Or should that be 64 things and 14 academics ? (a number that could be doubled from our reading lists with ease).
What about the others?
What have I missed out?
Some tools:
Do please add some of your own to see if I can get it up to the cliched 101.
If only a 6,000 word assignment could be written by assembling all your evidence, research and notes, putting in the criteria for this four parter, then hitting a button
This is the Wordle version
I wonder if by doing Wordles of our work it would be possible to differentiate between a lower and a higher grade assignment on the basis of the size (and therefore frequency) of certain words?
P.S.
Discussing mobile learning with my 13 and 15 year old I told them about loading all course books onto an iPad (becoming common place in Schools across North America); they both said it would be too distracting as you'd want to chat or play games.
I said what about an e-Reader, and they said that was boring, what was wrong with a real book
To cap it all my 15 year old has gone retro, both in her dress sence (her version of hippie or punk depending on her frame of mind), and insists on using a throw-away film camera or a functiong 1970s Polaroid camera.
The motivation has to be the content, not how it is delivered, and the end result in terms of grades, the university and career of their choice etc: I like the analogy of mobile content being like 'Chicken Tikka': whatever the means of delivery the expectation is that it is still Chicken Tikka.
'Whicever mode of delivery I choose, the meal I eat will still be Chicken Tikaa'. Luckin et al. (2005:122)
REFERENCE
Luckin,R., Brewster,D., du Boulay, P., Corbay, S. (2005) in Mobile Learning. A handbook for educators and trainers. Edited by Agnes Kukulska-Hulme and John Traxler.
Down with something hideous and find myself on antibiotics. Want to be studying but haven't the head for it, not academic papers.
This cover 20 benefits of mobile learning though.
As an asthmatic I wonder if the kind of videos I used to produce as interactive Apps might be of value?
Watch several movies, the wonderful 'Barefoot in the Park' with Robert Redford and Jane Fonda, the TV movie on the rise of Hitler with Robert Carlyle and 'The Englishman who went up a hill and came down a mountain' with Hugh Grant and Tara Fitzgerald.
'The Rise of Evil' is historically accurate though somewhat eager, understandably, to ensure that Hitler has no redeeming points. I'd recommend it as viewing alongside the two volume biography by Ian Kershaw.
'Barefoot in the Park' which I must have seen on TV in the 1970s drew me into the wonders of a stage play making it onto the big screen. I also admire the way five days of sex is handled by showing newspapers being put outside their hotel bedroom door every morning. I thought Paul put his shoes out to be polished, another film?
A call from a colleague with a major corporate and we talk social media learning for nearly three hours.
During this time I repeatedly search this blog, using the e-portfolio that it has become, sending charts and grabs from Picasa and from the iPad, creating a mind-map in Bubbl.us and balancing how the MA in Open and Distance Learning compares to the OU MBA he completed last year and the MRes he is doing now.
Just a phone call. We could have gone to Skype, Elluminate or even Google+. The phone freed up the laptop. Several photos picked up from workshops, as well as screen grabs, were emailed from the iPad which was also running.
Fig.1. Social Media Learning Mind Map
Timely as I am procrastinating over the ECA which will be on the use of Forums and Mobile devices in e-learning.
A reminder of how a synchronous conversation can achieve so much, especially when there were items set before our eyes to discuss.
We also discussed (I hadn't the energy to take many notes. In retrospect I wish I'd recorded it):
It was invaluable to have the external point of view, someone from a global comany of thousands talking about social media learning. Looking at the devices we now have, such as smartphones and tablets, it was particularly interesting to be reminded of human nature, how devices may be used for things and in ways that they were not designed.
Whilst the iPad permits mobility, we often use it when static: in our favourite chair, recumbant on the sofa, even in bed or in the bath. Is this mobile learning? It's hardly getting out of the house, drawing down data on the run using augmented technology to enhance the environment your in. And simply having content on an iPad so that you can using the touch screen to open and close the text, enlarging text, flipping the screen size between portrait and landscape all the time - the joy of its tactile nature. Unable to sleep I use the light from the iPad as a torch to sneak away from the marital bed and passed the children's bedrooms and to find my way downstairs withouth having to put the landing light on.
It also was clear how both devices and approaches to learning cannot be isolated, we got our joint heads around Engestrom's 'Activity Systems'. The technology is complementary, the move to personalise everything through device and software choices.
I'd played Devil's Adocat a couple of times suggesting that 'nothing had changed' only to come away agreeing that many of my behaviours were/are different as a direct result of Web 2.0. I have gone from learning in private, hunched over my books never showing it to anyone to a situations where, more like someone tending a public garden, or at least one seen from the street, people can see my thinking. Ironically, it is the end result that often fails to appear because I'm not about to post TMAs and ECAs online.
Some authors I quoted/cited during the conversation:
To which I subsequently add as a result of browsing the blog and so re-engaging with my own experience within the chronology of the module; it is this, after all, that is to be examined, rather than my knowledge from this and the preceding modules. A learning design fault?
I quoted Swift as saying (paraphrasing) 'I don't know what I mean until I hear myself speak'. If anyone has any idea how to cite this please do offer your thoughts.
More authors to consider in this context (mobile learning, forums, e-learning, web 2.0):
Other topics that we should have discussed:
BEING DEVELOPED FURTHER HERE
http://socialmedia4education.wordpress.com/2011/09/08/social-learning-for-corporates/
The idea of thinking of e-learning as a chicken tikka is sound, though I'd perhaps prefer pizza or a Chinese takeaway.
Whether it's e - learning or m- learning, it must be ME learning.
Chapter 12
Rosemary Luckin, Diane Brewster, Pearce, du Boulay, Siddons - Corbay.
