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Gobsmacked

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Fig. 1. MarineTracker.com

This blew me away. A service that tracks every vessel at sea. For various levels of monthly subscription the service will do all but helm your tanker, yacht, motorboat across the world's oceans - that is coming.

It isn't quite Google Streets - you can't drill down to live satellite images at sea level. 

Will DVLA track every vehicle on UK roads one day? Why not? All driving offences will become a thing of the past or be prosecuted the moment they are committed. And we take a step further towards the driverless car.

Then tracking people; voluntarily. Why do that? Having a snail-trail database of where you have been. It would be interesting to analyse how, ant-like, we go about our lives. The commute would be seen for the almighty waste of time that it is.

Would it be ethical to microchip your kids? Or a parent with dementia?

And regardless of this what kind of services could be offered to someone whose whereabouts is always tracked? To some considerable degree we allow this and encourage it as soon as we turn on a mobile device? I don't speak a word of Spanish - yet. I'd like through my phone, with an ear piece, to have a one-to-one tutorial as I attempt to cross the country to locate the above yacht when it puts into port in the next couple of days. 'Just in time' language tuition. 

Other things I don't want to look up. 'Tell me about ...' and I am promptly told about the thing I am looking at in a language, and style that suits me ...

Far fetched?

Artificial Intelligence offers a way forward to bring unprecedented levels of personalised learning to millions.

Those with a smart phone and speedy Internet access; so neither inclusive, nor fully accessible or even without cost. So severely limited in that respect as a harbinger of education for the world. 

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Where would you stick one? (A QR code that is)

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Monday, 5 May 2014, 06:57

Use of Quick Response (QR) codes for eLearning

Fig.1 Easily generated, at no cost, a QR code is a 3D barcode that holds ample information to take you via a scanning App on your smart phone or tablet to rich multimedia content. 

They were developed in 1994 by Denso-Wave (Denso, 2010) to support parts use in a slick 'just-in time' Toyota car factory.

And made patent free by them in 1997.

  • They can be read at an angle
  • even when 30% dirt impaired

You come across them far more often in France and Germany, or if you go that far in North America, as well as Japan and China. Over in California last summer I photographed them in all kinds of places ... 

More on mobile learning  from Kukulska-Hulme, 2005., quoting So (2008) of the importance of:

  • location independence,

  • time independence,

  • meaningful content

Student's engagement by way of evaluating their own work is a good strategy to motivate students. p. 95

Since 2009 Horizon report mobile devices, clouding computing and the personal web make ‘informational way stations … delivering contextually-relevant content’ Cohen (2011) have become possible.

According to Educause (2009) ‘The QR Code is the next-generation barcode, facilitating tagging of information, social media, and other popular content in today’s digital content eveolution’,

Use of QR codes has had a mixed response in the UK. Although ubiquitous in China, Japan and North America they are less prevalent in the UK. Their use in museums and national parks has thus far been limited whereas in formal education, to support school trips, there has been greater success. The generation of as well as the use of QR codes within a programme of learning appeals to students who use smart devices and increasingly expect the use of technology and access to the Web as part of their learning experience.

Obituaries and picture/video-memoirs found on cemetery markers, gravestones, and monuments (Naumannm, 2011; Ruane, 2011)

Video/audio guides and tours of tourism locations, museums, aquariums, zoos (Awano, 2007; Information Standards Committee, 2008)

On-demand multimedia tours and information for spaces, events, specialised audiences, shows, museums, dispalys (Barrett, 2012; Tucker, 2011)

Libraries are using QR codes to download audio tours to patrons’ mobile phones so that they can take self-guided tours. (Robinson, 2010; Ryerson University Library & Services, 2010)

France’s biggest science museum used QR codes to connect its physical exhibits to its library holdings, and vice versa (Vandi, 2011)

The South Downs National Park, as an experiment, put QR codes on signage (B-K, 2011)

The Museum of London uses both QR codes and NT codes.

Work where participants are equipped, to survey and for co-operative learning and FAQs that are applicable to targeted learning goals (Gradel & Edson, 2012a)

REFERENCES

Awano, Y (2007). Brief pictorial description of new mobile technologies used in cultural institutions in Japan. The Journal of Museum Education, 32(1), 17-25

Barrett, T (2012). 50 Interesting ways to use QR codes to support learning. (Last accessed 6th Feb 2014  https://docs.google.com/present/edit?id=0AclS3lrlFkCIZGhuMnZjdjVfNzY1aHNkdzV4Y3I&hl=en_GB&authkey=COX05IsF

Kerry-Bedel, A (2011) Its in conservation

Denso (2010a). QR Code Standardization. (Retrieved 6th Feb 2014, from http://www.denso-wave.com/qrcode/qrstandard-e.html )

Hicks, A., & Sinkinson, C. (2011). Situated questions and answers: Responding to library users with QR codes. Reference & User Services Quarterly, 51(1), 60–69.

