Mobile Learning

Very exciting!  The international conference on mobile learning, MLearn, is to be hosted here in Australia between 16-19 October 2007, in Melbourne (my favourite city in Australia even though I live in Canberra):

This conference will appeal to a wide range of audiences who are interested in enhancing learning, designing content and developing systems for mobile devices and wireless networks. The following objectives serve to define and guide the structure and foundation of the MLearn 2007 Conference.

• To promote the development of mobile learning
• To stimulate critical debate on & research into theories, approaches, principles & applications of mobile learning
• To share local & international developments, experiences & lessons learned.
• To promote networking & business opportunity development.
• To encourage the study & implementation of mobile applications in teaching & learning.
• To stimulate & assist personal professional development &  the development of new skills for educators.
• To provide a forum for education & knowledge transfer.
• To facilitate dialogue, sharing & networking between diverse cultures with regard to the optimum use of emerging technologies.
• To bring together providers of technology & services with educators and instructional designers.

The conference has now issued a call for papers, which can be submitted electronically via the conference website.  I hope to see many of you there!

technorati tags:mlearn, m-learning, mlearning, mobile learning, mobile-learning, mobilelearning

It’s a bit of fun, but in addition to being a good guide to mobile phone ettiquette, this podcast provides an example of a short piece of engaging audio learning content, suitable for delivery on a mobile phone, PDA, or media player.

The length, content, and style of delivery all lend themselves to mobile delivery, although the narrator speaks a little fast. A text transcript of the podcast is also provided at the Mr Manners site, which is a good example of providing the content in alternative forms, allowing learners to engage with the material in their preferred medium or style.

(via SolSie.com)

technorati tags:manners, m-learning, podcast, audio, mlearning, mobile learning, mobile-learning, mobilelearning

Have you found yourself recently

• hopelessly lost on a random street corner?
• drooling over Steve Jobs’ demonstration of Google Maps on the Apple iPhone?
• Wishing you could use navigable, interactive maps as part of a mobile learning activity for your students, without having to dish out for GPS handsets?

If you answered yes to one or more of the above (or, in my case, all three), you will be overjoyed to know that Google Maps is now available for mobile phones (other than the Applie iPhone), smartphones, and PDAs via a simple, free download and install.

With the same zoomable, annotated maps, integrated search, route planning tools, and photo views found in the desktop version of Google Maps, this mobile application puts the world at your fingertips. Download it by opening your phone’s mobile browser and heading to http://google.com/gmm, or find more information on this web page.

And if you’re not sure whether it’s worth the download, you can even try out the mobile version of Google Maps on this demo page, which works exactly like the real thing.

UPDATE: Google Maps for Mobiles does indeed work in Australia – as reported in this article from The Age!

technorati tags:google, maps, location, based, learning, situated, proximal, iphone, m-learning, mlearning, mobile learning, mobile-learning, mobilelearning

Mauru Cherubini blogs on a workshop whose convenors include some of the world’s most respected researchers and practitioners of mobile learning:

They are particularly interested in using mobile technologies for shifting from being a ’spectator’ of media to ‘creator’ of media.

One of the pedagogical value they see in these is the fact that media creation can bring a group of participant to a negotiation of perspectives. The idea is to discuss what media creation will mean in the future.

Thanks for sharing your notes, Mauru – sounds like a fantastic workshop, which I hope you’re enjoying! Please do share more of your ideas from the workshop if you can.

technorati tags:workshop, media, video, production, scripting, mlearning, m-learning, mobile learning, mobilelearning, mobile-learning

Tony Vincent at the Learning in Hand blog has created a new page on how iPods can be used for teaching and learning – and it’s not just for playing audio and video files:

Learn about functionality like syncing calendars and address book contacts, dictionaries, text files, PowerPoint slides, multiple choice quizzes, and other interactive content.

Check out his main iPods in Education page here to see all the things that iPods can do as learning tools – top rate, Tony!

technorati tags:ipod, education, learning in hand, teaching, learning, students, teachers, mlearning, m-learning, mobile learning, mobile-learning, mlearning

(photo: cavorite)

This week, the Carnival of the Mobilists is hosted at Xellular Identity, where the week’s best writing on mobile technology is showcased, including my contribution “10 reasons why mobile learning matters“. Later in this post, I’m offering edubloggers the chance to be part of our very own Carnival, as either a host or contributor.

Most Edubloggers will not yet be familiar with the concept of blog “Carnivals” or “Festivals”… but they’re worth understanding, as they can be powerful vehicles for promoting and improving an online community or practice or interest. The Carnival of the Mobilists, for example, is just a little more than a year old, but has snowballed into a community of hundreds of contributors, thousands of contributions, and in this – its second year – now offers sponsored prizes including international travel to for the best host, US$250 to each month’s best contributor, and US$500 for best post of the year.

