In this blog post I am reporting the real-time notes which I took during the round of presentation of the Mobile Learning workshop happening in Villars, Switzerland.
> Peter Byrne – Trinity College Dublin
SMART (Stop Motion Animation and Reviewing Toolkit)
It allows to capture and edit still stop motion animations on a mobile phone
DNT (DIgital Narrative Toolkit)
Is an application that allows to build a movie using the SMART application on the client side. The main screens allow the creation of the storyline with a conceptmap, then define the storybeats and then connect the received media files to various parts of the timeline. SMART would be able to MMS the content created on the mobile phone on the DNT server for editing.
> Giuliana Dettori – CNR ISTD
The relationship between narrative learning environments and mobile learning. Stories positively influence learning in all its aspects. Bruner’s defined narrative as a unique sequence of events, mental states, happenings … but these constituents do not have a life or meaning of their own. Their meaning is given by their place in the overall configuration of the sequence as a whole…
What characterizes NLE? Learning approach (game-based and challenge-based), Technological means (animations, augmented reality, natural language processing, intelligent agents), and the Role of the user (story authoring, story telling, participation in story creation, story audiencing).
Different research fields worked independently on NLE (artificial intelligence, multimedia studies, instructional design). The less is specialized the environments, the more work is required by the facilitator to support the activity. What is the relationship between NLE and mobile technology? Both narrative and mobile learning have a flavor of informality.
Not everything is a story: other forms of mobile media capturing can result in descriptions or chronicles which are not a form of narrative.
> Kim Issof
In one of our publication (Jones at al 2006) give 6 reasons why mobile learning can have a positive effect. Mobile learning is motivating because: control, ownership, cross-settings, learning in context and continuity.
Bird-watching using mobile technologies (Clough, 2005): participants used tablet pcs to observe garden birds as a part of a national survey. That could be constitute a perfect bridge between formal and informal learning.
Tablet PCs in schools (Twining et al, 2005): very short term ownership has an impact. Students were motivated. Ownership meant something slightly different.
PDAs in museums (Waycott at al, 2005): the device gives access to resources extending curricular opportunities outside classroom boundaries.
In conclusion simple terms require significant unpacking and have multiple meanings.
Q&A: We should not be comparing mobile technologies with desktop technologies but more old-fashion mobile devices like paper notebooks and pencils.
> Lyndsay Grant – MOBIIMISIONS – futurelab
Hitchers, CellID as a locative technology. Partnership between Futurelab and MRL, Nottingham University. The design approach involved an exploratory setting trying to link mobile to social network use.
MOBIMISSIONS was trying to push ahead the learning aspect. The application allowed to create and respond to ‘missions’: challenges, questions, resuests for informations, etc.
What they found was that co-located play was socially significant. Co-located teams could share fun or ideas. The social context was lost in asynchronous play because you could not know who created the mission and for which reason. Also they registered a preference for ‘open-ended’ and ‘creative’ missions. It was more important to make interesting missions than score points. The participants felt that the time and the effort they put in the activity was not rewarded.
Learning conversations stalled in asynchronous play. There was a need to support extended conversations.
> Jari Laru & Sanna Jarvela & Piia Naykki – How people collaborate to learn in different contexts scaffolded by the mobile tools
A mode of interaction has changed from one to many to many to many. Building sustaining communities which help people for sharing ideas to many to many.
In their activity mobile technology can serve as a regulation tool: self-regulation, other-regulation, co-reguation, socially shared regulation. Scaffolding collaborative inquiry with mobile technology (Laru & Jarvela, 2006).
Mobile Mind Map tool for regulating individual knowledge (Naykki & Jarvela).
Their recent interest moved into mobile media: slightly moving a canonical teaching paradigm into a RSS-aggregation-wiki paradigm where students can share online and re-edit their content that can be used for the lectures. The idea is also to being able to add content and use the content from the mobile phone.
Q&A: What do you think do you need the mobile elements in your scenario? The students are working during their studies and the platform can support their interaction on distance.
> Juliet Sprake – Etouring
Do we want a gadget that can see through buildings or do we want learners that can find cracks in the concrete?
Etouring processes are contingent on what propels participants to move around a building or through buildings. What motivates the next move is explored through these processes that set up particular …
Illegal tour guide: finding your way round the British library.
Haptic referencing. Walking is a metaphor for going forward.
Escavation toolkit is a system that allows the participants to walk around and collect data in different sites. The information is then uploaded to information kiosk. The next step is to find a panorama station where the participants can change the point of view on their work having a cumulative view on the samplings done on the filed.
> FELISA VERDEJO – LTCS Group – UNED
Sustaining Learning through an ubiquitous framework
ENLACE project students are engaged both in individual and collaborative activities.
The learning workflow includes activities spanning over a long term period. They want to integrate the technology in the curriculum.
The backbone of the technological infrastructure is a Learning Object Repository.
Agora is a system for co-located interaction where the interaction spread over several PDAs controlled by the students. The results of the field activity is then discussed in a plenary session.
The data collected is used into a modeling environment to further test hypothesis.
Taking the measures from the real world helps the students to make sense of their activities.
> Michael Voong – Birmingham University
Aim to build better virtual communities. Technology can de-skill. Draw inspirations from trends. Recent statistics on the use of social virtual communities shows an increasing interest from the youngsters. Winning mechanisms includes social tagging, annotations. Tags are also used in You-Tube for easily sharing and searching media. (Encoding specificity, Turving, 1970).
> JOCELYN WISHART- University of Bristol
Jones (2006) noted the importance of control as a feature of the relationship of users with their mobile device.
Conversational Learning (O’Malley et al, 2005): a conversation both reinforces and the illuminates the process of coming to know by constructing knowledge in a two-way interaction between student and mobile device.
Sketchy, Wildkey are great examples of field annotation tools that expose your annotation at national level.
The cognitive aspects of learning are interdependent and combined in a complex web creating motivation and understanding. We may well come to conceive of education as conversation in context, enabled by continual interaction through and with the personal, mobile device (Sharples, 2005).
> Russell Beale – Cognitive Work Analysis
Tech HumanTech ladder is a nice framework that he uses to explain that human-relations can get into the way in unexpected way when you introduce a new technology in a workplace.
Political constraint – Organizational – Team – Psychological – Physical
> Mike Sharples – The Future Technology Workshop
A method to imagine and design future technological systems. How we are going to collaboratively engage in media making in the future. Participant design is ok if you know what are you designing. Scenario planning is an high-evel of abstraction. This approach combines the best of both.
Current technology -> future technology;
Current activity -> future activity.
We look at the intersection of future activities with future technologies. The sessions will involve:
Imagineering – Modelling – Relo-play – retrofit – everyday – futurefit – requirements