From Mobile Learning:a hand book for educators and trainers. John Traxler and Agnes Kukulksha-Hulme (2005)
I read this on vacation in a couple of days in between learning to surf on the north Cornwall beach of Mawgan Porth. I have barely managed a day without dwelling on either e-learning or social media, dreaming of them even when a signal is difficult to come by (on the knoll above the farmhouse where we are staying).
Written in 2005 and so based on research of the previous five years I have to wonder at my haste to download it (e-book). It takes me back to my own first forays into online learning in 2001 when amongst others FT Knowledge was my account.
The problem with the content is that is is woefully out of date. All the research being done at the time was on the useless PDAs of the time; I stuck with a PSION that served me well as a pocket word-processor.
'Whichever mode of delivery I choose, the meal I eat will still be Chicken Tikka'. Luckin et al (2005:122)
The only idea of lasting significance that I have taken from the entire book is this one, that and fig.1 which I'm a mind map indicates the many devices that provide mobility, ALL of which now reside in an iPad or iPhone with all problems long ago resolved by commercial organisations rather than any institution who without fail take far too long to commit to anything and invariably design by committee trying to please everyone so put everything in, and rarely consider the commercial feasibility of their actions.
On reflection, 'take-away' says it all for e-learning as convenience is everything.
REFERENCE
Luckin,R., Brewster,D., du Boulay, P., Corbay, S. (2005) in Mobile Learning. A handbook for educators and trainers. Edited by Agnes Kukulska-Hulme and John Traxler.
Mobile Learning
Discussing this with Ian Singleton of icanplayit.com two weeks ago, I was Linked In to the author from JISC Doug Belshaw a few days later.
This conversation could soon link to a myriad of people cited and listed in the JISC report on Mobile and Wireless Technologies. This smorgasbord of a review will take a few weeks to consume; I'll want the recipe and I'll be back for more, repeatedly. It is a module in its own right.
It requires the early morning to take a three hour stab at this. Kukulska-Hulme (2010) says “Mobile learning is here to stay, even if in a few years' time it may no longer be distinguishable from 'just learning'."
As a student of e-learning the value of Doug Belshaw's JISC review is broad. Whilst mobile learning is the main theme, there is a suitable warming up to the topic via the development of e-learning and a broad acknowledgement of the key thinkers of pedagogy which touches on innovations in learning and the debunking of Prensky and his idea of digital natives.
It makes a good read for anyone studying Open and Distance Education with the Open University.
The theme that the author may not have seen that is pervasive throughout, is the idea of the e-learning entrepreneur; this seems inevitable with a device and technology that puts learning into the pocket of the learner.
Laptops and smartphones become a learn as I please, when and where I want, device. I wonder too, when cameras will become phones?
Reflecting on the devices that got unwrapped this Christmas some of us might prefer the Canon or Sony camera that uploads directly to Facebook, Kodak or Picasa without the interface of phone and laptop, or even a memory card.
If ou can think of it, it has been done.
This is one of those documents that will takes weeks of consideration as I wish to read all the references too, not that I doubt the author, but because often I find thinking such as this is like a digital conversation caught in the wind and there are a dozen other voices speaking at the same time. I've not come across Traxler before, for example. He’s cited 12 times in this review.
Though, just because someone else has already done it, does not mean that I might not do it better?
JISC Spotlight The presentation. “Students no longer need to engage with information and discussion at the expense of real life but can do so as part of real life as they move about the world, using their own devices to connect them to people and ideas, ideas and information of their own choosing, perhaps using their own devices to generate and produce content and conversation as well as store and consume them.” (Traxler, 2009, p.70)
Why therefore bother with a traditional university education at all?
Better to go straight to work and learn on the job, not simply as a trainee or apprentice, but by tapping into institutional and corporate learning. This is important The wider mobility of society has led to ‘approx-meetings’ and ‘socially negotiated time’ (2009:73) which, although mobile devices have not been designed specifically for educational purposes, has a knock-on effect upon formal education.
This disruptive effect has both a strong and a weak element, argues Traxler.
The ‘weak’ element of the disruption due to mobile devices in formal education is at the level of nuisance - such as ‘cheating’ during examinations, inappropriate photographs, devices beeping during class time. The ‘strong’ element of disruption, on the other hand, “challenge[s] the authority of the curriculum and the institutions of formal learning” (2009, p.77); students can effectively become gatekeepers and organisers of learning for other students in a way institutions have only been able to do previously.
Given the fragmented nature of the current mobile learning environment, there are multiple definitions of mobile learning; however, most of these definitions recognise the importance of
• context,
• access
• and conversation.
"[Mobile learning involves the] exploitation of ubiquitous handheld hardware, wireless networking and mobile telephony to facilitate, support enhance and extend the reach of teaching and learning”
Due to funding arrangements, which sector is involved, and country-specific contexts, mobile learning means different things to different communities.
• On the go
• Every day
• Between classes and home (and work)
• Conflicts of complements formal learning
• More interactive
Woodill (2010:53) identifies seven main affordances of mobile learning:
1. Mobility
2. Ubiquity
3. Accessibility
4. Connectivity
5. Context sensitivity
6. Individuality
7. Creativity
REFERENCE
Belshaw (201) Mobile and Wireless Technologies Review 2010 Doug Belshaw, JISC infoNet
Traxler, J. (2009) ‘Learning in a Mobile Age’ (International Journal of Mobile and Blended Learning, 1(1), 1-12, January-March 2009)
Traxler, J. (2009) ‘Students and mobile devices: choosing which dream’ (in ALT-C 2009 "In dreams begins responsibility" - choice, evidence and change, Traxler, John (Professor of Mobile Learning, University of Wolverhampton)
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