After 4 days of workshops (mLearn 2007 conference and Alan Levine’s workshop) I was struggling to stay awake by the end of the day on Friday. But rather than sneak in a nanny nap in the afternoon (concerned it would effect my ability to go to sleep that night) I struggled on with the plan for an early dinner followed by early to bed.
Forgot to send the memo to my mate Simon Brown, re-early night, who decided that “Hey, Sue want to test Ustream.TV?” I should add I think he may have meant I want to test Ustream but me being Sue took over and decided that might be cool to do a wrap on the conference so decided to broadcast from my hotel room while convincing my new mate Lance from Melbourne that he should join me in the broadcast!
So with Simon’s excellent guidance we got Ustream working and grabbed an audience using twitter with viewers from England, USA and Australia. The whole wrap on the conference was going okay until Lisa Durff threw in the curly question in the chat area – “But what did you learn?” Boy, tough audience you actually want to know what I learnt? You can check out the recording here!
Good question Lisa! And really that is why it is all about — “what did you learn from attending a conference that you did not know before?” And for someone like myself who has spent a lot of time immersed in learning about m-learning and mobile technologies that is a real curly question — with no simple answer.
So this weekend I have been trying to bring the past week all together into one place (my wiki) so I can reflect on what I learnt from the conference. Once I used to write my notes with pen and paper but I have found that writing my notes directly on my computer then transferring them to my wiki site helps my learning process because it ensures I do actually reflect on what I had written whereas less likely with hand written notes.
There is way too much information to summarise in a blog post so I suggest if you are interested in what happened at mLearn 2007 conference and what was discussed in relation to mlearning (mobile learning) you check out the pages on my wiki that:
- Pulls links from everyone sites onto the one page – it contains links (with summaries) to blog posts, photos from the event, podcasts and links to the recorded Elluminate sessions
- Contains notes that I wrote during the sessions I attended – please note I am still in the process of compiling these
Here are some key points covered during the conference that we need to be considering:
- When implementing technology there needs to be adequate support is provided for both staff and students. Common mistake is to not supply adequate support – e.g. when observed students who had PDAs supplied for their use 24/7 most were not using their devices effectively–poor use of text writing.
- Educators using technology with students are often failing to build reflection into the process and we really need to build reflection into the learning cycle to increase the gain of the learning
- We need to remember the things we knew before, in terms of good pedagogy, do not become irrelevant, and do not get thrown out with using new technology. If you throw out good pedagogy when you implement technology you can end up with bad situations in the classroom. So instead of the students gaining from using the technology their learning suffers.
- Classic example of misconception of the ability of the digital natives is educators will assume if students are using the technology they must know what they are doing and must be understanding what they need to do.
- The trouble with learner autonomy does not always mean that they will make good choices — as educators we need to make sure our learners stay on path.
- Mobile phones are the most owned mobile device. There are 3 billion mobile phones worldwide. Nokia 1100 (a basic mobile phone) has sold over 100 million compared to ipods which have not sold near 100 million and there is not even 1 billion PC in the world.
- The reality is that 2.7 billion mobile phones are text and voice only and are not high end mobile phones. So at the moment we need to be focus on the text and voice aspect of mobile phones if we are looking at using learner devices.
- Mobile phones are the most personalised device that people have – most people do not willingly feel comfortable letting others touch their mobile phone. UK study indicated 9 out of 10 people could not live without phone and 18-29 year olds spend more time messaging than talking on their phones. Most people used mobile phones to connect to mainly 5 people.
- With mobile phones there is a big distinction between mobile computing and mobile life style. The really successful services on mobile phones fit mobile life style. Services that make people stop, type it in just don’t succeed.
- Mobile phones are seen by many as personal devices – for connecting with their friends and some educators indicated their thoughts that students may not be happy with using their mobile phones for learning.
- There needs to be more emphasis on user content creation that using mobile devices for content delivery.
FINAL THOUGHTS
WOW — for the Aussies did I mentioned I got to play with two iphones?
I am well known for NOT BEING INTO MOBILE PHONES , so don’t bother ringing my mobile phone or sending an SMS, but totally love the mobile web. Would be quite happy to flush my phone down the closest toilet and have never felt any strong desire to buy any mobile phone….until I got my hands on the iphone. Now that is a phone that I wanted to buy — fortunately for my husband it is not available in Australia. Hopefully when it is released here they will have fixed all aspects of the iphone that I don’t like.
Sue Waters 
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