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.