Handheld Learning - learning with mobile and ubiquitous technologies

Since opening up this forum I've received a few emails telling me about exciting projects happening both in the UK and overseas so I thought I'd open up a thread here for people to tell us about projects that they've run, been involved in, are planning or have started.

I know you're out there, so get posting

Graham

We have a huge handheld initiative going on with over 3000 student handhelds in science and social science in Illinois, USA. Bridging the Disconnects No Child Left Behind Grant focuses on using handhelds to embed reading strategies in content area instruction. We are having huge success!!

More about the grant and handheld lesson plans at http://www.bridgingthedisconnects.org
More about the grant design and implementation contact Christine atctomasino@comcast.net

Christine

Interesting post!

I've been discussing future possible PDA applications with several educationalists recently and there are some common themes appearing on the "Wish-List" one of which is the ability for students (and educators) to author, i.e. create or prepare material for presentation, on their PDAs.

At the suggestion some of the members of this forum I have set up a couple of extra sections for us to create software and hardware "wish-lists" (you'll find them under the software and hardware sections) where perhaps we can all collaborate on defining the kind of applications and hardware that can allow our PDAs to meet their potential within an educational context. I'm hoping that in addition to educators that we'll also have enough developers getting involved here that we might see some spin off collaborations

Graham

Here are some projects that we're involved with at Birmingham:
- MOBIlearn is the major European project on mobile learning. We have just completed successful trials of the MOBIlearn system at the Uffizi Gallery, Florence. (www.mobilearn.org, www.mobilean.bham.ac.uk). We're also running trials at Nottingham Castle Museum, using our ultrasonic positioning system to provide location-based information.
- Caerus is our context-aware guide for outdoor locations. A full authoring and deployment system is available for 30 day trial at www.caerus.bham.ac.uk
- The Interactive Logbook is a project to develop a personal organiser and e-portfoliio for university students, see www.il.bham.ac.uk

Mike Sharples

Have two small projects funded by the University of Bristol and the TTA - both looking at the use of PDAs by student teachers to support them both in their learning for the course and while they are teaching on teaching practice.

My employer, the Research Center for Educational Technology at Kent State University (http://www.rcet.org), is involved in a variety of projects involving handheld devices. For a list of our research, see http://www.kent.edu/rcet/RCET-Handheld-Research.cfm. Our endeavors into mobile devices began in 2001 with the well-known Palm Education Pioneer (PEP) project in the US (http://palmgrants.sri.com), a project in which we participated as a regional research hub. Many of our current projects, as well as a CD-Rom we produced in 2003 (http://www.kent.edu/rcet/CD_Roms.cfm), and two handheld conferences have come out of this project. For example, we are currently studying the use of handhelds in elementary social studies education and reading, and the use of Danas by AlphaSmart in middle school science. In addition, one of our main foci of study is how handhelds are used in more ubiquitous computing environments (or "handheld-centric", a term used by Elliot Soloway and Cathie Norris). Ubiquitous computing was coined in 1991 by the Mark Weiser of XeroX Park as an environment in which technology is so prevalent it disappears into the physical and mental backgrounds in which we operate, i.e. anytime, anywhere, anyone computing. Handheld devices by themselves are an interesting phenomenon for education, but I think it is the overall technology environment we should be considering, at least at this point in time.

Mark

Hi Kathy

Ren and I have used Treo 600s for personal use for the past 16 months. We used them in Jamaica where we were working for about 9 months and I managed to mess with the internal software sufficiently enough to enable them to work there and do other nice tricks 

I've pretty much tried everything with them so let me know if I can help with anything.

Some good sites for reference/free stuff are

http://www.treocentral.com
http://mytreo.net

G

Yep the browser sucks 

Try Xiino

http://www.mobirus.com/eng/products/Xiino/index_html