Questions Proposed

What is Pachler, Bachmair, and Cook’s outside-in, inside-out challenge? How do you weigh in?

In the “Characteristics and Functions of Mobile Devices” section, the authors outline eight tasks that people use their mobile devices for. In the same section, they outline seven educational functions that people could use their mobile devices for, with three that they argue are most important for mobile devices. Spend some time examining these two lists. Do you agree? Do these lists match up to the learners you will work with? Do the educational functions meet the needs of your audience?

The authors address opportunities and risks that come along with using mobile devices. Consider these carefully and I’ll ask you to return to these ideas when you’ve read the Gulati piece.

When I read the section on texting (which they spell as “txting” in these chapters), I was intrigued by their perspective on the connection between the out-of-school literacies that youth gain through mobile devices and their in-school learning. Do you agree or disagree with their statements? Why?

 Response:

As an Instructional Designer we have to be aware of new technology and allow this technology to help us influence pedagogical application with in schools. This is the essence of the “outside-in, inside-out challenge posed by Pachler, Bachmair and Cook.

I don’t feel the two lists match very well in all areas. One area is attention. Mobile devices can be used in two contexts. Stated in Innovation in Mobile Learning (p 8), “location may be relevant to learning or merely a backdrop” and maybe part of small numerous learning episodes everyday as part of a person’s shifting attention. Pachler is applying only half of this concept. A mobile device may be used to enhance the task at hand, but may also allow for increased distraction. A smart phone for instance may interrupt with a notification or a phone call. These devices meet and exceed our needs, but cause other problems to surface for learner.

In reference to text-speak and the issue of the degradation of our language, teachers may fear a student texting or emailing them in this manner. However, Pachler states, “those kids who text frequently are morel likely to be the most literate and the best spellers, because the have to know how to manipulate language (p 91).” With this in mind, could these students be expressing a level of comfort with their teachers? This is how they text their friends and participate in a certain social context, text-messaging. Could the students feel this is an appropriate venue to initiate communication of this form and the teacher is not acculturating the new venue?

 Questions Proposed:

What are the opportunities, risks, and challenges facing these developing countries in terms of access to resources needed to support sustained learning environments (consider ideas mentioned by the author as well as one you can foresee; examples include qualified teachers, educational materials, Internet access, electricity, and mobile device affordability)?

In their chapter, Pachler, Bachmair, and Cook identified risk, digital divide, and opportunities based on research in the United States, Australia, and (mostly) the UK. How do their perceptions of risk, digital divide, and opportunities compare to the one’s identified by Gulati?

What has worked in many cases of technology integration in learning environments in the developing nations? What has not? Why?

Response:

Given what is working and what is not working, how can you imagine more fully integrating mobile devices today? What challenges would still be in place? Which would no longer apply? What new challenges and opportunities would this integration create?

Gulati mentions many issues to overcome for mobile technology to become effective learning tools. Also, she explains models more appropriate in teaching to overcome those issues. The use of radio and television to reach rural areas not granted with funding and access to IT infrastructures. These are far more practical remedies and should be explored. As IT infrastructure expands a solution would be to provide media-hybrid-teaching models. The mobile devices associated to the educational TV or radio program to enhance or expand on the content instead of replacing them. This is done often in marketing for TV programs. This allows access to information 24-7 and to interact social with others involved in the media content. The possibility of social media expanding the learned material through online social interaction may be a benefit seen in other online mediums.

 Questions Proposed:

Many authors and project developers have different ways to represent the interplay between the structure of an educational intervention or program and the degrees of freedom that a learner is provided. One such example is Figure 4, applied to the integration of mobile technologies in three settings in a mobile education system called MOBIlearn. Consider their perspectives; do you agree or disagree with the way they parsed the various options? Why?

I selected this journal article because the mobile education programs were divided and described in ways that overlapped our three themes of K-12 learners, cultural institutions (here, museums), and learners in higher education and adult/workplace learning (which they made two distinct subcategories here). Consider your area of focus. What advances have the European projects made in your area? Are there design, technology, learning outcome, and teaching strategies from another area that apply to your area?

Response:

I disagree with the model of testing for MOBIlearn. Formal learning assessment models could be used to overlay or measure the effectiveness of testing in informal learning environments to bring new perspectives to the effectiveness of learning with mobile devices. Yoon, Elinich, Wang, Steinmeier, Tucker use a “Conceptual Knowledge Survey” to assess learning. This could be done immediately or after time away from the learning environment to see test the various effectiveness of time and environment on learning with the devices. Using the various formal learning tools in flexible ways would allow for new assessment models to be formulated and experiment with in the informal environment and with mobile technologies.