Information Standards Committee (2008) Section 3: QR code, Synthesis Journal. (From http://www.itsc.org.sg/pdf/synthesis08/Three_QR_Code.pdf )

Robinson, K. (2010). Mobile phones and libraries: Experimenting with the technology. ALISS Quarterly, 5(3), 21–22.

Ryerson University Library & Archives (2012). QR codes. Retrieved 6th Feb 2014, from http://www.ryerson.ca/library/qr/.

Gradel, K., & Edson, A. J. (2012a). Higher ed QR code resource guide. 

So, S. (2008). A Study on the Acceptance of Mobile Phones for Teaching and Learning with a group of Pre-service teachers in Hong Kong. Journal of Educational Technology Development and Exchange, 1(1), 81-92.

South Downs Use of QR Codes (2012) http://southdownsforum.ning.com/forum/topics/signposting-and-qr-codes

Tucker, A. (2011). What are those checkerboard things? How QR codes can enrich student projects. Tech Directions, 71(4), 14-16.

Vandi, C. (2011). How to create new services between library resources, museum exhibitions and virtual collections. Library Hi Tech News, 28(2), 15–19.

 

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H818: The Networked Practitioner. Towards a 'poster' for our TMA2

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Thursday, 27 Feb 2014, 16:25

 Fig.1. 'Poster' constructed using a combination of 'Brushes' (to layer several photos in one) and 'Studio' a simple graphics app that provided the overlays and text. Images and screen-grabs cropped and saved into Picasa Web Albums. 

Created for H818: The Networked Practitioner - towards a poster to illustrate a conference demonstration of an interactive mobile learning platform aimed at sourcing the involvement of many collaborators to enrich our understanding of this period in history.

The QR code should work, the YouTube video does not - it's a screengrab. The video clip, under 2 minutes, is there.

This is Jack Wilson's WW1 Story  (blog) and here is the brief interview clip. In fairness I edited around 8 minutes down to 2 minutes, keeping one story about a young woman who came down from London to meet up and otherwise to compress the kind of circuitous conversation you can have with someone in their nineties. 

Fig. 2. Jack Wilson (1896-1992) talks briefly about his few weeks military training at RAF Hastings in May/June 1918. Features several of his photographs from these weeks that he sent home to his mother in Consett, County Durham. (As YouTube doesn't embed on OU platform, link to YouTube)

 Fig.3. The simplest of SimpleMind mind maps to remind me what the poster still requires and is certainly missing. 

And as a reminder to me there is 2500 words to write too. 

Only up because it it has sounded all night as if the roof was about to come off ... then load car with teenagers, dog and clutter to meet up with my wife and my in laws. Then 800 miles through France. I'll be back at my desk on the 6th Jan. But who needs a desk these days? I can get online from the passenger seat of the car - this summer it blew my mind to be online in a plane. It'll be considerably less pleasing to find smartphones are used as eagerly and noisily 3000m up a glacier as they are in a shopping mall. Our connectedness and desire to be so has to be the technical and social phenomenon that defines the era we are living through - I would prefer to have a chip embedded in my skin so that I wouldn't have to care about keeping the XXXXXX phone charged, on a loud enough ring so that I respond, and on my person wherever and whenever I am from something like 6.00am through to the early hours of the morning. 

I'm drifting into reflection mode but at one end I am getting final calls, emails and texts from my wife (an 'owl') at 1.00am (I've been asleep for a good 2 hours) then fed up with the noise of the wind I check the BBC weather at something like 5.30 am and trigger something in Facebook that informs others that I am online and I get a message from a fellow 'lark'. Come to think about it I had might as well have been online for the hours I slept given the concoctions of my dreamworld. 

  • Breakfast.
  • Pack car.
  • Wake teenagers.
  • Walk dog.
  • Run through assorted check lists.
  • Check weather.
  • Wake teenagers.
  • Go back to bed and set off later as it clears?
  • Woken by phone at 11.30. Where are we???
  • Wake teenagers.
  • Set off.
  • Arrive five hours late.
  • Realise I have forgotten the dog ... 
  • Look forward to a power cut so that everyone's gadget dies so we can look forward to a traditional Christmas of charades, deluxe Monopoly and Twister. 

CALL TO ACTION

If you or your relatives have old photos from the First World War how about sharing them and let's see of collectively we can bring these characters back to life by researching then telling them story. I'm always very interested to hear from people with a similar interest in the 'Great War' especially when it comes to the Machine Gun Corps and the Royal Flying Corps where my grandfather and great uncle served. 

My WW1 blog might be the place for this.

 

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QR codes and NFC

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Thursday, 27 Feb 2014, 17:12

Fig.1. YouTube video for the Museum of London's NFC initiative in 2011

Having picked through links that came to a dead end in a fascinating paper on the variety of technologies and tactics being used by museums in relation to mobile learning I started to see and read more and more about the use of QR codes (those matrix two-dimensional barcodes you use with a smartphone) and NFC 'Near Field Communication' which is becoming an industry in its own right.

Having been kept awake at night about a need for 'constructing knowledge' rather than being fed it I knew that visitors, students especially, need to engage with their surroundings by somehow seeking and constructing their own views.

