Handheld Learning - learning with mobile and ubiquitous technologies

Hey well done there Dave Congrats to you and the gang! Well deserved.

Nice response Graham - had me laughing - good luck with a 10million niche but on a planet of 6 billion - its still a niche! lol

Fair point about angling. It was more direct experience I was referring too rather than empirical evidence and the proof of the pudding is in the news stand (in this case anyway and the fact that magazines stay in business proves there must be some demand.

Linux and MS and netbooks. I am wondering in the world of the multichannel, multimedia web has the all singing, all dancing OS of the late 20th centuary finally had it's day? MS in particular fights its wars on a lot of fronts, a dangerous place for any superpower.

So Graham - is MS Windows Mobile the equivalent of Britain just before the Fall of Rome. Are Windows Mobile users destined to be abandoned while the legions of techies are recalled to fight off the barbarian hordes (aka Linux techies at the gates of the eternal city?

Sorry - to many Arthurian legends growing up....

I am curious about the racial comment too. Jon anywhere the BJET article is in the public domain?

OK - lets stir the waters - one of the problems with these magazines, especially single products ones, are that they get repetative and samey really quickly. They are kind of useful when you first get something or researching options but once you have got the hang of a device they quickly become something unread on the coffee table.

If the iPhone is so easy to use does it really justify yet another publication about it?

On a bit of a tangent, it's kind of interesting that there was a lot of speculation about the death of print when the Web first got exciting and newspapers have definitely felt the pinch, its less obvious with magazines though if a visit to Mssrs is anything to go by! Has new technology meant that niche marketing (which lets face an Iphone magazine is still niche) of magazines are now more viable?

Hi Jon

Been involved in a lot discussions (mainly on this forum it has to be said) about the whole Digital Native concept and I wrote my views in depth here http://www.3sheep.co.uk/2007/11/07/mythmaking-digital-natives-and-immigrants-do-they-really-exist/. From my perspective I see the concept as a bit of a red herring and I think its more useful to look at Digital Technology from a lifestyle enhancement perspective. So for example - if it meets a needs we adopt it, the article explains my views in depth.

Broadly speaking I think it risks creating barriers that don't exist. There are lots of people I know who are older who use technology seamlessly and I've met enough young people to get a sense of 'gadget fatigue' from them.

The problem with 'Digital Natives and Immigrants' is it has become a tabloid-esque headline grabber and polarises into two camps what is actually quite a complex social situation with lots of grey areas.

Hi Graham - doesn't sound like a nice start to the contract. If you don't want to pay 0871 number calls you can try 02 customer services on  0113 3069265.

This site http://www.saynoto0870.com/ is really useful for avoiding the cost of calling people who you are actually already paying for a service (don't get me started .

Good Luck!

Stu

Hi Sharon

With regards to alternatives to the Iphone that you have listed. With the exception of Wifi connectivity pretty much any recent mobile phone E.g The LG Viewty range up, Sony Ericsson Walkman range, the new Samsungs, Windows mobile range, the Nokia N series etc. etc..

With Wifi - Nokia high-end range the high spec Sony Ericsson, HTC range etc.. I could go on. It's a long list but I will give the Iphone the credit of having the best marketing.

I am not anti-Iphone (Mac aficionado generally) but I fundamentally do not believe you can have personalisation and device harmonisation. It's contradictory position. Also, I have deep concerns about British education being trapped with one supplier. The Iphone is particularly dangerous because of it being tied to one connectivity supplier.

My baseline model mentioned in my last post works. I achieved that in my work on the Molenet projects I was involved in. So you can have flexibility in device choice.

Sharon, I respect your views but I doubt we are going to reach a consensus. The same devices do not offer the same opportunities. A device does not a successful learner make and for some learners digital technology maybe exactly the barrier they do not need.

I will end reiterating  one of my earlier points - no one knows where this is going to end-up. The use of mobile digital devices for learning in formal education is only just beginning, it would be dangerous to say this is the model we must use and discussions such as ours are useful for progressing the theory and just as with all learning there will probably never be a 'single view'. With us, I can see a disagreement in philosophy which affects our advice for pragmatic adoption.

Its a discussion I've enjoyed and maybe we can pick up with a pint at HHL later this year? and see where we've both got to by then.

Hi Sharon

We are trying to tease a lot of threads out of a tangled ball of wool here!

I realise you are school teacher and so your responses are going to be in that context but I really do need to emphasise again that education is not just children and so I take a very broad view. My own experience is in delivering national services and in that respect what device is being used is largely irrelevant because there is no way that every student in the UK is going be using the same piece of kit. This is for all sorts of reasons.

So to deal with that issue I set baselines of what the technology needs to be capable of. By a baseline I mean for example a mobile device with web browser and 2G connectivity with 1GB of memory etc..