Works Cited

Pachler, N., Bachmair, B., & Cook, J. (2010). Mobile devices as resources for learning: Adoption trends, characteristics, constraints and challenges. In N. Pachler, B. Bachmair, & J. Cook (Eds.), Mobile learning (pp. 73-93). Boston, MA: Springer US. doi:10.1007/978-1-4419-0585-7

Gulati, S. (2008). Technology-enhanced learning in developing nations: A review. The International Review of Research in Open And Distance Learning, 9(1). Retrieved from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/477

Kukulska-Hulme, A., Sharples, M., Milrad, M., Arnedillo-Sanchez, I., & Vavoula, G. (2009). Innovation in mobile learning: A European perspective. International Journal of Mobile and Blended Learning, 1(1), 13-35.

Yoon, S. A., Elinich, K., Wang, J., Steinmeier, C., & Tucker, S. (2012) Using augmented reality and knowledge-building scaffolds to improve learning in a science museum. ijcscl 7 (4), pp. 519-541

I read the three articles listed below. And the issues that came to my mind were the apartheids between economic status, race and the importance of skills. The articles focus on quantifying the issues for support. Generalizing and mapping out the changing landscape of eduction seemed to be the main focus at least with Warschauer and Yardi articles. The Mckay article touched on the changing social interactions caused by the diffusion of technology into our society.

I felt that one thing was missing, a true focus on the emotional connection, cultural differences and the negative impact on the students who do not succeed with technology. The readings were broad generalizations, focusing on race, gender and the use of technology. There was mention of the hispanic culture in Yardi’s article. However, the reading attributed the issues of access for hispanic families to financial and language barriers. I wonder if there is a deeper cultural relationship. I remember attending a movie showing, hosted by the Multicultural center here a PSU. The movie examined the different cultural views on education. I apologize for not remembering the name of the movie. But, the hispanic culture did not encourage the value of females attending college in the documentaries example. Could this be a correlation to the necessity of obtaining a computer and having online access at home?

Also, I ask, is the cultural view of technology and its uses truly explored? In the Yardi (p.195), they explain “[w]hites were more likely than Blacks or Hispanics to use word processing, e-mail, multimedia, and spreadsheets or databases.” They associate this difference to the economic status and language spoken in the families. There needs to be a deeper question explored here. Why is there a difference? Modeling of the parents or community members? Teaching styles of the teachers in the various schools associated with the economic status? A broad generalization about correlation is made.

The Mackay article addresses a new cyber culture emerging from the new generation of tech-savy youth. In reference to the above issues of ethnic cultural, is there a connections? Let me explain. The use of technology to socialize and connect with each other maybe rooted in a ethnographic and anthropological reason. One example is the Hispanic cultures roots to community and family. These are strong ties and occur in real life social gatherings. Now combined with the economics and values of technology, would the family purchase items to place a physical distance in those real life gatherings? Is there a thought about that or is there just an apparent cultural behavior?

A White family using email, word processing, databases and etc. finds value in this. Would this family be less likely to have dinner around the table and eat while using a computer? Thus allowing technology to place a barrier between them and a real life gathering. This may encourage connection on a digital level.

The social interactions may have different significance rooted in traditional values that have evolved from cultural roots. The articles don’t explore these perspectives deeply, but try to associated them with quantifiable statistics. Explanations maybe rooted in cultural traditions or more anthropological roots, combined with the socioeconomics issues. Factors to examine are affluent hispanic families and compare usage, how, when and where technology is used to non-affluent hispanic families. Furthermore, the comparison of technology usage to affluent and non-affluent caucasian families will reveal the culture developing or mutating from the diffusion of technology into our lives.

I mentioned the negative impact on students within this diffusion of technology. We tend to focus on how having and not having technology impacts a child. Then further focus on the child that arrives to innovation as in the example of the film maker, Max. We forget the child that fails with technology or uses it in a non-productive manner. How do we help these student? Is this issue solvable with the presences of a stellar teacher? Is the mentor part of the relationship between a teacher and the student the qualitative factor to overcome all the socioeconomic, cultural and other negative life influences? Is giving technology access to a child enough? Or is the emotion support and encouragement to use the technology in a positive way vital to helping the students who are a negative outlier? We focus on the positive outliers in these articles, but never highlight the negative outlier? The negative outliers a generalized! I will keep asking questions and trying to find the balance in the presentation of stats and numbers. I hope others can assist me in seeing more balance in the presentation of the articles. Because we need to help the ones who have no access and have access that are not doing well with technology.

Articles Read:

• Mckay, S., Thurlow, C., & Zimmerman, H. T. (2005). Wired whizzes or techno-slaves?: Young people and their emergent communication technologies. In A. Williams & C. Thurlow (Eds.), Talking adolescence:Perspectives on communication in the teenage years (pp. 185-203). New York: Peter Lang.
• Warschauer, M., & Matuchniak, T. (2010). New technology and digital worlds: Analyzing evidence of equity in access, use, and outcomes. Review of Research in Education, 34(1), 179-225. doi:10.3102/0091732X09349791
• Yardi, S., & Bruckman, A. (2012). Income, race, and class: exploring socioeconomic differences in family technology use. In Proceedings of the 2012 ACM annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 3041-3050). ACM. Doi: 10.1145/2207676.2208716.