Without QR and NFC the simplest expression of this is taking notes, and or photographs of exhibits - not just selfies with a mummy or your mates. Possibly doing bits of video. And from these images cutting/editing and pasting a few entries in a blog, Prezi or SlideShare. QR and NFC feed the visitor controlled and curated bite-size nugets, so more than just a snap shot, you can have audio and video files, as well as more images and text.

Fig.2. South Downs Way QR Code.

Successful trials mean that these have spread. Funny I've not noticed them living in Lewes and walking the dog most days on the South Downs. I'll take a look. NFCs have been used extensively, for 90 exhibits, at the Museum of London - so a visit is required. Though I won't be ditching my iPhone. Apple does not support NFC believing that the technology is still in its infancy ... like Flash, like Betamax and VHS, and all that stuff, a battle will be fought over the NFC benchmark.

So 60% penetration of smartphones in the population ... most of all of which can use a QR code, but less using a early version of NFCs. My experience?

Fig.3. QR Codes at the Deisgn Museum

Last year a visit to the Design Museum I found the 'Visualizing the mind' exhibition littered with QR codes.

They didn't work. Just as well they had ample computers. How often do organisations jump on the IT bandwagon only for a couple of wheels to fall off further down the road?

Fig.4. Evie

Meanwhile I'm off to walk the dog .. then using a trip to see Gravity at the Odeon Leicester Square with my kids to include an educational tour to the Museum of London (always handy to have a teenager around when using mobile technology).


REFERENCE

'REPORTING RESEARCH' 2013, Interpretation Journal, 18, 1, pp. 4-7, Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 10 November 2013.

 

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How can the gallery or museum visit be personalised and augmented to make first impressions last?

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Friday, 2 May 2014, 14:25

Fig.1. Miro - Barcelona

A lifelong love in art galleries yet I still feel unmoved (most of the time) by galleries and museums, possibly because I expect the gentle, guiding voice of my late mother at my shoulder (artist, art historian, Mum).

What could be a more personalised visit than to have someone who knows you so well point things out, guide you to things that will interest or irritate, then offer an insight - invariably linked to 'what do you do next?' i.e. look, learn then apply.

I take heart from the exceptions, only two visits I can think of though:

'In Flanders Fields' - you need a day to yourself to take this in. The most shocking moment entering a funnel like fixture, looking around then twisting your head up to see sets of photographs of mutilated combatants. It put your physically in a demanding postion to view them. Then the multi-media displays, not just actors giving accounts, but the ultimate before and after shots of places using satelitte images and old aerial photos.

'Alcatraz' - on many levels the visit irritated me, partly the Disneyfication and advance booking, then the many layers of the islands as bird sanctuary, prison and Native American conquest. What impressed though was the brilliant audio guide - BBC at its very best might be the way to describe it. Very carefully and sensitively juxtapositioning of interviews with former inmates, guards, and family members of guards/governor which between them created a sense or atmosphere of the place like some kind of hideous monastic retreat.

So how do we 'recreate' battlefields" We have the 750th of the Battle of Lewes here in East Sussex next year, as well as us all having five or more years of the run up to, the war and aftermath of 1914-1918.

The opportunity exists to use smart devices to give visitors and pilgrims an enhanced, personalised and lasting memory of these places - but how?

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H810 Activity 31.4 Benefits of mobile learning

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Friday, 14 Dec 2012, 05:49

Is learning support by text messaging mobile learning?

Must it be a smart-phone. I would have called taking an Apple Classic into the garden on an extension cable and using it in a cardboard box to shield it from the sun as mobility of some kind - indeed development of the use of laptops in the last 15 years has been mobile and in 1997 I shot a training video for the RAC on a roadside device called ‘hardbody’ that was a navigational tool to locate the breakdown, a database of parts, a diagnostic for fault finding and fixing and a way for customers to pay.

The prospects for and possibilities of mobile computing have been known for a long time.

Getting them into the hands of students has taken longer as prices have fallen and broadband made readily available.

Was a cassette on a Sony Walkman mobile learning, or more recently is something from iTunes U on an MP3 player mobile e-learning? Yes, surely if its function is educational or it is resource tailored for a specific module.

