Review - Innovative e-Learning with Mobile and Wireless Technologies

This event took me from Manchester over to Cardiff. The event was organised by the JISC funded RSC Wales and led by David Sugden, John Traxler and John Whalley, all respected characters on the m-learning circuit.

A large part of the day was taken with reflections on the lessons learned from the JISC publication "In Their Own Words - Exploring the learner's perspective on e-learning" with focus on the mobile aspects of that report. The report was published this year and so remains current. It essentially concludes that 'personal technologies' like mobile phones and Ipods and systems like online social networks offer the opportunity to engage students in new ways and gives learners advantages, such as making better use of dead time such as sitting on buses etc.. It does also suggest that institutions will still remain the focus for learning.

The themes of this publication formed the bedrock of the day as well as exploring these themes in their own presentations and issues such as accessibility the presenters were joined by Fatma Elsayed Meawad, who looked at a J2ME interface she had designed to work with Moodle and John Alcock who discussed a voting systems with students. Both these presentations were very interesting. The principles discussed by Meawad are very similar to those I apply to the development of Hairdressing Training for mobile devices. So it was personally interesting to see similar conclusions about approaches to mobilisation of learning materials are being reached independently. The voting system used by Alcock is becoming increasingly common and essentially allows anonymous electronic polling of groups using infra-red devices. The real challenge with this system is not the technology but the development of well constructed poll questions, since respondants must always choose from a list.

The workshop was supplemented by one group sessions, where divided up, the attendees took different scenarios and looked at how mobile solutions might help in learning outcomes. This provoked some interesting discussions.

Overall the day was very interesting and useful (if a long trek from home!) I think my biggest concern is that m-learning might become compartmentalised by these events whereas I think it should only be seen as on tool in a kit of learning approaches.