In my initial post, I questioned why the formal learning environments stick to traditional learning environments, desks and chairs and podiums. I believe innovative teachers will take the students out of the desk with their mobile multimedia devices to explore and apply instant knowledge in the real world. A student learning about plants can be with plants and not at a desk. A physics student learning about trajectories and velocity will be experimenting, sorting data and applying the abstract formulas as real data with new mobile devices.   The interesting part is, mobile learning is about instantly accessing the knowledge and not about developing the next new application or game. It is about connecting the real world with the knowledge at your fingertips, instantly. Applied knowledge during the moment of curiosity!

Things like QR codes and other AR content is about mobile teaching! Associating the specific content to a real world item. This is what makes it different from mobile learning. A learner can just do a web search.

The biggest issue to come with mobile education will be allowing learning to be in control of the learner and not only the teacher.

I read the articles listed below. Three were Horizon reports for specific fields and explored the potential for mobile learning in those areas. There is potential for the movement in mobile learning. But the issue is in changing peoples attitudes towards the value of informal and formal learning.

Mobile tools are multimedia tools, now. This means education will change. Pea (2006) say that the tablets take up less desk space and provide room for notebooks and textbooks (pg. 429). They approach this from the idea of adding a tool to the pile. But a tablet can replace them all. A tablet can allow the environment to change completely.

Here is a photo I took from the movie Serenity. Tablets could allow this to happen. New advancements in technology could allow the formal environment to change. How does this environmental change effect formal learning?

Here is a photograph taken of a website of a ministry locate in the woods. Yet, they hold to this traditional environment to facilitate learning and writing. Why?

We focus on the effect of the tools on the learner. Yet, we don’t explore how it is changing teaching and how it can change the learning environment? Why are teachers not taking advantage of the flexibility of the new mobile tools? Habits need to be broken and a culture of tying students to a desk needs to be cut.

A teacher can make an iBook in a few hours and build it to the specific lesson and environment. But the next issue comes; the content in the mobile application. The delivery of information is changing in the market place. Pea and Moldonado (2006) address the informal educational bits this with “learning bites”(pg.432). In McGrane’s (2012) book, she states that we must design content for the context with which it is delivered. The issue is not to deliver less information, but prioritize the information and anticipate the user’s wants (pg.30). The market place is realizing this and the research field has the knowledge and understanding of how much a person processes and acquires information in context. Incidentally, the market place is working towards giving what the users want, because of money and marketing incentives. Yet, the education world seems not to understand this as a whole. Why are we not giving the learners what they want to learn?

Now, game-ification is one area where this is being understood and is noted in all of the Horizon reports. The idea of Edutainment is another area where there is understanding of giving a learner something they want.  In entertaining while educating, the learner learns without stress. Transferring that knowledge comes over time.  Teachers do this all the time with in class movies and use it to reenforce something done in class. These two techniques, game-ification and edutainment, offer ways to teach people about things they may not be interested in, but in a format that may interest a learner.

Mobile devices are changing how and what we learn. The problem is will educators like the possible result; learners choosing how and what to learn and educators struggling to teach what they think should be learned!

Personal readings:

• McGrane, K. (2012). Content strategy for mobile. New York, NY: A Book Apart.

Classed assigned readings:

• Pea, R. D., & Moldonado, H. (2006). WILD for learning: Interacting through new computing devices anytime, anywhere. In K. Sawyer (Ed.), Cambridge University Handbook of the Learning Sciences (Chapter 25). New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Horizon Report for Higher Education
  • Johnson, L., Adams, S., & Cummins. (2012). Executive Summary and Time-to-adoption: One year or less: mobile apps and tablet computing. The NMC horizon report: 2012 Higher Education edition, pp. 3-17). Austin, TX: The New Media Consortium. http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/HR2012.pdf
  •  Johnson, L., Smith, R., Willis, H., Levine, A., & Haywood, K. (2011). Time-to-adoption: One year or less:electronic books and mobiles. The 2011 horizon report (higher education ed., pp. 8-11 and 13-15). Austin, TX: The New Media Consortium.
    • EPub version: http://wp.nmc.org/docs/horizon-2011.epub
    • PDF version: http://www.nmc.org/system/files/pubs/1316814265/2011-Horizon-Report%282%29.pdf
• Horizon Report for K-12
  • Johnson, L., Adams, S., & Cummins. (2012). Executive Summary and Time-to-adoption: One year or less: mobile devices and apps and tablet computing. The NMC horizon report: 2012 K-12 Edition, pp. 3-18).Austin, TX: The New Media Consortium. http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2012-horizon-report-K12.pdf

• Horizon Report for Community/museum
  • Johnson, L., Adams, S., & Witchey, H. (2013). Mobile apps and tablet computing. The NMC horizon report: 2012 (museum ed., pp. 10-17). Austin, TX: The New Media Consortium.http://www.nmc.org/publications/2012-horizon-report-museum
    • The 2012 edition was released on January 16, 2013.