In This Edition
IAmLearn Executive Notes
- President's Message: Welcome to mLearn 2016
What's Happening: News and Notes
- Teaching & Learning with Mobile Technologies Vodcasts
- John Traxler: The Future of Mobile Learning
- NATO Future Online Learning
- Notes from International Mobile Learning Festival 2016
- Nurturing Communities of Inquiry with DojoIBL
- GEOSchool Day 2016
- WEKIT: A New European Community on Augmented Reality and Wearables-Enhanced Learning
- Overcoming Challenges in Mobile Learning Across Sectors
Upcoming Events
Contributing to the Newsletter
IAmLearn Executive Notes
President's Message: Welcome to mLearn 2016
It is again this special time of the year when many of us get together to celebrate our shared interests and be grateful for the IAmLearn community to which we belong and which we form together. It makes me feel all warm, proud and “all kinds of wonderful inside” to be able to celebrate our passion for and service to the field of mobile learning through our annual conference dedicated to mobile and contextual learning – mLearn 2016. This 15th World Conference on Mobile and Contextual Learning is held October 24-26 at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), a dynamic and innovative university located in the centre of Sydney, Australia.
The annual mLearn conference is the leading international conference on mobile and contextual learning that has attracted participants from more than 60 countries, including researchers, policy makers, professionals and educators from higher education, school education and vocational education, government departments, industries and international organizations as well as IT developers and solutions providers. mLearn provides a forum for participants to share knowledge, research and practices as well as to debate critical issues pertaining to the future of mobile learning. It is also an opportunity to network and celebrate our community and plan together for another year of m-learning research and initiatives before we meet again at mLearn 2017.
The mLearn 2016 conference program includes keynotes by Mark Pesce, Susi Steigler-Peters, and Professor John Traxler, as well as an array of papers and presentations on theories, research and pedagogy of mobile learning. I’d like to invite all mLearn 2016 attendees to participate in the walking tour of Sydney, our Monday IAmLearn AGM and reception as well as the conference dinner. We are also inviting those of you who cannot join us in person to follow mLearn 2016 on Twitter at @mLearn2016 and #mLearn2016. Enjoy the dialogue.
See you at mLearn 2016 (in person and online)!
Dr. Agnieszka (Aga) Palalas
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What's Happening: News and Notes
Teaching & Learning with Mobile Technologies Vodcasts
- Defining mLearning (with Dr. Aga Palalas)
- Deploying Mobile Technologies in Education (with Dr. Mohamed Ally)
- Scalability and Sustainability in Mobile Learning (with Prof John Traxler)
- Teacher Preparation and Pedagogical Approaches to Mobile Learning (with Dr. Dean Cristol)
- User Interface Considerations for Mobile Learning (with Geoff Stead)
- Mobile Technologies and STEM (with Dr, Mike Sharples)
- Mobile Assisted Language Learning (with Dr. Agnes Kukulska-Hulme)
- Future Trends in Mobile Learning (with Dr. Marcus Specht)
Watch the video below for Rob's conversation with IAmLearn President Dr. Aga Palalas on the challenges with arriving at a single definition of what mobile learning is (and to access the rest of the videos in the playlist).
The Teaching & Learning with Mobile Technologies Vodcasts are available on YouTube under a Creative Commons Licence - so feel free to share and reuse!
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John Traxler: The Future of Mobile Learning
IAmLearn Vice-President Professor John Traxler recently spoke with Stifterverband to discuss the changing face of mobile learning research and practice.
When it comes to digital learning teachers no longer have control over what device their students are learning with. They bring their own device, their smartphone and their tablet computer. And this is a nothing but a revolution in higher education, says John Traxler of Wolverhampton University, one of the pioneers of mobile learning. So how do teachers and universities cope with that new situation? (Stifterverband, 2016)
Watch the full interview here...
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NATO Future Online Learning
Dr. Helen Crompton
The ACT Innovation Hub is self-described as a professional international defense organization environment where college staffs and students can research, practice and collaborate with the NATO-wide subject matter experts community. The Innovation Hub is infamous for its development of online collaborative communities supported by genuine tools and techniques allowing its members to work efficiently beyond time and space.
I attended part of the event, and I am sharing notes from those sessions.