The problem with your model is that it does deny personalisation. Giving every learner an iPhone (or whatever) would be the same as giving every music student a Trombone. After all every Trombone player will develop their own style and play different types of music - so there is individualisation but they are still all playing the trombone.

I disagree with your closing point about giving "all the same tools for each child and teachers are trained prior to using", for me this would be the end of personalisation in mobile learning, since it really would be everyone playing the trombone (how far am I going to push this metaphor .

In fact handheld devices have been phased in. The various conferences and programmers in Schools, Post-16 and HE have all had projects on varying scales looking at the impact of these devices. The problem as I see it is that Education as a sector is scared to take the next step and leave behind the project infrastructure.

If we accept that we all (and I really do mean everyone here) have different learning styles then we need to let learners find the technology that suits them. This means that for some learners no digital technology will suffice and for others they will need little if any contact with a single educator, whilst for others they will need it everyday. This is personalisation. Giving every child a mobile phone or laptop isn't.

The idea of every learner with the same device speaks to me of everyone in rows of desks. I accept your point about each learner focusing on a different aspect of the device's capabilities to enhance their learning but that is also true of learners in rows of desks, some will always answer the questions verbally, some by writing answers, some by book learning, others by board and so on.

Economically, I don't believe that your model is sustainable at the moment. Technology is changing at a cracking pace. By the time contracts are negotiated and in place, whatever is chosen on a large scale will be out-of-date.

It is unlikely we will end up with a consensus and viva la difference! After all mobile learning is still too new for anyone to say this is 'how it must be done'.

There is a middle way though and I experimented with this on the two MoleNet projects I was consultant to (Stockport and Trafford Colleges). MoleNet was a capital spend, so it had to provide hardware. This was duly done but we did not buy just one piece of kit but a variety of devices. Harder to manage but we ended up with a technological landscape that more closely reflected our day-to-day reality.

The key to its success was the baseline I wrote about earlier. As I explained services I design are developed with a baseline in mind. So I knew that so long as the devices met that baseline the services would work in the project.

Its another project but it shows that you can have variety in terms of device access but consistency in service delivery.

We remain in full agreement about the need for training. However, the real focus of this training should be to encourage educators to look beyond the technology and to start applying the pedagogy.

Let's see where we go next Sharon

Hi Sharon

This is a good discussion to have I don't think there is ever going to be one coherent view because different educationalists work with different learners who are varying ages and backgrounds etc.. The discussion is still really worthwhile though because we get to start thinking about why we make the decisions we do.

Clearly from you posts your experience is with child learners. My contact is generally with older learners, extending well into Adult Learning. In Higher Education, for example, learners will be pretty much expected to provide everything - notepads, books and pens. Where equipment is centrally provided it is rarely done so on an individual basis. So for example there are PC clusters in libraries etc. Many HE learners will also provide their own computer equipment and connectivity.

So that's a clear difference with your experience of teaching children. But I have met teachers of children in situations where pupils will provide their own pens and notebooks. So it's not a consistent experience.

If learners and teachers have one device then I would agree they are "effectively singing from the same hymn sheet" but then I would argue that cannot be personalisation. If everyone does everything the same way then it cannot be personal.

I agree about "ICT equipment that sits in cupboards" and I think there are lots of reasons behind it, not least of which that educators have often not received the training they need to make the best use of equipment in their own context. However, I think we run the same risk with mass supply of the same devices. It will only take a few educators to have a 'bad experience' for the gear to be consigned to store cupboard.

However I disagree about the cost not 'breaking the bank' point because we now run the risk of replicating what the learner already has access too and ending up in a position where our finances are spread too thin. One classrooms worth of kit may not seem massively expensive but on a national basis and given the rapid redundancy of small digital devices it would require a very large rolling commitment on behalf the UK Taxpayer and given that very little large scale funding in education lasts forever - is that realistic?

From my perspective it would be a better spend of money to now add to educators skill sets so they can learn how to spot useful learning applications for these devices in a personalised learning agenda.

It's good discussion and helping gather thoughts I have left lingering for too long.

Hi Satonner - now can I pick up on one of your points re "personal learning devices"?  and ask should the learning device be separate from other personal digital devices.

I take a very broad view of education and my professional focus tends to be on the post-16 and HE sectors, although I have worked with the pre16 sector and I would accept that the strategy for one sector of education would not necessarily be suitable for all.

However, given that the majority of digital devices that learners already have with them have much that something like the iPhone could offer, would bulk purchasing and the consequential imposition of a specific hardware solution on learner be a 'good spend' of public money?

Increasingly I think not since we know the power is out there so isn't time we really looked at how to use it and actually adapt m-learning to personalisation? i.e. using what the learner brings to the table and finding out where they are engaged.

If we use what the student has and is already engaged with then we free up meager funds to help those who genuinely don't have. Also we free up  funds to help training for educators, which is desperately needed if we are ever to move out 'project land'.

