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!