  1. Convenience and flexibility - the university in your pocket. Ditch the folders, files and print outs.
  2. Relevance - situated
  3. Learner control - mine (personalised Apps, choice of phone and case ...)
  4. Good use of 'dead time' - on the bus, train, passenger in car ... in bed, in front of TV, on the loo or in the bath.
  5. Fits many different learning styles - short burst or lengthier intense periods
  6. Improves social learning (i.e. Communicating with peers and experts)
  7. Encourages reflection - easy to take notes (audio as dictaphone or text)
  8. Easy evidence collection - photos and audio (screen grabs from online research), tag finds.
  9. Supported decision making
  10. Speedier remediation - instant
  11. Improved learner confidence
  12. Easily digestible learning - where 'chunked' though this should be a choice where content has been suitably prepared for web usability.
  13. Heightened engagement - feeds alerts that can be responded to in a timely fashion. Makes synchronous and quasi-synchronous forum feedback possible.
  14. Better planning for face-to-face - organiser, contactable 24/7 (almost)
  15. Great for induction - keeping in touch, easy to ask questions, familiar, universal and everyday.
  16. Elimination of technological barriers - basic, intuitive, commonplace.
  17. Designed once then delivered across multiple platforms - responsive design (using HTML 5)
  18. Easily trackable via wifi - and GPS
  19. Cost-effective build
  20. A means to recoup money
  21. Technology advances with Apps
  22. Technology advances with interface, voice command and other tools.
  23. Everything in one place, including TV, radio, podcasts, photogallery ...
  24. Assistive technology - add a micro-projector, wifi-keyboard, sync to other devices such as tablet, laptop and desktop, augmented learning ...
  25. Replacement technology - starting to replace money, already replacing cameras, MP3 players, address book, organiser, games console, remote control, torch, dictaphone ... pen and paper, art pad ...

(In part from Dr Chris Davies, Head of the e-learning research group, Oxford Prof. John Traxler, Prof. Of Mobile Learning (2011 )

http://www.epicbrasil.com/assets/files/Mobile_learning_NHS_Research_Report.pdf

(last accessed 10 Dec 2012)

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Museums and galleries - what can you recommend?

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Monday, 18 Nov 2013, 14:58

Fig.1. Lawrence Lek at the Design Museum, Shad Thames, London.

Seen it once, then again with my 14 year old son - and for a third time with my 16 year old daughter next week. Potentially with other members of our extended family and friends too. I should have bought a season ticket.

The Design Museum is unique - I spent time with EVERY exhibit. I need a couple of hours every day over ten days. That's how much it resonates with me - the stories, the process, the end result.

There are three galleries:

FIRST FLOOR

Fig.2. Jessica Ennis takes the stairs to the first floor seven at a time

Innovation in Sport - design with a bias towards the Olympics and Paralympics, with Formal 1, Le Mans, hand-gliding, surfind and a few other sports too. Sixteen sports people silhouettes on the walls in the stairwell - how do you physically match up to Jessica Ennis, Messi, Phelps or Sharapova?

SECOND FLOOR

Fig. 3. A 3d rendering of a crystal whose shape is formed by your presence and movement (courtesy of a Konex device and a laser)

Digital Memory - a dozen designers, architects and conceptual artists play with Swarovski crystal to express what memory is. Most mind blowing, all beautifully displayed with headsets explaining what is going on in the artist's words and other interactive screens - and 'augmented' content from wif-fi and 3g.

SECOND FLOOR - SECOND GALLERY

Fig. 4. Yuri Suzuki at the Design Museum

Designers in Residence - six young innovators set a brief, there journey of discovery, experiment and creation lovingly recreated with video, artefacts, audio and displays - and a take-away booklet.

With half-term upon us where do you recommend taking children, young adults and their friends? How does this change if you are their grandparent or parent of a friend? Can you cater for them all? What might it cost?

The cost of getting into the Tower of London made my jaw-drop - £23 for an adult? £55 for a family ticket!! I think I'll leave it for another 1000 years.

The Wellcome Foundation 'Super Human' exhibition and other galleries are free (and lunch is great too).

The Design Museum was £11 for an adult, £7 for a student

Where in the world do you go? We all have our favourites.

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Should we call it e-learning anymore?

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Sunday, 7 Oct 2012, 06:18

IMG_1089.jpg

It is learning whether you prefix with an 'e', 'm' or 'b' as in - electronic, mobile or blended.

Increasingly the opportunities, particularly with learning on a hand-held computer - 20th century terms for the 21st century smart phone or table - are for 'a' or 's' learning - standing for applied or 'action learning' that is 'situated'.

For example, I use a combination of an iPad or Kindle when coaching swimmers - not just for registers, but to show images from a swim drills book.

I am waiting for the wrist or lapel badge computer - an iPad the size of a Nano or ring. Will these come to be known as 'w' learning or 'r' learning or has 'e-learning' become generic? The Google display will be one to watch.😳

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iPads an OU Module

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It is a big ask to expect to complete a module entirely on an iPad - I suppose the greater challenge would eb to do so on a smartphone. My first and thus far ONLY trip is that I cannot edit a wiki. The advantage is making use of micro moments, on a bus, waiting for a bus, in the bath (oh yes), a passenger in a car - breaking from a walk. All occasions when a laptop, even a netbook, is too bulk or slow to open.
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Kindle Joy

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It's taken me two years to get round to figure out how to send a PDF file to my Kindle. This is an experiment. I've also sent it to an iPad and may even follow with an iPhone.

If I can combine a day walking on the South Downs with some stops to read a paper then I kill several birds with one stone; most importantly I get through the reading and don't feel I've been confined to the house. The dog goes for a walk, I enjoy the fresh air and exercise my legs.

Mobile Learning?