Graham, I've never sloped off early from HHL - always too good to miss a second! LOL - Seriously sounds interesting, hopefully it will be flexible spending and not just capital only because I think that's been the difficulty of MoleNet and I share your hopes about that.

I think the UK mobile data market needs a serious review by the service carriers and it's time that data carrying was seeing as part of the inclusive package. And to be fair that is the general trend but it is still over priced for what it offers in comparison to desktop broadband. That comparison is one the service carriers themselves invite in their marketing so I think a value check is well worth making.

I think the next stage is too look at what learners are using themselves. Also, I very much want to make the distinction between learners - who can be any age and 'kids'. I know the focus of many on this forum is schoolchildren but I think and want to encourage us to look broader. The UK faces some of its most serious economic challenges over the next few years. To meet them we need a workforce that can carry on learning and fitting that in into a very busy lifestyle. Mobiles could be invaluable for that!

But back to my point (I digress too much sorry!) If we really want personal learning then we need to see what and how the learner is engaged. Not everyone will take to mobile access and we need to move away from the idea and projects of 'lets give everyone one of these' (whatever it is) and start seeing what they are using and to think about why they are engaged and whether or not that engagement can be used in learning.

We've seen some huge mistakes made by education with regards to the PC and other IT use in classrooms. Too many organisations are now tied (no longer voluntarily) to one supplier. It's bad for creativity in learning and bad for the tax payer. Lets not make the same mistake in education with mobile learning.

Also, lets make sure that supplier models fit learners and educators needs and not the other way round!.

I agree we need to invest in training for education providers and also we need to make sure that those who cannot afford and for whom the technology is unsuitable are not left behind.

So thinking about the UK specifically. Is the UK ready for the 'spend'? I am thinking that if we want to use ubiqutious technolgies in learning (irrespective of platform). How do we actually engage the educators - not the learners. The learning value will come when the key educator in a learners life teaches them how to use these devices for learning.

For a while now I have wanted the UK to go mainstream with this. Projects only tell us so much. It's going to be interesting when we see education (schools, colleges and univiersities) using a blend of technologies well to enhance and engage the learner within and without the halls of learning. But to do that will take a well educated (in terms of understanding the technology) and motivated set of educators. I know many are here on this forum already but do we have enough and is the UK really ready to make the investment to make this work?

I agree the technology is progressing in a very interesting way. I've seen some prototypes 'paper replacements' that look interesting but I think they are some way off production yet.

One thing the e-books show is our cultural love affair with print.

Biggest disadvantage though - can't use them in the bath!! Sure it will come

One OS to rule them all and in the darkness bind them...?

I agree broadly with Wolf's commentary on Chris's original post, which is an interesting read in itself.

Convergence is coming (at least I hope so as I run a consultancy in it but at the moment the big but older IT players e.g. Microsoft and Apple are still heavily reliant on their proprietary models. The Iphone is a great example of this and along with the iPod Touch and Windows OS range show that commercially it can work very, very well.

But along comes the next evolution of the Web, dominated for now by companies like Google. A very successful model of sometimes Open Source but most importantly APIs that allow 3rd Party integration with relative ease. Also, by using the browser as a delivery mechanism they get around the problem of having to adapt to different OSs (I know this is not always the case but I am writing about a broad principle). Google, of course, has also created a successful means of driving revenue from adverts rather than software sales.

But convergence is different. Anywhere, anytime, anyhow access is coming but it is not necessarily easy. A glance over the iPhone web development pages will tell anyone with a little bit of savvy that there is much to consider when delivering services to different platforms, despite the impression the adverts give.

At the moment we seem to be a little stuck in replication when it comes to convergence. A lot of companies seem to want to replicate their desktop experience on to mobile devices rather than exploiting the mobility of the systems themselves. However, this is not the strategy of the big players e.g. Amazon, Google etc.

The iPhone has probably given America the wake-up call it needed with regards to mobile phones. Now they have something decent, well designed with Internet access. It has challenged other providers and this is a good thing but if the iPhone becomes the de facto standard for the mobile experience then that is a dangerous place to be for everyone, including Apple.

My hope is that iPhone and other devices will help raise the awareness and expectation of the user and in so doing encourage greater creativity in device and software design and a better consideration of what mobility is about. We are already seeing mobile phones which are specialised for gym users and others for construction workers.

One size doesn't fit all, its what I find exciting about this field.

Bringing a final educational slant to this then the challenge for all of us is how do we respond? Because at the moment education is woefully slow at effectively dealing with technological change and at the moment the pace of change is such that we risk been left behind.

As I understand it there are no plans for a UK release of the Kindle but there are others out there that are available in the UK. This weeks Gadget show on Channel five had a nice short review http://gadgetshow.five.tv/jsp/5gsmain.jsp?lnk=401&section=Consumer&show=s9e7&featureid=873&description=E-Readers.