Last night from 12:30am until 6:30am I attended my first full day web conference. What could have tempted me to stay up all night you ask? It was the ACU Connected event, and you can go HERE to see what sessions were held. As one of 130 educators from around the world (and two from my institution Education Queensland), we logged on to hear real life stories of Universities and Schools that are integrating connected, mobile, wireless devices into their learning activities. To get an overview, its well worth visiting this twitter summary at twazzup.com – it’ll provide you with the most popular links and tags that were shared.
So was it worth staying up for? Well I’d be a dill if I hadn’t made sure beforehand that it would be worth it! But yes, it was. Its one thing to read about and even take small steps oneself towards see effective teaching and connected, mobile learning come together; its quite another to hear directly from the actual practitioners involved in large scale rollouts. ACU has over a thousand students with iPhones or iPod touch’s. FHU has many more. Even some of the K-12 schools had up to 800. It was also a big help with my thinking about the small temp trial of OLPC XOs I’m managing at present. In some ways, the XO is like a big, kid friendly iPod touch… more on this in a future post.
Here’s some of my favourite quotes/ideas:
- Effectiveness of connected mobile platforms for student use is a big debate as alot of the apps classified as ‘education’ are rote based only.
- “treat mobile devices as full participants – media players AND content creators”
- “don’t extend outdated pedagogies into new media”
- Campus bookstores sweat as faculty move away from expensive textbooks to mobile readers and cheap/free learning resources (via @ruben_r)
- MCG medical school has a youtube video showing their mobile learning www.mcg.edu/mobile
- interesting FYI: iPhone vs iPod Touch in education – ACU finds iPhone users more satisfied/ use the device a fair bit more.
- William_Rank (ACU) “We’re having so much virtual contact with students now that we’ve changed university policy about office hours.”
- FHU 7 mobile learning objectives (link)
- At FHU 87% of faculty felt comfortable requiring use of mobile device for class activity (via @allisonoster)
- “I’m not sure that personal productivity & learning can function separately with these sorts of devices. It’s an artificial distinction.” “many see learning as seperate to personal productivity. Is there a distinction?” (via @agrie8)
Tags: Connectivism · Future · mobile/miniaturisation · uLearning
I am currently working towards achieving the highest level of technology in teaching recognition that my employer (Education Queensland) awards. Known as the ‘Digital Pedagogy License, Advanced’, it forms part of the worlds best practice in this area ‘Smart Classrooms framework‘. The main thrust of the preparation work I am doing for the license is not about sounding off about learning theories, or naming the tools I use, but about real, practical ways that I believe and KNOW technology is improving and transforming my ability to lead learning. Its also been designed as an incredibly and deliberately self-reflective process, and I will over the next couple of months share some of my thoughts and the drafts of the different sections I am compiling. Here’s the first – Enjoy!
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(excerpt from a draft of my belief statement)
I believe that ICT, while an essential component of schooling students for life in a digital world, is not as important as the learner themselves. Thus any learning experience must start with where the learner is, and be based on a relationship that both challenges and makes a student feel safe.
I believe that ICT exists to serve learning. Thus rather than teaching ICT for its own sake, ie. where students learn specific technology skills that can go quickly out of date, I instead seek to teach life-long skills such as digital storytelling that can be adapted across technology platforms.
I believe that the learner and their understandings of the world come first, and so choose to initially consider student needs, and then choose technology that is capable of enabling their improvement. In this way, my practice incorporates simple, mobile devices that can be taken to the small-group spaces where I work with my students, and which can be learnt in seconds such that they become an invisible part of students learning. These simple voice recorders and PDAs do however allow students to capture their learning experiences and use the technology to help them reflect and improve in ways which their learning difficulties prevents them from doing.
Finally, I believe that I must learn with my students to be a role model for going where I in turn can ask them to go. Thus, if the world of technology is going towards ubiquitous, real-time communication, so must I. And also so must I share this world with them in responsible AND innovative ways.
Tags: Connectivism · Future · mobile/miniaturisation · uLearning
Having written about the One Laptop Per Child’s XO laptop project back in 2007 when it first started, imagine my happy surprise at getting to manage a small trial of this device at my school at the moment! The OLPC Australia website currently states that 500,000 XOs will be rolled out to remote communities across Australia in the coming months, and as a fair few of these will be into Queensland schools, some in-context knowledge about how they fit within the education system I work for will come in pretty handy.
So what are my first impressions? Firstly, as the only designed-for-kids-first device of its kind, its a wonderful wonderful machine. Unlike some organisations whose rhetoric uses all the right buzz words but fails when it comes to living up to them, the XO device really does encourage creating, sharing and connecting just by its very design. I’ve only had limited time with two XOs in connected mode so far, but they are so easy to hook up via their built-in mesh networking that almost every activity can be shared between multiple students. This includes co-writing or drawing, or even controlling each others camera, or using the sonar sound activity to measure distance between machines. It really is the learning theory of connectivism personified in a device.
Even the Sugar OS that they run has an interface of brilliant simplicity, with every activity running full screen and auto-saving, while a ‘journal’ of every activity they have done is accessible with just one button push. I’m also looking forward to using them outside regularly thanks to the special LCD screen they have that allows full readability in sunlight.
Be sure to head over to http://www.laptop.org.au/ to read up about the full vision. If mobile devices are becoming more and more ubiquitous as we know they are, why shouldn’t kids get to use ones designed for them rather than for business or universities? We’ll see how this mass rollout goes across Australia, but if the logistics and training of teachers with the devices can be properly managed, there is a ton of potential here ready to be released.