No need for fancy software or an MA in Instructional Design either. This is like taking a paperback with me, or a file of papers in an arch-level file. Which is how I often read and revise: up a hill, in the woods, by the beach. Its that or not get it done at all as hanging around the house I find it too easy to get distracted (and I don't have a study or even a room of my own).

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Put Bill Gates and Steve Jobs through the Kirton Adaptor Innovator personality inventory and what do you get?

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Sunday, 4 May 2014, 09:41

Re-reading the Steve Jobs biography with four months in hand before another MAODE module I am struck by what it tells you about Gates and Jobs and how self-evidently one is an adaptor 'doing things better' while the other is an innovator 'doing things differently'.

This drawn from doing a KAI personality inventory and all the reading around these tests for B822.

I came out at 144 on a scale of 160; I'd envisage Jobs as somewhere on the outer edges of 150 while Gates gets a 20 or 30, neither would be in the 60-130 zone for two thirds of respondents.

If they ever did one of these are the results known?

As most managers do observation and experience of a person's behaviour and responses must suffice.

I feel a desire to revisit H807 'Innovations in E-learning' while mixing it up with B822 'Creativity, Innovation and Change'.

I can do this through the 1000+ entries I have here and by refreshing my mind from the current and archived blogs of others blogging here currently (though few if any blog there way through the MBA programme and I am yet to find anyone blogging about B822).

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GoMo e-learning and m-learning

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Call it me-learning? Cut and pasting a short module from a PDF to GoMo which enables content across all mobile platforms. Adding images and video, multichoice questions and 'hot spots'. If the MAODE is Sandhurst, then this is machine-gun training in the front line.
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M-Learning stands for 'Mouse-free Learning'

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Friday, 2 Sep 2011, 03:53
Mouse-free learning anyone? As well as being so portable I like the iPad for the touch screen. I need an iTouch though as I get cramp/ numbness in my supporting hand. What are your iPad experiences? One unexpected use I have found for someone who is often up in the dark is to use it as a torch.
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HOLIDAY ILLNESS

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Sunday, 10 Mar 2013, 00:23

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?

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B-learning: as in bathroom, bed, beach or 'in the bath'

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Monday, 29 Aug 2011, 06:48

Could be bed-based learning too, even the beach, or on a boat; all tried for the purposes of testing the device and its possibilities.

TIPS FOR THE BATH

  • Spare towel for the iPad when you put the thing down. I find this is when the water gets cold.
  • Toe control of the hot tap.
  • Contact lenses in (glasses steam up).

The context lends itself to a variety of e-learning topics, the marketing of bathroom products, shampoos in particular.

photo.JPG

A glance might allow the sleuth to identify the make-up of family members.


Takes picture, though this could be uploaded directly to wordpress here I go for Picasa Web, then paste in the code.


DIY tips on a dripping tap would be handy, but isn't that e-training?


Otherwise normal bath activities apply:

  • read a book,
  • listen to the radio ...
  • sleep
  • wash


Surely 'mobile learning' in this context is a misnomer (or unnecessary nomer)

Was book reading ever called mobile or portable reading once cost and size meant that some people took the early printed books with them?

Being without a room of my own, or study even a habitable shed, garage or attic the advantage of having an iPad in the bath is that I am unlikely to be disturbed.

A laptop doesn't work, you get drips in the keyboard and sitting up spoils the point of the bath.

Where do you take your 'mobile device' and in what contexts, times and places is it suitable or conducice to learning?

I find a bench 'in memory to ... ' on cliffs looking over the English Channel at Hope Gap or the mouth of the River Cuckmere below the chalk cliffs of the South Downs known as the 'Seven Sisters' a place to write, especially at first light. For a couple of hours. Train journeys can be good too, so long as it isn't packed.

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Toilet Learning - Just 'situated' learning?

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Monday, 29 Aug 2011, 09:20

SURVEY ON USE OF SMARTPHONES BY US STUDENTS

photo%252520%2525288%252529.jpg

53% of students (mostly undergraduates in this survey of 573 in the US) with a smartphone, typically an iPhone or Blackberry, use it in the bathroom.

Only 28% say they never do.

My only suggestion is to do as in China and wash you hands both before and after.

This gives me t-learning or should that be 'seat-uated' learning.

Situated and contextual learning requires marrying up the place and the learning being done, which could therefore be National Geographic and 'The Oldie' online?

The posh may prefer 'lavatory learning' - which would be 'L-learning'.

Lavatorum Docet

The lavatory teaches

 

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Mobile Learning Challenge

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Thursday, 1 Nov 2012, 16:27

Mobile Learning Challenge

If you are interested in mobile learning here's a challenge from IET colleague Prof Agnes Kukulska-Hulme - co-author of some of the material in mobile learning (Week 19 of H800 of the Masters in Open and Distance Education).

Search 'mobile', 'm-learning' or 'agnes' here for my notes from the last 18 months if you are interested in having a go?

Perhaps some of us could work together and give the winnings to an educational charity or towards producing an idea? 

The International Association for Mobile Learning (IAMLearn, www.iamlearn.org), in collaboration with Epic (www.epic.co.uk), is proud to announce the Mobile Learning Challenge. 

