Some final bits...

A few snippets that I forgot to add:

As a result of the wireless shenanigans, me and Liz now have some 3G mobile broadband modems, which could be of use to the LTI int he future

Some notes/refs to follow up on:

• A new journal: The International Journal of Mobile and Blended Learning, inaugural issue is out early in 2009
• Rogers' Diffusion of Innovation Theory
• Ely's Eight Conditions for the Facilitation of the Implementation of Technical Innovation

Catchup time

OK, I'm miles behind with my contributions to this blog. Time for a summary and some other thoughts

Some highlights:

• Marc Prensky - ace keynote (I didn't gain much from the others). Myself, Andrew and Susannah first heard about him when we were working games for learning a few years ago. He covered loads - I tried to take notes but he just went so fast! (must get his slides from the web, even if the colours he used on them were awful!) Some of his key points were about the development of technology, and students teaching themselves: "Mobile learning will be more complex, and will involve more doing". He also talked about gaps: student/teacher; haves/have nots; present/future and researcher/practitioner. My final note of what he said is: "The small disappearing box called the classroom". I was pleased to see him eating some black pudding at breakfast the next day - an honorary Northerner in my eyes
• Andy Ramsden's sessions on QR Codes and Twitter - Interesting. Innovative. Engaging. Participative. Pretty much what I was hoping for at the conference- if only I'd attended more like that
• Mark Kramer's session - I've looked at his work online since the conference. I only wish I'd seen it!
• I went to a session about accessing and downloading videos via Bluetooth from city centre kiosks -it gave me an idea about something we can do with the media space in the Adsetts extension
• An interesting conversation with someone doing her PhD about 'spontaneous mobile learning'
• The Pondicherry Indian restaurant in Ironbridge. Fabulous
• The "Australian Tony Soprano" who was attending the conference. He looked just like him. I saw him on his mobile a few times, probably talking to Paulie Walnuts, arguing with Carmela, or booking an appointment with Dr Melfi

Some lowlights:

• Marc Prensky - his session over-running had a domino-topple effect on ours. Can't really blame him though, because...
• ...not a single thing ran to time, which was also affected by...
• ..the ridiculous mid-afternoon timing of a wine-fuelled book launch
• The complete and total lack of fresh fruit at the conference, at breakfast and at lunch (and no, a token bowl of apples on the registration desk does not count) which prompted a trip to Asda. Water was hard to find too, but there was plenty of cold tea and packets of biscuits
• The beautiful-sunny-day-outside-but-curtains-closed-and-all-the-lights-on approach used in the conference rooms. In the ones that had windows
• The doorstop of a conference proceedings which were also provided on CD. I'm guessing mine is now in a bin in Shropshire somewhere
• The wireless access. Oh dear, I wont repeat what Liz has already covered, but I pity the poor guy who had just arrived from Chicago to present, to be told that there was no web access. He didn't have a backup, so he tried to improvise but I'm not really sure it worked... ...poor guy. You live and learn
• Multiple trips over the not-very-convincing bridge over 2 dual carriageways, between the hotel and the railway station. I'm amazed at how many bridges there are in Telford...

Some other notes I made:

My own thoughts, translated directly from at-the-time scribbles:

How to best evaluate mobile learning activity? Is it possible?
You can't be device-specific
It's what you do and where, not how
Dishing out kit to mega-cohorts is not sustainable, and it goes out of date (like our Palms with Office 2007). It's more about equipping students to learn via different methods of access

Some conclusions:

• I thought the conference was trying to cover too much - it was just so broad, Liz has referred to this in a comment elsewhere. I found it difficult to relate some of what I saw to mobile learning
• 20 minutes is not long enough for a conference session, especially when things don't run to time

I've added some other (belated) thoughts etc as comments on the other posts in this blog

bits'n'pieces

back in the sprawling metropolis and reflecting that even stannington has more going on the telford, i'm starting to look through the bits of my notes that didn't make it into fully fledged blog posts. i'm also starting to regret my rashly made promise of a more upbeat post than the last one...so let's start with some conference game news! all 4 contestants will receive an ironbridge and/or telford related prize (i may have inadvertantly overstated the quality of the prizes involved here, so please don't get too excited - can i blame the credit crunch for the lowering of quality standards?). but i did v much enjoy all the submissions, as they helped me cope with the dark moments in very very dull sessions - so thanks for playing :)

talking of games, richard and i did start to work on ideas for inter-lti games tournaments of some sort - more news to follow shortly.

