Mobile
eLearning Papers: Call for articles on Mobile Learning open until November 19th
While learning has always expanded beyond the walls of the classroom, the proliferation of devices and applications, which have greatly expanded when, where and how information can be accessed and stored, brings this issue to the fore. How have such devices had an impact in learning, and what role may they play in the future? This issue hopes to showcase practical examples and generate serious reflection on an emerging topic.
Today’s youth are growing up in a world very different from the world their teachers or parents knew when they were young. Where and how they learn is changing as mobile learning and social networking become part of their every day life. Ubiquitous access to social media, tools and knowledge resources is taken for granted, while passive teacher-directed work dominates life at school.
Open, social and participatory media have significant potential to transform learning and teaching. They offer numerous ways to communicate, collaborate and connect with peers. The range of free educational resources and tools is rapidly increasing. Cloud computing has enabled free or inexpensive access to applications that were once available only to those who were willing to pay premium license fees.
The gap between the potential and actual use of technology in education is a paradox. eLearning Papers seeks to facilitate the sharing of innovative and creative uses of technology to support learning among its readers. The upcoming 32nd issue focuses on mobile technology applications and their potential to enhance learning within the broad spectrum of education and training. Papers are welcome on any aspects related to the use of open, social and participatory media, cloud computing or mobile learning. Some suggested focus areas are listed below.
- How do mobile devices enhance learning and creativity?
- Mobile learning and creative classrooms
- OER for mobile learning
- Mobile learning management models and strategies
- Learning design for mobile learning
- Mobile learning platforms, devices and operating systems
- Authoring tools and technologies for mobile learning
- Content design and development for mobile learning
- Platform specific applications for learning
- Augmented reality in education
- Mixed reality and mobile devices supporting learning
- Mobile devices and schoolwork, in classrooms and beyond
- Mobile devices supporting performance and learning at work
- Low-tech mobile learning, e.g. the power of SMS
The article submission deadline is November 19th, 2012. The provisional date of publication is December, 2012. For further information and to submit your article, please contact: jimena.marquez@elearningpapers.eu
Guest editor: Prof. Dr. Martin Wolpers, Fraunhofer-Institut für Angewandte Informationstechnik FIT
Europeana Open Culture app
Europeana, Europe’s digital library, museum and archive, has launched its first free iPad app. Europeana Open Culture introduces the public to hand-picked and beautiful collections from some of Europe’s top institutions, and allows people to explore, share and comment on them.
The app provides an easy introduction to Europe’s glorious art treasury through five specially curated themes: Maps and Plans, Treasures of Art, Treasures of the Past, Treasures of Nature and Images of the Past.
Europeana Open Culture presents stunning visual collections with large images - great for those smaller details - and a comment option that opens up the possibility for dialogue between many people exploring the same images.
The 350,000 images available through the app come from collections as diverse as:
- Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh, UK
- Rijksmuseum, The Netherlands
- National Library of Poland
- The Archaeological Museum, Portugal
- Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
- Digital Library of the Spanish Ministry of Defence
All images included are either in the public domain or are openly licensed.
The app is built on the Muse platform. The platform’s code is open source, so, it is completely free to use and improve.
SouthCHI 2013
SouthCHI 2013, the first International Conference on Human Factors in Computing & Informatics, will be held on July 1-3 in Maribor (Slovenia).
The new series of international conferences SouthCHI aim to focus on every aspect of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), a field which has been extremely successful in the last 30 years, changing computing to the benefit of end users. Advanced mobile, ubiquitous and pervasive computing have dramatically changed the way we interact with information, making human factors an essential part of computer science and informatics in all areas of our daily life.
The complete programme of SouthCHI 2013 is available here. The keynote speakers for this first edition of the conference are Helwig Hauser, from the University of Bergen (Norway), and Norbert A. Streitz, scientific director of the Smart Future Initiative (Germany).
SouthCHI will be a biannual event, being organized in the odd years, and will visit Alpe-Adrian, South, South-Eastern and Mediterranean countries.
“We need to educate more people all their lives and we can’t do it using the elite model developed in the past”
Dr. Fred Mulder, UNESCO Chair holder in Open Educational Resources (OER) at the Open Universiteit in the Netherlands and former Rector of OUNL, and Dr. Rory McGreal, UNESCO Chair holder in OER and professor at Athabasca University, recently stopped by Rome to deliver keynote addresses at the LINQ2013 conference.
eLearning Papers has recently launched an issue on MOOCs. What is your opinion about this phenomenon?
FM: I think MOOCs are an interesting phenomenon that gained a lot of media attention recently. This attention can help make OER mainstream in education and get OER in the policies of governments. MOOCs are still in an infancy stage and they can further develop in various ways in the future, but I think they can anyway help reach this ultimate OER goal.