I sat on the panel with about 12 others. About 2/3 of the panel were military leaders of some type. This was broadcasted live via webinar and various others across the globe joined us to listen in and to also present.
Topics Covered
- Online Learning and Education Science, theories and applications\
- Best practice in Online Learning Strategies, Methodologies, Techniques and Tools
- How to best leverage Online Learning and its various aspects in support of NATO?
The discussions started with presentations and discussions on the topics of:
- How training needs are determined
- The infrastructure of particular divisions
- Education and training opportunities offered by NATO and non-NATO participants e.g. e-ITEP which can be accessed at http://e-itep.act.nato.int/homepage/LoginPage.aspx?returnURL=%2f
- How NATO is organized
- Scholarly findings of how students learn
The NATO have an elearning program and the courses are all developed in iLias, which is open source software. There are 69 nations who access the courses. The ADDIE framework is typically used to design many of the courses. The courses are synchronous and asynchronous, although the majority are asynchronous and they often used the term “anytime, anywhere learning” although few appeared to be connecting with mlearning but with main desktop and laptop computers. The presenters described the use of electronic simulations, simple learning resources, and interactive e-lessons.
Those on the panel spoke about the need for students to be online as travel budgets are small and relocation of educational institutions is hard to impossible. For the future of learning they want faster-better-cheaper learning and training. They also want to move towards all training modules to be cloud-based. It is worth noting that NATO does not own any training centers.
The presentations moved to actual online teaching and learning strategies. I presented during this time and with a presentation time of 10-15 minutes I covered a small strategy of connecting students with the instructor in asynchronous online environments, I covered the literature about the feeling of isolation that many students feel, even in large online classes and how this can negatively impact course grades and completion. It is good for the students to know that there is a person behind the instructions, grades, and feedback.
The two strategies I shared where video visuals and animated personas. For the video visuals I talked about including a small inset video of the instructor so they could see the person behind the voice and gain the added advantage of seeing body language and expression during video lectures. Examples of programs include LiteCam HD, Camtasia (expensive), ScreenCastoMatic (free). The other strategy was to create animated personas. For this strategy, I shared my iPad screen and demonstrated the Telligami app. I showed the participants how they can create an animated person that looks like them and presents the information from the voice recording that the instructor has made. This latter strategy is a good way for an instructor that does not like to actually appear on video.
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Notes from International Mobile Learning Festival 2016
Mobile devices transcend the educational affordances provided by conventional tethered electronic and traditional learning. However, empirical findings show that educators are not integrating technology effectively into the curriculum. In this study, a thematic synthesis methodology was used to develop and present a framework for thinking about the integration of mobile devices in teaching and learning. The mobile learning (mlearning) integration framework is comprised of four main parts: beliefs, resources, methods, and purpose. These four areas are elucidated to reveal the many sub-components that determine how technology is integrated. An ecological framework is then presented to demonstrate how the individual parts of the initial framework operate through a complex, interconnected network of systems involving personal and environmental factors.
Dr. Crompton also shares her thoughts on the topic, and her keynote:
"Over the past few years I have been thinking about how educators make decisions about integrating mobile learning. I have worked for the International Society for Technology in Education for a number of years and traveled to places across the US to provide professional development on mobile learning. Many of these educators have self-identified that training is all they needed to effectively incorporate these technologies. However, I found that the amount and level of mobile learning integration has greatly varied after the professional development and that there are many other parts involved. This thematic synthesis had me unravel what all those parts were and ecologically how they came to influence that educator."
Here is a link to the proceedings that provide more information on this keynote and all the other great presentations. You can also click the following link to read more of Helen Crompton's IMLF Highlight Notes.
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Nurturing Communities of Inquiry with DojoIBL
Angel Suarez Fernandez – Open Universiteit, NetherlandsInquiry-based learning (IBL) is a process of understanding, developing inquiry skills and constructing knowledge sparked by curiosity. Very often, these inquiry processes take place in collaborative settings, described by (Pierce, 1877; Garrison & Anderson, 2003) as Community of Inquiries (CoI). The term Community of an Inquiry concerns with the nature of knowledge formation in IBL, and it refers to the continuous exploration of a meaningful topic for the community members (students), where they engage in social interactions to generate shared understanding.