Tags: Connectivism · mobile/miniaturisation · uLearning
Any educators still doubting the power of mobile devices and web technologies really needs to see the following article. Not only is the around 1.5 million books that Google has scanned now available for searching and reading, but a new iPhone / iPod Touch / small-screen-optimized interface means it can now be done simply and easily from anywhere in the civilized (read cell-connected) world. Surely that must be useful for some students somewhere?
I was only discussing yesterday with my schools librarian about what he was planning to do about physical resources vs web-based (ie cheaper, less time and resource hungry) ones… TUAW.com link with more info:
Via TUAW.com
Direct link to book search:
Posted via email from Jonathan’s posterous
Tags: Future · mobile/miniaturisation · uLearning
I’ve recently had the privelege of corresponding with several educators more experienced than I regarding micro-blogging service twitter (that has now become so much more!). There are a few things that it takes one a while to work out about twitter – but via the Oz-teachers discussion list Chris Betcher has posted this great great foreward (with links) to embarking on the ubiquitous network journey that is Twitter. Enjoy:
“I can understand the sceptics… I was one for a long time. I’ve also been getting incredible personal and professional value out of Twitter for quite a while now… So here’s a few thoughts that will help you get your head around it…
The first advice is this…
Don’t even think about evaluating the worth of Twitter until you are “following” at least 40-50 people. Twitter works because it invites diversity and traffic. If you only follow a few people, you’ll get neither and hence won’t really be able to judge whether it has any value for you or not. So find someone you think is worth following, look at who they follow, add some people from their follow list and so on. Don’t stop until you are following at least 40-50 people. Yes, this will generate traffic. Yes you will not be able to take it all in (well, maybe at 40 you still can, but not much beyond that) That’s ok… you don’t need to read every tweet. As you add people to your follow list, you gradually get to a point where the messages flow by you much faster than you can deal with. That’s ok too… it’s a smorgasbord, you don’t need to eat everything! But seriously, if you try to “manage” Twitter by only following a few people you will never see the worth of it. Trust me on this.
Second bit of advice…
Choose who you follow carefully… take a look at their bio, see what they do. I tend to avoid the “web entrepreneurs”, “marketing gurus”, “social media analysts” and so on… they tend to waffle about things I’m not interested in. I usually look for people who are educators, although I do add the occasional non-educator in order to keep some degree of diversity in the feed. Too many people with all the same outlook on things tends to create an echo chamber where there is no diverse opinions or ideas. So it’s good to have a few “ring ins”, just to mix things up a bit. Once you find someone to follow, look at the type and frequency of messages… you probably don’t want to follow someone who constantly tell you what they just had for breakfast or that they are getting their hair done, and you probably don’t want to follow someone who tweets every 3 minutes. However, again, a little bit of diversity can be a good thing, and you’d be surprised at how often these seemingly trivial messages can help you, and to help put a human side to these people you follow. You decide what works for you…
Third bit of advice…
Remember that your tweets go to everyone who follows you, and that they become part of the public record. I wouldn’t, for example, tweet about my bad day and how much I hate my job. I wouldn’t whine too much, swear too much, or do things that would generally have a negative impact on my “digital footprint”. It also means that if you have followers from different parts of your life, they will all get the same tweets… so your family (if they follow you) will read your tweets about education, and your educator colleagues will get to read your tweets about that family bbq last weekend. This is not a problem, but you do need to think about how you structure your online social world.
Learn to use the @ reply system and to send d direct messages to people. Take some time to work out the Twitter culture… like all online communities, it most certainly has one. And if you find a conversation starting to evolve in Twitter between yourself and someone else, and you are realising that it probably isn’t of real interest to the general Twitter community, take it to another forum to keep it going… Skype is great for this.
Last bit of advice…
Get a Twitter client! If you need to go back to the Twitter homepage all the time to check what’s happening, you will quickly lose interest. So pick a good client Twitter app that will run in the background. I used to like Twitterific, but Twhirl is my current favourite. Tweetdeck is pretty good too, though probably better once you get the hang of Twitter. There are plenty of Twitter tools for mobile devices too, like Twinkle, Tweetie and Twibble. Trying to take Twitter seriously without one of these tools is just making life hard for yourself. Get one.
Finally, remember that Twitter is about “small pieces loosely joined”, which is really how the world works in real life. In real life, it is the tiny, seemingly insignificant social connections that so often direct our lives in some surprisingly major ways. Some of you have jobs that you work in because your mother’s friend’s daughter knew a guy who’s dentist sent her son to a school that was thinking about employing an extra teacher, and because of these loosely joined social connection, you ended up with a job. Perhaps you met your husband because you went for a drink with a friend one night and bumped into a person who knew someone you went to school with and his best mate had a brother that you were introduced to and eventually married. Isn’t this really how life works? You know it is! Think about your life, and identify all the little serendipitous things that happened to you because you just happened to be in the right place at the right time, talking to the right person. The more connections you make, the more likelihood you have of these “small pieces loosely joined” actually leading you into things that you never knew you wanted and that you never, ever could have predicted. That’s what Twitter does.
Still a sceptic? Trust me and just try it. Not by following three people and never looking at it again, but by REALLY trying it, with lots of people in your network, and for at least 6 months. Then meet me back here in 6 months and tell me some of the amazing stories that happened to you because of Twitter.
Chris
PS: for what it’s worth, here are a couple of blog posts I’ve written about Twitter that may give you some food for thought…
Tags: Connectivism · uLearning
Our sister-blog mlearning-world has posted a great video depicting a ubiquitous learning project – harnessing the power of the mobile phones and downtime between on-field action at sports stadiums to deliver science lessons. This is a fantastic example of how to take advantage of teachable moments – but on a massive scale! Go here to see the vid:
http://mlearningworld.blogspot.com/2009/01/hot-lava-brings-science-to-100000.html
Posted via email from Jonathan’s posterous
Tags: mobile/miniaturisation · uLearning