now, where to start with the rest of it? tell you what, rather than trying to cover previously unmentioned sessions, i'll share a few of the questions that attendees asked during them, as they seem much more interesting than the content itself (looks like 'upbeat and positive' are going to have only limited use in my vocabulary today!) - where i can remember, i'll try to indicate the topic of the session:

• opening keynote about pedagogical drivers: will education ever truly become a driver for the development of technology rather than adapting social technologies? will educators be able to imagine truly creative applications of 'new' technologies?
• designing tasks for engaging mobile learning: by giving people information about pre-defined trails or pathways, are we actually encouraging them to be more passive (eg, giving someone a trail of information to access about particular animals as they walk around a zoo)? what role does curiosity have to play? will people become so focussed on the 'extra' information they now have on their mobile device that they'll become more blinkered?
• mobile devices in nursing practice: in personal/social use of technology, mobile devices become an integral part of who you are, a way of expressing yourself. can we ever give students meaningful enough activities in education that this will be replicated? what is the role of ownership (of device and/or activity)?

ok, just to finish off, a couple of my favourite snippets from marc prensky's keynote:

• in response to educators who object to having to adapt to "the kids" and their new ways of learning - students asking "why should we have to adapt to the past?".
• can we start to see the digital divide as a digital multiplier? eg, in a class of 20 where only 5 students have a mobile, don't set them individual tasks - set them group tasks where they develop collaborative skills as well as developing subject-based knowledge.

when things go wrong...or at least don't quite work as expected

sitting in the final keynote, it's fairly obvious that the people who like talking about mobile technologies really don't have the faintest idea about using mobiles *or* technologies. the presenter's powerpoint keeps cutting out (something to do with the non-uk plug, possibly - cue lots of predictable jokes about mobility causing problems, and lots of smug laughter) which is, you know, not his fault. but the really annoying thing is that probably 90% of the audience either can't or won't turn their phones, pdas, laptops, etc, to silent. which makes me want to shout "it's 2008! no-one is impressed that you've got a mobile!" - and various other things with more swear words involved.



so, here's a quick reflection on some of the mobile elements of the conference that haven't quite worked:

• we were invited to text in questions for keynote speakers, so that they could answer them in part of the Q&A session. great idea! except that for whatever reason, the texted question in diana laurillard's keynote was received on a laptop at the back of the room, which the session chair walked to the back of the room to pick up, brought it back to the front of the room, read out the question, and then returned the laptop to the back of the room. hello? a little too much personal mobility going on there. (oh, and by the by, she declined to answer the question anyway, because she didn't understand it.)


• the wireless access in the conference venue. where to start? while i have some sympathy with the organisers (they found out that the hotel wanted to charge £29k for wireless access for all delegates, so ordered broadband modems for everyone which didn't turn up in time despite being promised) why would you plan a conference about mobility and connectivity in a venue without guaranteed access? it just seems odd.


• the layout of the rooms is awful - the chairs are packed so close together that there's barely room to write notes, let alone type them.


• they gave us these little tracking devices, the idea being that they could monitor which sessions each person had been in and store the papers from these sessions in individual blogs so that you could access them after the event. again, great idea (if a little scary) - but on the first day, the system wasn't working properly because someone had unplugged the receiver while hunting for internet access (or something like that). i guess it's an experimental approach, and i'm probably expecting too much - and if the other bits of the conference had worked smoothly, it probably wouldn't matter too much. but add it all together and...

i think the strangest thing is that despite the fact that we've been given the proceedings on cd, they've also gone to the expense of producing printed conference proceedings for everyone. and it's a huge breeze block of a book, which i probably won't bring back with me because it won't fit in my case, and i don't fancy breaking my back for something that i'll glance through for maybe an hour or so. i know some people like their printed proceedings, and it gives them their isbn publication - but why not give people the choice about receiving them? save paper, save money...