The Mobile Learning Challenge is searching for innovative and visionary solutions for learning using mobile technologies. 

Practitioners, students, and young researchers are particularly encouraged to contribute their inspiring and visionary concepts. Specific technical skills are not required for participating!

Full details here: http://www.iamlearn.org/competition.php   

The first prize

The winner of the Challenge will receive £1000 (one thousand GBP). The winning solution will be presented to the mLearn 2011 conference audience either by the winner (if present at the conference) or by the President of IAmLearn. 

This prize is co-sponsored by IAmLearn and Epic. 

The second prize

The runner-up will receive a prize of 5 years’ free membership of IAmLearn.

Deadline for Submissions is Wednesday, 14 September 2011 24:00 GMT. 

Please circulate this news through your networks and forward to anyone you think might be interested. We hope there will be many exciting submissions.

Best wishes. Agnes 

Agnes Kukulska-Hulme,  President, International Association for Mobile Learning.

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Time, Place, Activity

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Thursday, 1 Sep 2011, 13:42
The intersection is the next generation of designs.
(context mobile learning, author AKH)
My interest is to free up fingers and legs so that I can tongue- type or contol/ influence actions directly from my mind, indeed to have not something of my mind reading and writing up my every thought, but as a distinct 'other' entity. Churchill had his secretaries. Didn't Barbara Cartland have three? Though they weren't independent or contributing thinkers.
Or perhaps the personal assistant is the personal device of the future.
What it requires is no technology and closer living, in my case not three men in a boat, but three like minds in a Yurt.
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Woman of the Developing World favour learning by mobile phone

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Monday, 29 Aug 2011, 10:32
As a professional swimming coach when working with disabled swimmers I was taught to play to a person's strengths.
When AKH talks about the inequalities of access, on the one hand she mentions the affordances of such devices on the other ... we find a way to play to their strengths - is it not these developments that drive advances?
Woman needing and wanting to study favour learning via a mobile device (smart-phone or more likely a standard mobile) as it can just look as if they are on the phone. There are cultures where learning is liberation and where liberation is not something the men want 'their' women to have.
I wonder how many others can now take their mobile device into a 'space of their own' (to paraphrase Virginia Woolf), so that they can Rita-like (as in 'Educating Rita) 'improve' themselves.
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The inaugural lecture of Agnes Kukulska-Hulme (Part 4)

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Wednesday, 31 Aug 2011, 15:21
In 2001 AKH undertook the first interviews on the Masters.

I was in this cohort, working full-time, on H802 but not using a PDA. I lacked the wherewithal to get content a palm M105. I had a Psion in my pocket and side by side on my desk were a MAC and a PC.

More on the academic stuff from Way-out & Kukulska-Hulme ( 2001-3)

This Palm using MAer had created their 'university in their pocket'.

Coming from the agency side working across platforms in TV and the Web I had been asked to provide ideas to a UK company that had the UK licence to create content for handheld devices; I should have been speaking to AKH.  

http://blogs.ft.com/mba-blog/2011/06/22/distance-learning-or-nearness-learning/#axzz1WbbnlExG LINKS http://www3.open.ac.uk/media/fullstory.aspx?id=21782
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Enjoy this webinar in mobile learning

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Saturday, 30 Jul 2011, 19:59
http://elearningstuff.net/2011/07/28/mobile-learning-catalytic-change-–-online-webinar/#respond
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MAODE H800 A moment of enlightenment

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Sunday, 1 Jul 2012, 17:27

I would like to be studying an applied MAODE.

This should be a joint collaboration between the Institute of Educational Technology and the Open University Business and Law School.

applied is the operative word.

Not a Masters in Open and Distance Education, but an aMAODE.

18 months ago I signed up to the MAODE (I might have done an MA in Fine Art ... for which I was qualified. Where would I be now?)

Never mind

My mother, tutored by Quentin Bell at Durham University in the 1950s, had me teaching fine art somewhere. (Our family for the last four generations seem not to generate progeny until they are at least in their third decade)

Maybe, e-Art?

I may pick this up next and become a e-learning verions of David McAndless.

Information is beautiful

Go Google.

24 months ago several friends signed up to an e-learning course with Sussex University. They are now constructing e-learning, I am not.

Why?

The difference, dare I suggest, is did I want to be a mechanic, or the engineer?

  • Can The OU be less precious and offer more of both?
  • My first ECA was an entirely practicle, commercial piece of e-learning that was shot down ...
  • for being blended
  • and 'of this world.'
  • It is all 'of this world'.

It is only learning, not e-learning, but o-learning.

Only Learning.

P.S. It ain't rocket science. As Martin Weller shows in his VLE book.

What we as potential practioners of online learnning is a dip in the training pool. As a Swimming Coach, and former competitive swimmer, what strikes me is that I am yet to stick my toes in the water.

Frankly, my concern, is that if I come up with another commercial e-learning project for an ECA it will like the other one be rubbished because the markers are looking for an academic paper, not a viable e-learning project.