A blog carnival or festival involves bloggers who share a common interest. Each week, those bloggers contribute their best post of the week to a common location, such as an email address. One blogger, the “host,” accesses the email, sorts out the contributions, selects the best entries, and writes a “carnival post” that links to the contributions – sometimes hosts perform these duties in very creative ways. Contributors who are selected then write an article that links back to the host’s “carnival post”. It is also a tradition for the host to showcase any newcomers to the carnival each week, and to select their “favourite” entry.

In this way, the Carnival serves to promote the best writing of its contributors, and creates an informal, growing community online.

Now: here is the opportunity to create our very own Carnival of the Edublogs. If you write a blog that reflects or reports on innovation or improvement in teaching and learning, please do one or more of the following:

• Email carnival.edublogs@gmail.com if you would like to host an upcoming Carnival this year.
• Email carnival.edublogs@gmail.com with a link to one of your best recent posts if you would like to contribute to the first ever Carnival of the Edublogs, next month!
• Subscribe to the Carnival RSS Feed on the Carnival of the Edublogs blog, so you know when each Carnival is released.
• Promote the Carnival! Invite other Edubloggers to host or contribute to, or read, the Carnival of the Edublogs, and write an article on the Carnival on your own blog.

You’ll find more information on the Carnival of the Edublogs at http://carnival.edublogs.org. This invitation is also replicated on the Carnival blog at http://carnival.edublogs.org/2007/01/23/come-to-the-carnival/ .

Update: It seems that Alexander Hayes (”It’s all too bloody interesting and thats why I’m still up at 1.48AM”) and Stephen Downes (”It’s all very interesting and it keeps me up nights as well”) have both just found the Carnival of the Mobilists, too!  Will you be coming to help launch the Carnival of the Edublogs, guys?

technorati tags:carnival, festival, edublogs, edubloggers, carnival of the edublogs, clcommunity, networkedlearning, edna, education, teaching, learning, innovation, edutech, mlearning, m-learning, mobile learning, mobilelearning, mobile-learning, educational, students, teachers, university, tafe, vet, vte, training, e-learning, elearning

I’ve just found a site called SpinVox, which allows you to call a number on your mobile (or any phone), leave a message, and have it automatically converted into any text format – SMS, email, or even a blog post. The blogging service, Speak-A-Blog, works like this:

Simply call your Speak-a-Blog^TM number and speak your post. SpinVox converts it to text and posts the entry live to your blog, within minutes.

Sounds like a fast and simple way for learners to make journal entries on the go – particularly if their work or study environment doesn’t favour taking the time to laboriously compose an email or message using a mobile phone number pad. 

SpinVox is a bit like the opposite of the Talkr text-to-speech service I use on all of my blog entries to convert my typed blog entries into a spoken, downloadable form that many people find more convenient for accessing as a podcast or audio file for listening on their iPod, mobile phone or PDA.  Using audio as a data interface while on the move can be more flexible and easy-to-manage than typing on a small keypad, or reading off a small screen; Talkr and SpinVox are two services which have recognised this with their services.

In addition to processing blog entries, SpinVox can also convert spoken messages to emails or SMS messages, and can convert other peoples’ Voicemail messages to you into text and send them to you in that form. SpinVox is based in the UK, but available internationally, and working with service providers here in Australia and around the world, so we can expect to hear more about them soon all over the world… or should I say, read more?

technorati tags:spinvox, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, speech2text, text2speech, mlearning, m-learning, mobilelearning, mobile-learning, mobile learning, speak-a-blog, speak-a-text, voicemail, sms, email

Justin Oberman at the Mopocket blog has come across a report from RCR news (December 25th 2006 page 20), highlighting the utility of mobile phones as an educational tool for infants:

A new study by PBS found cell phones may be useful as an educational tool. Eighty parents with children between the ages of three and four were given video enabled Sprint PCS phones and  asked to listen to literacy tips and allow their children to watch streamed letter video clips at least three times a week for two months. The study was designed to test the level of acceptance of using cell phones for educational content to parents of preschool children. Parents surveyed during the study said the video increased their children’s knowledge of the alphabet and provided them with tools to help their children with literary skills.

Children aged three to four? Using mobile phones? Many of you will be sceptical about this claim, but I was visiting my girlfriend’s family over the holidays, and her two-year-old sister was already using one of her dad’s out-of-service mobiles as a toy – pressing the buttons and making “calls”. She’s not alone: Emily at textually.org relays Information Week’s report that kids as yound as 2 years of age are downloading content to cell phones, computers, and portable digital music players:

“About 15% of 2- to 5-year-olds use cell phones and 62% of 11- to 14-year-olds use the devices, according to a new study by NPD Group.”