hmmm, that all sounds very grumpy. so let me try to balance it by saying that on reflection i have got quite a lot out of the conference (contacts, links and ideas that i probably wouldn't have got around to finding during 'normal' work time; and it's made me sit back and really think about what mobile learning means for me, and more importantly what it isn't). there were some excellent sessions (eg, the V&A museum session was ace, really interesting; the MiLK project session was also really good; marc prensky's keynote was good, and mark kramer's session late yesterday was very thought provoking). but as someone else said, you really would like to know what was in the organisers' minds at some points during the planning and selection process.

i will make a slightly more upbeat post later, honest, but my wireless access is about to run out. so in the meantime, i'll leave you with 2 images that represent the new and the old elements of the conference. firstly, the scary tracking device - nice idea, but clearly needs some more work:

and finally, an image of something that always cheers me up in hotels - no matter how dingy and uninspiring the venue, you can't help but feel reassured at the presence of a corby trouser press, surely one of the most unused but nonetheless entertaining aspects of hotel life:

a quick glimpse at the delights of telford

not ironbridge:










i don't think this is ironbridge either:











there are lots of exciting attractions in telford:










in fact, it's fair to say that we were overwhelmed with choice:










to prevent you from leaving (why would you want to!) they try to bamboozle you with confusing directions:










or maybe it's a case of all roads leading to the railway station? but we did manage to escape to the very lovely (gorge-ous...) ironbridge later - look, if you don't believe me:










where we found an excellent curry house in the former police station - which i hope explains the slightly strange signage found there:

next time i go to a conference...

...i will mainly only attend sessions given by people called mark, marc, or andy ramsden.

and here's why: during marc prensky's very entertaining keynote he showed a video about multi-function devices, featuring the sumsing turbo 3000. i made a note of it so that i could search for the video later to share here. and i fully intended to do that! but the last session i went to today was by mark kramer, and was ace - really good thought provoking stuff presented in a good way. anyway, at the end of his (mark's) presentation, he gave us the address where we could find copies of his slides and work. and do you know what? he'd already posted a link on his website to the video that marc showed in his keynote! 2 birds, 1 stone. or, 2 mark/marcs, 1 url?

anyway, here's the sumsing video - hope you enjoy the future vision!

(oh, btw, andy ramsden is always worth going to see, and a good laugh too. but not only that, he was chairing the really ace session by mark. coincidence? i think not.)

a live blogging experiment! you saw it go horribly wrong here first...

challenges in evaluating mobile learning - giasemi vavoula

[some of you might remember giasemi - she came up to shu in 2002 to do something as part of the e-learning@shu events. looks like she has a co-edited book coming out early next year - researching mobile learning: frameworks, methods, and research designs.]

[this is a shame - it has the potential to be really interesting, but she's rushing through the slides in an attempt to fit everything into the alloted time, and there's a *lot* of stuff on each slide. so i'm going to wimp out of the live blogging experiment at this point and try to make a bit of sense of what i've got so far - will check in with her paper later.]

those challenges:

challenge 1: capturing learning context and learning across contexts
challenge 2: did anyone learn anything?
challenge 3: challenging ethics - how much privacy can people have? is there a different definition of informed consent with mobile/informal learning?
challenge 4: technology challenges - usability, etc
challenge 5: seeing the bigger picture
challenge 6: formal or informal?

so, the context of learning = a combination of: location; social setting; objectives/intended outcomes; methods/activities that make up the learning 'event'; and the tools used to support the learning. in a traditional classroom, many of these are fixed and familiar from occurrence to occurrence - the more mobile [and informal?] the more vague the context becomes. so, i guess, what she's saying is that it's fairly easy to document what happens in the classroom [but surely that's only at a very superficial level? you can monitor action but not intention?] but that the more mobile/informal you get, the more difficult monitoring becomes.

one way of mitigating this is to use co-operative inquiry [which i think is a fancy way of saying self-reported data!] - not without pitfalls such as problems with recall and reliability, so she says it's important to use mixed methods to triangulate and to capture different perspectives.

