(Duration 7:34) Mobile or handheld learning is already changing the way students learn, both in the classroom and on the move and JISC is looking to guide future developments in this area. At a MIMAS organised conference Westminster University in July this year, delegated explored the topic ‘Mobile Learning: Telling Tales’ and Nicola Yeeles, JISC’s PR Officer, went along to the to find out more.
Nicola Yeeles I began by talking to Anne McCoomb, Outreach Manager at MIMAS, about MIMAS's involvement in promoting mobile learning.
Anne McCoomb We've had a couple of services which have got mobile services associated with them. One was the hairdressing training service which was set up a few years ago and, more recently, we had a project called the JISC Information Governance Gateway. We set up a mobile interface to that as well and we're looking to do a lot more in the way of mobile interfaces too because we have a huge range of services. What we wanted to do at this event was to find out how mobile devices are being used and how we could best create a service that's going to be useable immediately and in the future.
Nicola Yeeles Jacqui Carter of MIMAS, who organised the conference, explained what she hoped delegates would take away from the day.
Jacqui Carter I think there are two things, Nicola. One is for MIMAS, who have organised and hosted the conference today, to understand a bit more about mobile learning and how we can develop and design our services so that they respond to user needs. And the other one is really to start a conversation with people in the room so that we can learn from what's happening out there on the ground in the classroom and also in the industry, and that we can part of that conversation in a way that perhaps we haven't been part of it as much as we would hoped to have been until now.
Nicola Yeeles The keynote speakers were keen to stimulate debate about where such investment might go. Graham Brown-Martin, Chief Executive of Learning Without Frontiers, opened the conference with a provocative talk centred on the way children learn through computer games and mobiles. He explained what he was hoping to achieve with his presentation.
Graham Brown-M I think what I was trying to achieve is really to provoke people into thinking, or at least challenge them to think. I think the education sector is guilty really, and has been for a long time, of not taking into account the types of technologies that learners are already using at home. Certainly this has become more pronounced over the past five years or so where there have been sudden accelerations in gaming technologies and mobile technologies and so on and so forth, and there has been this kind of idea that one size fits all rather than allowing the kids, the learners, to bring in their own technologies and their own experiences, applying some other kind of almost corporate technology or technological guano, as I called it, to overlay on an existing teaching practice.
Nicola Yeeles Graham also explained why he resisted the very definition of mobile learning.
Graham Brown-M I don't think mobile learning is any different from any other learning. I just think we're also learning differently. If you or anybody listening to this podcast wants to find out about something, most often they'll simply not go off and find an e-learning course. In fact, probably no-one will. They'll go online and they'll do a search, and they'll find lots of different pieces of information, and they'll stitch it altogether and then they will learn and then they will know, and then they will go and do something and try it out. And that's kind of the future of learning and mobile learning.
Nicola Yeeles The second speaker was John Traxler, Director of the Learning Lab at the University of Wolverhampton and reader specialising in mobile technology for e-learning. John's talk was entitled ‘Mobile Learning: The Story So Far.’ I asked him what he was hoping people would take away from his presentation.
John Traxler Well, I suppose I worry that, if they read the literature, what they see is lots and lots and lots of projects or trials or experiments, and I was trying to join those up, join up the dots and say that there is actually a kind of body of work with some achievements already behind it. One of those achievements, I think, is actually that we've managed to take education in some form or another, maybe training, maybe educational content, maybe connecting communities together, and take that out to people or communities or regions or countries where it hasn't been possible or it's been very, very difficult.
Part of that has just been obvious in the sense of we've managed to address problems with distance or infrastructure or sparsity where learners are just too thin on the ground. But in other cases, it's been maybe the kind of social or economic distance of people who can't afford to come into formal education or the buildings of formal education, or are very unused to it or intimidated, and mobile learning technologies are familiar and are therefore kind of the thin end of the edge to help them get into more formal learning. We've helped people maybe exploit small amounts of time for learning, which otherwise would have been wasted.
So, in a variety of different ways, we've actually opened up learning, as I say, to different communities, different people and, in some cases, maybe almost whole countries. But the other side, the flipside, I think, of what we've done is actually use these technologies to actually expand or maybe enrich what we actually mean by learning to make fieldwork, for example, much more meaningful and authentic.
Nicola Yeeles And speaking of authentic, the delegates clearly felt that John and Graham's talks and the ensuing discussions were relevant to their own practices. I asked delegates, what's the most important thing that you're going to take away from the conference?
Delegate 1 Hopefully use things like the Houghton system, the Brainteaser on Wii and just various technologies that I've seen and heard today, and ideas basically.
Delegate 2 I think the thing that I'm going to take away is that now we've created guidance for getting people started in mobile learning, the issues that people are spotting on the horizon are to do with the fragmentation of different platforms for mobiles. The fact that people are creating materials in so many different packages, some of which work in some browsers and some mobiles, and just trying to get around that problem of not all materials being available on all machines and all browsers and all platforms, and trying to get some sort of standardisation in there which will obviously benefit everybody in terms of accessibility and literally access to the material.
Nicola Yeeles Jacqui Carter summed the challenge facing JISC, MIMAS and their partners.
Jacqui Carter We've seen today that students in the classroom at schools are already engaging with this technology and the challenge for us now is to make sure that our services that we deliver are responding to those needs as those students come through university and colleges doors in the next five years or less.
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