In short, DojoIBL is an intuitive and collaborative platform to structure inquiry-based learning processes. If you are a teacher, designer or facilitator willing to change education to provide better learning experiences to students, contact us and give DojoIBL a try (Angel.suarez@ou.nl).
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GEOSchool Day 2016
Christian SailorAlmost 300 students defied the bad weather at the GEOSchool Day and set out to compete against other students from primary and secondary school. They participated in the GeoGame Battles of the semiannual GEOSummit, the official Swiss conference for geoinformation. The students used the newest geoinformation technology and playfully faced different real world challenges by mastering a battery of tasks both indoors and outdoors.
The indoor games included smartphone-based augmented paper maps, a wind farm simulation game in virtual environment, as well as a mystery eye tracking game.
Outdoors, the students could explore their skills as a pitcher by estimating distances of their throws using professional surveying tools, use an augmented reality sandbox for to understand the mechanics behind flow maps, assemble an ultra-sized geo puzzle game or even play a game of guessing sketches that were drawn by their classmates, using the GPS-tracks they left behind while running around outside.
One of the many highlights was the MEGAGEOGame, a game where the students had to master a total of 7 different missions in the City of Bern. The participating classes were assigned to different groups, where each student took in a different role, such as that of the Navigator, Communicator or Data-Collector. The classes then competed in, amongst others, seeking hidden treasures, finding unique objects and identifying pedestrians with wearables. The students in particular remembered the most difficult mission, i.e., a collaboratively sketched equilateral triangle and Swiss cross using their individual GPS-positions.
However, two classes outdid the others and were announced the champions of the GEOSchool Day 2016. The reward included – as it should be in Switzerland – a huge bucket of chocolates and a treasure chest full of traditional card games.
At the end, 300 students left the GEOSchool Day knowing they gained a deep insight into the technologies and applications of today’s geoinformation systems and what is more important, they left wanting to learn more about this field of education and industry, i.e. signing up for a course of study or applying for a job.
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WEKIT: A New European Community on Augmented Reality and Wearables-Enhanced Learning
Mikhail Fominykh - Project manager at Europlan UK Ltd
This platform will be used for industrial learning and training employing augmented reality and wearable technology. The new concept of wearable experience will bring mobile technology-enhanced learning to a new level by converging knowledge in the form of experience instead of information. WEKIT captures expert experience using a combination of wearable sensors and transfers it to trainees via immersive, in-situ learning. Trainees get access to and benefit from tacit expert experience which goes beyond common knowledge embodied in technical documentation. As a result, the learning and economic effectiveness of training is projected to significantly increase and to improve operational performance and satisfaction of workers.
You can learn more about the WEKIT concept by watching our introductory video...
For more information on the WEKIT project, visit www.wekit.eu.
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Overcoming Challenges in Mobile Learning Across Sectors: K-12, Higher Education, Business
We hope to learn a lot from the outcomes of this study and to cultivate cross sector partnerships to help each other better overcome challenges in mobile learning.
Watch the video from our convening at the University of San Diego and to learn more about the study...
Visit our website to learn more about the study.
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Upcoming Events
International Conference on Knowledge Technologies and Data-driven Business (iKnow)
iKnow 2016 will take place on 18-19 October 2016 in Graz, Austria. Knowledge Technologies have dramatically changed over this period. i-KNOW 2016 aims at advancing research at the intersection of disciplines such as Knowledge Discovery, Semantics, Information Visualization, Visual Analytics, Social (Semantic) and Ubiquitous Computing. The goal of integrating these approaches is to augment human intelligence by designing tools and services which interact naturally with humans, learn from their experiences and generate and evaluate evidence-based hypotheses – following the cognitive computing paradigm. That is, we interpret cognitive computing as the convergence of various knowledge technologies research fields.
24th International Conference on Computers in Education (ICCE 2016)
International Conference MOOCs, Informal Language Learning, and Mobility
- MOOCs - design, learning, teaching, quality assurance, etc
- CALL and its normalisation
- Mobile-assisted language teaching and learning
- Informal language learning
- Learning to learn languages
- Student mobility
- Virtual classrooms, eLearning, and ePortfolio
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Contributing to the Newsletter
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