Indeed, some entrepreneurs are even targeting babies and infants as comsumers of mobile phone functionality; for example, the Mobile Baby Toy uses a real mobile phone to provide a baby with entertaining pictures and sounds when they press the buttons, wherever you happen to be. Young children now have a range of handsets which parents can give them, with functions that allow parents to regulate who they call, and who calls them until they’re ready to graduate to a full-blown mobile (apparently, in late childhood or early teen years).

The ramifications for adult education and workplaces around the world are clear: it won’t be long before we have young adults in our companies and institutions who have grown up with mobile phones all their lives. In the same way that the landscape of information technology is being engineered and revolutionised by people who have grown up with home computers such as Amigas, Amstrads, and the Apple Mac IIe, we can expect that mobile information technology will undergo revolutionary change in the next decade, spurred by the expectations and understanding these “mobile natives” will undoubtedly bring.

technorati tags:cellphone, mobile phone, mobile, telephone, communications, m-learning, mlearning, mobile learning, mobile-learning, mobilelearning

In educational technology circles, there’s been much debate in recent times over the relative merits and drawbacks of controlled, predictable, but limiting teaching and learning environments (e.g. Learning Management Systems), coined “walled gardens” – versus open, creative environments with rather less individual or proprietary control (e.g. social software), coined “open gardens”.

The issue of walled vs open gardens has also been hotly discussed by the mobile device industry, which even features some excellent blogs dedicated to open gardens. In the mobile phone industry the walls around developing and accessing content seemed to be lowering, but, it seems, there are other barriers to surmount in the pursuit of more open access to content and functionality. Doug T writes:

“The new walled garden is not the content you can view on your phone, but rather the applications that you can install on your phone.”

For example, as Sam pointed out in his comments on my iPhone article, the new Apple iPhone will limit the applications (”widgets”) that users can install on it, possibly incurring the wrath of users who seek the freedom to customise their mobile phones however they wish:

“This is a quote from Jobs in the NYTimes:

‘We define everything that is on the phone,” he said. “You don’t want
your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded
three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t
work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.’ “

This definitely dampens my enthusiasm for the iPhone as a potential educational tool; if the latest innovations such as QR Code readers or 3rd party mobile applications can’t be integrated with this new portable digital environment, it makes it considerably less useful for facilitating new, innovative learning experiences. The problem with walled gardens on mobile phones, like this, is that it makes it very difficult to establish new boundaries for a device – to “shape” it to meet our needs. The iPhone currently only has two widgets, for weather and stock prices, both pretty useless for the needs of the average educator or learner (unless, perhaps, you’re studying meteorology or economics!). An open architecture would enable the device to be customised to meet more diverse and relevant needs.

Apple’s products are always innovative, ground breaking, and trend-setting. but I certainly hope that this “walled gardens” approach is one of Apple’s trends that won’t be followed by other handset manufacturers.

(via C. Enrique Ortiz Mobility Weblog)

UPDATE: Darla Mack refers to a great article on “10 ways the Nokia N800 [handheld internet device] is better than Apple’s iPhone“.  Leigh Blackall loved the Nokia N770; I reckon he’ll be rapt when he checks out the Nokia 800, which has a few extra goodies, including a built-in Skype video camera. Sweeet.

technorati tags:open gardens, walled gardens, iphone, customisation, personalisation, m-learning, mlearning, mobile learning, mobilelearning, mobile-learning, open, architecture, widgets

Wattpad have launched a site enabling users to create their own digital, text-based stories, and make them accessible to mobile devices.  The text is compressed before being downloaded to the user’s phone, a few pages at a time – strategies designed to minimise waiting time for content. 

The Wattpad reader allows users to search for and browse new stories, and download them remotely.  Alternatively, stories can be downloaded to a PC and transferred to mobile phones using a cable or Bluetooth connection.  Other services, such as Winksite, already allow users to create their own mobile web content, so I guess the particular attractions of Wattbook are the remote search/browse, and the “upload from PC” options that most other services lack.

This kind of service would be well suited to providing short-ish texts (for example stories, case studies, or references), since even with the free PC upload option, I’d imagine it would be cumbersome to read anything very lengthy on a mobile phone screen.  However, I could conceivably be wrong in this assumption, as several users have uploaded the complete novel Eragon and other longish print books (e.g. A Short History of Nearly Everything, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Life of Pi) into Wattpad form.

With the PC upload option, it’d be more flexible and powerful if Wattpad were able to save images into their books (even if these could be configured to be stripped out of remotely downloaded books), but other educators may well find this a useful resource nonetheless.

(via Pocket Picks)

technorati tags:wattpad, stories, story, digital, storytelling, mobile web, mobile, web, m-learning, mlearning, mobile learning, mobile-learning, mobilelearning, cellphone, mobile phone, cellular