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.