RM: I am very excited about MOOCs. We were involved with the first MOOCs that came out in Canada and George Siemens, one of the founders of the MOOC concept, is one of our faculty members. I have been supporting scalable education nearly all of my professional life and I think the major challenge for the 21st century is how we educate people around the world who are capable of a university education and just don’t have access, which is an issue not only in the developing world, but even in Canada and in Europe. We need to educate more people all their lives and we cannot do it using the elite model that we have developed in the past.
What are the challenges that MOOCs face at the moment?
RM: I think one that has not come yet is the revanche of the traditional universities, but MIT and their initiatives made OER respectable and they are making the same for MOOCs, a real possibility for mass-education.
FM: I think another challenge is to cherish diversity. We should think about how we can serve diversity in terms of language, cultural context, and educational models. There is not a single model that will work for every situation.
Do you think also access and cultural barriers can be other challenges?
RM: The benefit of having MIT or Harvard lead the way is the bigger impact it has on developing countries and it can be a stimulus for smaller universities to do their own. In many cases, in developing countries education is only for the elites, so this new trend breaks away the idea that in order to have an education you need to have an elite system.
FM: In my view it is a mistake to think that you can capture the whole world with US-styled courses in the English language, even if they come from reputed research universities. It’s better to have a collaborative model with universities at different continents to develop their own MOOCs. My concern is to have this at global scale indeed and to have it applied in countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America in different languages and adapted to their own cultural contexts.
Will MOOCs replace more traditional educational models?
FM: MOOCs can have different applications in different situations and some universities might decide to include MOOCs into their curriculum, but I don’t think they will replace a full curriculum. A curriculum is not just a set of courses but rather a coherent program in which courses are related and other components are included as well.
RM: I think it would be difficult, but not impossible. We have the possibility of getting a Bachelor of General Studies solely via prior-learning-assessment or challenge exams at Athabasca University. The possibility is there. As MOOCs develop, there will be numerous career paths: some of them will be MOOCs, some regular courses, some OER, and some with regular textbooks.
So, blended learning is the future. What are the keys for this to happen?
RM: One is the ability to divorce the assessment process from the delivery process. The other big issue is the transferability of your credits so that people’s acquired learning is accepted.
FM: MOOCs will be a challenge especially for open universities. That’s why we started OpenupEd: to offer a good alternative to the US-based MOOCs by putting the learner at the centre and by delivering quality learning materials in a wide variety of languages and with a decentralized model.
If you want to read some more information about OpenupEd, please read this other interview.
Dr. McGreal, in your talk yesterday at LINQ2013 you mentioned that OER should be applied and formatted on mobile devices for M-learning. Why do you think this is priority?
RM: Look around, the world is mobile. It’s not “going mobile” anymore, it is mobile! And yet we are continuing to design our OER as if people have a desktop rather than designing for a small screen, chunking your information. It’s a lot easier to take that and put it on a desktop than the other way around. This is the world we live in, and a lot of educators don’t seem to see it.
You also mentioned that there is a need for OER because we cannot effectively use commercial content. Do you think this can be solved by putting in place the right policy on property rights?
RM: I’m a bit cynical about policies because we have all kinds of policies that we don’t pay any attention to. Policies are often a diversion from doing anything. We can’t use commercial content in designing for mobile devices, and this hasn’t struck anyone yet, they think they have a choice. If you get a commercial e-text, it’ll be in one format, and you can’t switch it to another. There are a lot of people with all sorts of devices and we need to have that capability to adapt from one to the other.
What implications this could have with people with disabilities, for instance?
RM: Again, we have to have these capabilities: text to voice conversion for blind people in particular. These things we need to do and we cannot do them with commercial content. These kinds of restrictions are going to ruin it for educators: we have students in open universities from 60 countries and it’s impossible to negotiate intellectual property licenses with each of them. We cannot use proprietary content on these courses without breaking the law, so OER and Open Education are the key.
And now just a last question for both of you: what is your role as UNESCO Chair holders in OER?
FM: Using the UNESCO chair provides an interesting independent mechanism to promote OER but having the privilege to use the UNESCO label. There are four UNESCO chair holders in OER besides the two of us: Tel Amiel, from University of Campinas in Brazil, and Wayne Mackintosh, from Otago Polytechnic in New Zealand, and we of course would like to expand the number of chairs in Africa, Asia and Latin America. In 2011 we began designing a common plan of action to add value to the OER world. I’m coordinating the Global OER Graduate Network (GO-GN), a network of PhD students and their supervisors from universities in different parts of the world. Currently we have about 15 partner universities and close to 20 PhD students who all will have additional supervision from experts in different countries. The network will meet in an annual seminar where the PhD students present their research plans and outcomes and get feedback.