even in classroom setting, validity of measuring whether someone has learned something in that context is challenged, but with mobile/informal learning the outcomes are very personal and may not be set. [she's going really really fast!]. can we watch for processes that indicate learning may be happening - eg, behaviours such as sharing, active involvement with 'task' or group? and also look at learner-created artefacts to assess whether anyone learned anything?

well, i'm going to evaluate what i've learned, and that is: live micro-blogging = good; live "proper" blogging = bad (for me anyway) :(

but on the brightside, it gives you some more keywords to play with!

now with added pictures!

if it's true that a picture is worth a thousand words, and that talk is cheap, then it's probably time for some illustrations of the conference. let's start with the venue itself: none of the conference rooms have any natural light coming into them, which makes you appreciate having a hotel room that allows you to look out over such a magnificent vista:


today, after andy ramsden's twitter session (which was interesting, of which more later) i accidentally ended up in a technology/systems/standards session. i didn't understand a word of it, but lots of people seemed to be taking pictures of this slide, so i thought i'd share it with you instead of trying to summarise the session:



are we all clear about that?

the presenter also helpfully shared a couple of pictures/diagrams with us to clarify some of the concepts he was talking about - for those of you struggling to keep up, let's see if these help:




(the word obscured by the person's head is "environment", btw)

right, i'll leave you to digest that for a while - time for a spot of dinner and then some more sessions - hopefully not about metadata.

Finally connected...

Well I finally have an internet connection (some of you may have noticed a solitary tweet yesterday), but only by choosing to miss a session and by managing to grab a seat at the toshiba 'cyber cafe'. Hmmm. Not sure how long it will last but here goes...

Liz seems to be doing a far better job than me with the blogging (she did pay £15 for 24hrs access, bargain!!), and in her choosing of sessions. I don't have a great deal to report yet. I saw a session yesterday that gave me some ideas for the something we can do with the media space, but a lot of the others I've seen haven't filled me with inspiration.

Marc Prensky was good yesterday, but his session over-running had a knock-on effect with the timing of our own. We did OK, 20ish punters, some questions and follow-ups, but timing hand on my watch said we'd had 16 minutes of the 20 we should have had, and a (superbly timed!! er, no) wine-fuelled mid-afternoon book launch badly affected attendance at yesterday's later sessions

Another keynote this morning, Mike Short from O2, some interesting stuff and some links to follow up.

I'm a bit disillusioned with it all at the moment, and me and Liz are going somewhere else (if we can find anything!) for lunch because it was far less than great yesterday. Maybe that will re-energise me

This sounds a lot like a whinge but it's all I've got at the moment... ...hopefully I'll have something a bit more positive to report before we return to civilisation

what does mobile learning mean to you?

i thought this might be worth picking up on in a bit more depth, as i'll admit that i'm quite confused. as louise pointed out in a comment on the lecture recording post, what makes that a suitable topic for a mobile learning conference?

there have been a variety of sessions here so far - some of them ace (like the MiLK session we haven't written up yet; and the V&A session), but most of them are a bit, well, disappointing, and leave you wondering where the true connection to mobility lies.

so, if you had to sum up what mobile learning means to you in less than 140 characters (txt spk allwd - as long as you provide a translation for people like me who won't understand a word of it), how would you do so? i'm aware that there are many many definitions out there, but i'm interested in your own personal one.

on a slightly related note, there's a really excellent special report in the economist from april this year that looks at wireless communication and how it's ushering in new forms of nomadism (i may have previously bored some of you with this before, but in case you've escaped so far i'll add a link to the list on the right in a bit). which makes it all the more entertaining that they chose a hotel without free wi-fi access for a mobile learning conference, and that they haven't sorted out the mobile broadband modems we were promised.

umbrella throwing, and an ode to a photocopier

right. the first session (apart from diana laurillard's keynote, which i can't bear to write about right now) was called 'designing tasks for engaging mobile learning'. it was ok without being particularly memorable, and looked at an orientation exercise for new students. some of the lessons learned were more generally about active learning (eg, passive tasks are not suitable for engaging learners...) rather than specifically about mobile learning, and some of the examples were frankly very very odd. but the idea of supporting orientation through a mobile game that gives them a route through the institution was interesting.

