I will briefly review “Mobile VLE vs. Mobile PLE: How Informal is Mobile Learning?,” a paper presented by Chen, Millard, and Wills at MLearn 2008 Conference.

In this paper, the authors first present Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) and Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) as two contrasting learning orientations in e-learning.  VLEs refers to having a common online space for teachers and their students to share resources and exchange communications in the context of given courses.  Some examples of VLEs are Blackboard, Angel, and Moodle, and any other content management systems fall into this category.  PLEs, on the other hand, is shaped and developed with a set of Web 2.0 tools that are chosen by learners themselves in order to share their ideas and resources with the community of learners.  A key difference between VLEs and PLEs is that who has the control over their learning.  Learning in PLEs is hinged on learner autonomy while learning in VLEs on institutional framework.

The authors framed the question in terms of whether mobile learning fits in VLEs or PLEs based on a degree of the learner’s autonomy in their own learning.  In order to answer the question, the authors investigated 17 mobile learning systems from 40 papers that were presented at MLearn 2007 Conference.  Their finding is that although all the 17 mobile learning systems they investigated presented informal environment, they represented formal learning in all other aspects.  All the learning activities are, therefore, characterized as VLEs rather than PLEs.

The framework the authors developed to assess formal learning consists of four key questions:

1) Why is the student doing the activity?  (Learning Objective)

2) Where is the learning activity happening and when is it happening? (Learning Environment)

3) What is it that the student is going to actually do and who are they doing it with? (Learning Activity)

4) How are they going to undertake the activity? (Learning Tools)

The authors then characterized the mobile learning systems they investigated into student-led, teacher-led, or negotiated.

It is so easy to say, “we are offering mobile learning and it encourages informal learning.”  However, using the 4 dimensional framework developed by Chen, Millard & Wills, we can critically assess what kind of learning activities are actually taking place in a given mobile learning.  Since I’m interested in bridging the gap between informal or personal learning with formal education, I found this to be a very useful assessment framework.

 

References:

Traxler, J. (2009).  Current state of mobile learning.  In Ally, M. (ed.) Mobile learning:  Transforming the delivery of education and training.  AU Press, Athabasca University. Available at: http://www.aupress.ca/books/120155/ebook/99Z_Mohamed_Ally_2009-MobileLearning.pdf

Chen, W.P., Millard D.V. & Wills, G.B. (2008). Mobile VLE vs. Mobile PLE: How Informal is Mobile Learning? In: mLearn 2008 Conference, Wed 8th to Fri 10th October , the University of Wolverhampton.  Available at http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/16158/1/InformalMobileLearning_modification_final_0718.pdf

 

 

 

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