Mobile Learning

I came across an excellent podcast from Sue Waters in WA, who recorded Robert Svanbery and Jane Looker, IT lecturers from Great Southern TAFE WA, talking about how PDAs are being used by health care trainers. Robert and Jane stressed how digital mobile devices are integral in the health care industry – for example, the use of MIMS drug databases on PDAs to determine dosage or contraindications (conflicts with other drugs or conditions), or the use of the Internet to upload images of various symptoms for diagnosis or second opinions on treatment, and many other applications are documented on a number of Medical/PDA sites. Giving health and nursing students experience with the same tools is vital if they are to go into industry properly equipped for the practices they will encounter there.

Health isn’t the only industry where PDAs and mobile devices are taking on a vital role and should therefore be a vital part of training. Some of my colleagues in CIT’s Tourism & Hotel Management faculty reminded me just last week that a growing number of restaurants use PDA-equipped, wireless systems to automatically record customer orders for the kitchen and for billing purposes. Just on the weekend, I saw a PDA being used to record orders at McDonalds in Canberra city, to more quickly process a long queue of customers. Other colleagues have related stories from the plumbing industry, where photos of a part or problem are sometimes sent “back to base” for identification, diagnosis, or quotation.

Vocational and technical educational organisations need to be responsive to this use of mobile technologies in industry, and quickly adapt training methods and resources to reflect the changes in the workplace.

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Here’s a set of great free Java midlets for learning about several secondary-level mathematical concepts, such as graphing of various equations, equation solving, sketching graphs, fitting graphs to data, and quadrilateral geometry: Math4Mobile.

The functionality of each application has been based on sound pedagogical principles: for example, the development page states the development team’s understanding that “learning is a social-cultural process and teachers and peers are part of the individual cognitive process”. The social-constructivist aspects of teaching and learning theory are reflected in the functionality of these midlets – they integrate with the multimedia messaging capabilities of phones, to enable graphs, diagrams and work to be captured and shared between peers, teachers or mentors. The midlets take full advantage of the mobile phone keypad for interaction and data input, and each one is supported by a set of lesson plans/learning activities that utilise each midlet.

All of the midlets work on mobile phones supporting Java 2 Mobile Edition (J2ME) with a screen resolution greater than 128×96 pixels (which, by my recent research, includes the vast majority of mobile phones sold in Australia within the last two years). Technically, the implementation aligns favourably with best practices in mobile application design.

Math4Mobile is a project of the Institute for Alternatives in Education in the Faculty of Education at the University of Haifa. Thanks to Arik, from the development team of Math4Mobile, for bringing this to my attention, and well done!

Maths can be a challenging subject especially – when some students have out of date math books and calculators. Studying hard sometimes isn’t enough: get the help you need with new applications that are available now.

technorati tags:java, j2me, midlet, mathematics, maths, graphic, algebra, equations, geometry, social, constructivism, connectivism, m-learning, mlearning, mobile-learning, mobilelearning, mobile learning, graphing, education, flexible, learning, mobile