the gist of the presentation was an evaluation of different types of task. so, for example, discovery tasks (eg, how many x are there in this location?) had low impact on students' orientation - they rarely remembered the information or why it was important; tasks which were closely integrated to location and activity (eg, find x resource in the library and copy this section of it) had more impact and helped with retention of information, without being that memorable out of context; more creative tasks (eg, how far between two lecture theatres? measure it by throwing umbrellas between them...or possibly more bizarrely, find this particular photocopier and now write an ode to it...) were definitely memorable - but students were unclear why they had been asked to complete it.

i think that with slightly less weird examples this would have been a better session - but even so, the point about mixing up creative and context-dependent tasks isn't really anything new, and there was no clear indication of why it was specific to mobile learning.

recording your lectures on the cheap

i only caught the end of this, but it was about setting up a cheap 'n' cheerful camcorder at the front of your lecture theatre to record your lectures so that you could upload them for students to view at a later date. not my cup of tea, but the following snippets were fairly convincing and seem worth sharing:

• overwhelmingly seen to be a positive thing for students
• lack of studio/production quality not seen to be a problem by students
• no influence on lecture attendance ("if students aren't going to attend, then they're not going to attend regardless"; also lecture attendance is a more effective way of managing their time - set time, location - than trying to fit in an extra hour to review later, so it tends to be used as a complementary resource instead)
• it offers the lecturer another way of communicating with students

getting lost in museums

ok, now that i have access to wifi, power, a cup of tea and biscuits all in the same location (my definition of a pretty damned good working environment) am starting to write up my notes. and here's a bonus game for you, this time related to the title of this post. which film character is alleged to have got lost in his own museum? name of film, character and actor on the back of a comment please!

right, back to this: this is the last presentation i went to today, and was called "mobile learning in the museum landscape: supporting higher education students". it was a good talk, if a little short (the session convener in this room was a bit haphazard with his timings, letting some people overrun, then penalising the presenters who followed. not fair at all.). you can find out more about the project here and also get hold of the evaluation reports here - so i won't waste too much time on the details. but basically, it was about giving museum visitors (in this case HE design students) devices that let them follow a trail through the V&A, offering them more information about particular artefacts or issues, allowing them to upload text-, audio- or photo-based comments themselves, and then access their trails online later.

there were a few elements that i thought were interesting/worth following up, including:

• tensions between "free-choice learning" (ie, the quintissential museum experience of getting lost and finding your own pathway) and "fixed trails" (eg, "think back to the previous exhibit and reflect on x" - which you wouldn't be able to do with more free-range approaches to discovery) - the presenters were quite certain that there was a place for both. and for what it's worth, so am i :)
• the additional bits of information accessed via a mobile device allowed students to access material in-location (ie, at a specific point along the trail) that the museum wouldn't be able to display on-location (not enough room for all those labels!).
• recordings of expert voices (audio or text) enabled students to see the links between scholarship and practice - eg, between the historical design they were studying (artefact) and current practice (eg, testimony from a well-known practitioner in the area of ceramic design).
• the museum resources and iGuides acting as a 'complementary layer' of information, not in competition with HE resources. this presentation focussed on the study of design, but i'd like to think it's applicable across a range of subject areas.

any thoughts/comments/obvious applications within the work we're doing?

belated hello!

well, arrived safely in telford late last night. we decided to stop off in brum for tea in an attempt to get a last glimpse at civilisation before heading to the milton keynes of the west midlands. it was a good decision - though we were both somewhat affronted when asked if we were in town for the james blunt concert...hmmmm.

we're staying in a kind of time-capsule hotel that never really seems to have escaped from the 70s - lots of cream and beige and checked patterns everywhere. telford is, apparently, a new town and itself a child of the 70s - if you don't believe me, check out this wikipedia page or the excitingly named shropshire tourism website. planning on escaping to explore later, so watch this space for more exciting 70s news!

btw, someone (let's call her relen hodger) rashly promised "if you blog it, they will come". so there's a game and prizes and *everything* to encourage you to play along nicely. see left right for details.