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!