RM: I am coordinating the OER knowledge cloud, a repository with over 600 referred papers and reports on OER that help students on the Global OER Graduate Network and other researchers working with OER issues to find the information which is full-text searchable. Another major action is the OER University, Wayne Mackintosh coordinates 23 universities members from 6 continents to create pathways for using OER to assessment and accreditation, and Tel Amiel in Brazil is working on K-12 issues.
Application for Android to learn foreign languages
Fiszkoteka.pl is an educational portal that converts the flashcard learning method (i.e. with little pieces of paper bearing information on both sides) into a multimedia online experience.
eLearning Africa 2013 programme revealed
Sharing the best practices of sustainable classroom computing: join experts from Zambia, Lesotho and the UK in the eLearning Africa interactive session chaired by Dell's David Angwin http://bit.ly/10kBPJj.
To know the whole programme, please visit the following address: http://www.elearning-africa.com/programme_table.php
Notes for editors
eLearning Africa, 8th International Conference on ICT for Development, Education and Training
May 29 - 31, 2013
Safari Conference Centre, Windhoek, Namibia
Organisers: ICWE GmbH (www.icwe.net), Government of the Republic of Namibia
Contact
ICWE GmbH, Ms Rebecca Stromeyer
info@elearning-africa.com, www.eLearning-africa.com, Tel.: +49 (0)30 310 18 18-0
The eLearning Africa Team
eLearning Africa 2013 - Innovation or Sustainability: the Choice for African Education
Four controversial experts will take part in "a bare-knuckle fight" about priorities for African education at this year's eLearning Africa Debate. Outspoken Scottish entrepreneur and blogger Donald Clark and Namibian teacher and eLearning expert Maggy Beukes-Amiss will square up to "mobile technology crusader" Adele Botha and Angelo Gitonga of the ICT for Education Unit of Kenya's Ministry for Education at the annual war of words. They'll be arguing about whether too much attention has been paid to innovation in education and not enough to sustainability.
"It's a big issue and there'll be a bare-knuckle fight," says Harold Elletson, who will chair the debate alongside Honourable Silvia Makgone, Deputy Minister of Education, Namibia. According to Dr Elletson, "Some people think that the focus on innovation and technology has just persuaded governments and consumers to invest in equipment that soon becomes redundant. They say that the priority should be to support projects that are sustainable. Other people argue that innovation is vital to Africa's competitiveness and future economic growth. They say that it should be at the heart of the education system."
The eLearning Africa Debate has become the highlight of the eLearning Africa conference, an annual gathering of experts and decision-makers from all over Africa and beyond. Traditionally one of the liveliest and best attended events at the conference, this year's debate is likely to stir up real controversy.
"It's an issue which affects everyone and on which everyone has an opinion," says Dr Elletson. "The debate is an opportunity for conference participants to say what they think about one of the most important issues for the future of education in Africa."
The motion for debate, which will be put to a vote, is "This house believes that sustainability is more important than innovation for education in Africa". The debate will be held at the Safari Conference Centre in Windhoek, Namibia. All conference participants are welcome to attend and to take part in what promises to be a tense and exciting climax to a fascinating conference.
Information on the debate can be found at http://www.elearning-africa.com/programme_debate.php, and the full conference programme can be found at http://www.elearning-africa.com/programme_table.php%20.
Notes for editors
eLearning Africa, 8th International Conference on ICT for Development, Education and Training
May 29 - 31, 2013
Safari Conference Centre, Windhoek, Namibia
Organisers: ICWE GmbH (www.icwe.net), Government of the Republic of Namibia
Contact
ICWE GmbH, Ms Rebecca Stromeyer
info@elearning-africa.com, www.eLearning-africa.com, Tel.: +49 (0)30 310 18 18-0
Vision in an Increasingly Mobile World
'Vision in an Increasingly Mobile World', an event organised by the British Machine Vision Association (BMVA), will be held on 15 May 2013 in London, UK.
Modern mobile computing creates interesting opportunities and challenges for computer vision research. This meeting will bring together researchers and practitioners, from both industry and academia, interested in all aspects of mobile computer vision - be it within consumer devices, autonomous/embedded systems or novel deployment domains.
Leading a Multiple Project Mobile Learning Initiative: The Approach at Boise State University
Many colleges and universities have launched wide-ranging, device-specific mobile initiatives or invested substantial resources to make services mobile friendly in a platform-neutral manner. For others, a more measured approach toward integration of mobile devices can be a reasonable and pragmatic way forward.
Faculty and staff from a number of units within Boise State University convened in Fall 2010 to develop a series of specific recommendations that would allow for the development of one or more innovative, technology-based projects across campus. In 2011, the task force submitted a proposal titled “Mobile-Learning for Boise State: A Proposal to Catalyze Transformation in Teaching and Learning.”
This paper published by the EDUCAUSE Research Bulletin describes a number of projects that have emerged from the mobile learning initiative.
The full article is also available here, at the Boise State University Scholar Works archive.