1st summary

The current status of research in finding connections between location and learning brought me to develop an idea that the reason that you can go mobile with this new technology has not been explored at all. All the application for mobile learning try to represent the same kind of services or application that you can find in a networked computer environment. first of all is not clear to me why you would like to give each person computational device even in a classroom environment. What are the advantage of this upgrade, what are the cognitive benefits children can have when dealing with a networked environment sharing something or working together on something.

Essentially is not clear to me what does it mean collaboration: it is a mutual modelling or script which involves the reciprocal explanation and reciprocal teaching learning function? it is an organisational strategy by which people self regulate dividing the tasks in cognitive block that can analysed further or is it a kind of mutual exploration, by which people participate collectively in the exploration process producing in turn perturbation into the system and analysing the arising effect. …

What i want to understand is the kind of learning solution i can imagine for mobile learning. why do we have to define something new if we are not introducing something revolutionary? Why do we have to use a new technology if we do not see any reason for that?

In dealing with mobile learning and CSCL I envisioned the following scenarios:
(1) participatory simulations: using physical location as input into a virtual world running on the computational devices of the participants. This can be used in a collective simulation and for learning through position games; (2) data logging / extended notepad: using the mobile as an extended notepad to record data to be used into a virtual world and vice-versa from the virtual world to bring data out into the physical side for supporting something.

Is participatory simulations the input is from the physical world to affect the simulation inside the virtual world. We can envision something working on the other way but the application i can see so far are only for assembling purposes (i.e. the virtual tells you where to find something and you go there).

The learning perspective offered by participatory simulations over mobile are incredibly high: we can envision each participant as a containing a part of the solution, a social capital. Mixing together these capitals will enable the group to solve the puzzle. There is a share control in the sense that nobody is in charge of the system and everybody has to participate in order to get to the solution. The learning arises from the network through free exploration of the simulation.

Simulations used into participatory study or framework are appealing for exploring emergent phenomena like economical relations, decentralised mindset, social capital, social network maps, …

Participatory simulations do not solve completely the location problem. In fact the same simulations can be realised for a computer networked environment where people can input through the keyboard. the only reasons for having them mobile is that, in this way, people can embody their learning and heaving a better understanding.

If we think in term of fine-level movement and the movement as a design element itself, we can imagine the mobile as being a computational device able to sense and record our movements and use this information to a specific entertainment/learning purpose. We can envision collaborative usage of co-ordinated movements in a dance environment. for example, as per the MediaLab GiveawaySensors < www.media.mit.edu/resenv/GiveawaySensors/ >.

MeMe Tags
\cite{Borovoy98}

This paper presents this meme Tag technology, an electronically-enriched name tag that is able to share bits of information with other name tag in its proximity. the system is designed to share these Memes, which are quotes or sentences. This is supposed to increase the communication amonge the users. What is not defined by the paper is the autors’ meaning of collaboration. the interesting ideas is to share bits of personal informations with extrange, altough the potentiality of this new capability are not deeply explored by the authors. Interesting links with F. Davis (\cite{Davis92}), R. Dawkins (\cite{Dawkins76}), and J. Donath (\cite{Donath95}).

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