This is where the tectonic plates of theory and practice meet. Is anyone on the MAODE doing it to become an academic?


DSC01936.JPG
From Drop Box

(Note to self a month later ... it is applied. In every module, particularly H807 'Innovations in E-Learning' we are constantly pressed to put e-learning in an applied context with which we are familiar)

 

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Tablet technology - From 1988

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Apple started this journey in 1988

See pics and videos of the iPad Ancestors

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Are you a Tablet Agnostic, Atheist, or Evangelist?

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Saturday, 2 Jul 2011, 05:16

Or is that device agnostic?

Quite right too, though my life was easier when it was all Mac. I'm working on some ideas in relation to Martini-learning.

You know the thing, having a Smartphone or iPad that you can use (cue the music) 'anytime, anyplace, anywhere.'

It's just learning folks.

Whether you add an i, an e or an o, as in iLearning (interactive), eLearning (electronic) or online learning. Not forgeting web-based learning which it was called c1998 to 2005?

I am reflecting on how best to introduce new anything to people.

As a professional swimming coach I think a good metaphor is teaching adults to swim. I can get the motivated person to a full Triathlon in 18 months and an Iron Man in Five Years.

It all starts in what used to be called the 'baby pool' or training pool. Just get into your costume and get your toes wet might be a start. I am ok with many blogging platforms, I've observed their progress with a rye smile for over 12 years and have a habit of giving them all a go.

I am getting used to Linkedin.

Next stop a master class in Twitter and Facebook (where all three Jonathan Vernons are I regret to say me ... Getting unstuck, not feeling comfortable with the 'collective' me.

A simple exercise with a tablet I feel has been to have had access to an iPad for three weeks but only used the wifi connection. I now have the sim card in.

So work doesn't just come home, it can be 'enjoyed' 'indulged' or 'executed' from a Wendy House at the bottom of my mother's garden.

Here's the rub.

I have to be indoors because the reflection on the icey glass surface of an ipad gives me more cloudworks on the keyboard and screen than I need. For reading at least it is back to the Kindle.

P.S. Having not used my mobile phone for a week, and not missed it, this like Television, might be a piece of technology that like my Psion and Palm One before, have had their day.

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H800 80 Week 19: Mobile devices, mobile learners & Web 2.0

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Friday, 5 Oct 2012, 06:28

From materials and commentary prepared by John Pettit (2008)

Of courses it is learning if it is on a mobile phone or any other device. Do we mean informal or formal learning? Vicarious learning or didactic? Stumbling across knowledge, or reading formerly to pass an exam? Does it matter? These devices blur the distinction between a means of educating that may eventually look dated and specific to an era.

Do we need campus based universities?

Kids can have their kicks in Ibiza then study online while holding down their first job.

Give the campus over to the retired and unemployed.

Do we need schools?

And if so, instead of being at the centre of a child's education, perhaps they become as tangential as a visit to the leisure centre of supermarket because you are better linkedin to the educators and the content when you're away from the place and all its distractions.

When do you ever not learn even if you don’t know it?

It depends entirely on what the device is being used for. Apps have shown how versatile we are at throwing activities and qualities at these devices. People want this stuff.

Is a laptop mobile? What about the old Apple Classic? I used to take it out into the garden on an extension cable and view it inside a cardboard box while sunbathing. Was that mobile? I can read in the bath on a Kindle and click through RSS feeds on the iPad while the Kettle boils. Might it simply feel as if all these people are following me around?

There are degress of mobility. Working in TV we carried around with us monitors to watch content back during a shoot. The thing was no more portable than a hod stacked with bricks.

When I read formal and informal learning I wonder if this equates to whether the learning is hard or easy. I have acquired knowledge in a formal setting and had a laugh, equally in an informal context without the self-motivation and will I have found informal learning very hard to do.

It is sometimes claimed that handheld digital devices allow students to learn at anytime, anywhere. A more nuanced position argues that the devices have the potential for ‘any time anywhere’ learning but that many other factors come into play.

For example, some devices may be easy to handle but have small screens that don’t allow easy reading.

Far from being hard to read the small screen is better suited to the narrow field of close vision that we have. So what if it is like looking through a letter box. If you want to concentrate why look at more?

A device can become too small. Too portable. As a video producer I have seen kit shrink so much that a device the size of a child’s shoe will generate a HD image and for $75 a day you could hire a camera that delivers 35mm quality. Making a film though with a device so small creates instability, you need some weight on your shoulder if you want to keep the image steady.

The portability and size of screen is less relevant than the affordances of the device, the fact that an iPad doesn’t support Flash, or Android is having problems with Google Apps, that is, if you are using learning materials that require specific functionality that isn’t working.

As for screen size, people may watch a blockbuster movie on a giant screen at the Odeon Leicester Square or on a Smartphone or palm-sized gaming device that is no bigger than a spectacle case; here what matters as with any movie, is the quality of the narrative, not the size of the screen.

Where a device’s portability comes into its own, as the person who recently made a phone call from the top of Everest, is the portability. Another extreme might be a cave diver with a device the plots the route for a cave system, or a glaciologists relaying pictures of a feature in a Greenland ice-sheet to colleagues thousands of miles away that informs the research.

‘Patterns of usage differ widely, and the fit between people’s lives and the devices they use can be very close.’ (Pettit and Kukulska-Hulme, 2007, p.28)

Is an apt way to express a new term being used in the Open University Business School to describe applied or practice-based learning that gets away from the ‘distance’ tag, that is to call it ‘nearness’ learning. (Fleck, 2011). I also like the idea of ‘intense but provisional,’ people’s attitudes are brand specific, with the Mac vs. PC split of computing now a split between Windows, Mac and Android (and others).

People chose brands to simplify the choices that have to be made between a plethora of devices, between Sony, Nokia, Goole and Windows, as well as between network suppliers, be that O2, Vodafone or others.

There is another way of looking at it though, if you come to see that all these devices offer the same sets of services and tools, from QWERTY keyboards, to a camera, from messaging to phone calls, to the hundreds of thousands of Apps, and in the case of the latest Windows phone … Windows software from Outlook to Docs, PPT to Excel.

Is size such an issue?

People have managed needlepoint for centuries and once painted miniatures. There is an appeal for the tiny sometimes, just as there is for the massive. In this respect the device becomes a reflection of the person’s personality, as well as the depth of their pockets, the availability of others services, from a signal to 3G (or not), even to the power to charge batteries.

Personal choice, celebration of variety, offering a smorgasbord rather than the continental breakfast.

‘That well-known random-access device consisting of ink on bound sheets of paper may still have plenty of life in it yet!’ (Pettit and Kukulska-Hulme, 2007, p.28) expressed in 2007 is how in 2011 writers in the e-magazine Reconstruction 6.4 describe the ‘long-tail’ of the blog, that definitions have become meaningless, suggesting that the varieties of ways to do or have what we have continued to call a ‘blog’ is as varied as the ways we have over many centuries come to use paper.

Drawing on a paper written in 2007 on research presumably undertaken a couple of years previously, it strikes me that ‘the world has moved on’, to say the least – though not enough. This exercise is looking at the extraordinary capabilities and uses for a device that in 2011 can offer somewhat more than was possible four years ago. This doesn’t mean to say we have the things.

From my own perspective I came into the MAODE (this time round) with an eight year old iBook that had trouble with some software, things as simple as PDFs and the latest versions of Flash as I was unable to upgrade the operating system. Working from a smallish screen I found myself printing off too. For the second module I had access to a better laptop and plugged it into a good-sized screen that allowed me to see a page of A4 at a time or to swivel the screen and have two windows open side by side. During the course of my third module (this one) I found myself without a particular device, but with access to a desktop, a laptop, even an iPad (and have used a Kindle to read some 16 books). Here I found myself putting everything online, into a blog and e-portfolio so I could access whatever I wanted wherever I was (or whichever device was available), as well as having the cataloguing, aggregating, sharing affordances that this has given. Any device, however mobile, and whatever size, can tap into this content.

The problem now, isn’t simply, for me at least, is the overwhelming volume of content I have put online, which despite adopting various approaches to keep track of it, has split into a number of blogs (OU, Blogger, WordPress, and Tumblr), a number of cloud galleries/warehouses in the sky (Flick, Dropbox, Kodak and Picasa Galleries, My Stuff, Pebblepad).

It is apt that I blog under the name ‘my mind bursts’, because it has, and is.

Like having a thought, or recalling some event or fact seemingly on a whim, I find I stumble across these ‘mind bursts’ quite by accident, forgetting the number of blogs, for example, that I for a period started only to abandon so that ‘serendipity’ has a role to play through the myriad of links I’ve also made. None of this has helped by finding myself with three Facebook accounts and unsure how to delete the ‘right’ one.

The attitude can only be to ride this like the web surfer of a decade ago – to run with it, rather than try and control it. You meet friends coming off a training a Liverpool Station, you do not need to know who else is on the concourse, the timetables for every train that day, week or year. To cope with the overwhelming quantity of stuff tools to filter out what matters to you at that moment is coming to matter most.

Currently I find myself repeatedly drawn to the activities of Hugo Dixon, a former Economist and FT journalist, who set up a business he called ‘Breaking Views’ to counter what he already by then perceived as a deluge of online information and the old print-based expression ‘Breaking News’; we would come to need as some pundits predicted fifteen years ago, ‘information managers’ or ‘information management systems’.

I wish I could reference the expression properly but ‘Freedom is lack of choice’ is one of my favourites; sometimes filters and parameters have their place. I enjoy using a Kindle as much for its limitations; it is something I can take to bed knowing that it’ll send me to sleep, while an iPad keeps me up all night.

REFERENCES

Fleck, J (2011) Association of MBAs Conference Video 2011

Pettit, John and Kukulska-Hulme, Agnes (2007). Going with the grain: mobile devices in practice. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 23(1), pp. 17–33.

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