Mobile Learning: Educause ELI Focus Session Recap

cc-licensed photo via Flickr by James F Clay.

cc-licensed photo, "Google G1 next to iPod Touch" via Flickr by James F Clay.

Last week I attended the Spring 2010 ELI Focus Session on Mobile Learning. Not only did the session presentations offer valuable insight into mLearning needs and pedagogy, but the session’s Twitter feed proved to be just as valuable. Participants shared their own comments and insights into the presentations play-by-play and it became a useful place to post one’s own notes. In many cases, other people’s comments were re-tweeted because they typed what I was thinking before I could finish my own tweet. I’m sharing my own Twitter posts from this session below for my notes on the session, links to external resources, and in case you want to follow any of the other participants whose insights I retweeted.

First, a few comments about the session and the subject of mobile learning in general:

  1. Mobile-assisted learning is the future of technology-assisted learning. Today’s undergraduate students are sometimes called the “Net Generation” because they grew up with the internet in mainstream homes. Today’s children are growing up with mobile devices. If the advent of the internet has affected the way we teach our students now, we can similarly expect mobile technology to become a more and more pervasive element in future pedagogy. In other words, the more we see students using the technology, the more likely and necessary it will be to design course activities and communication methods that incorporate mobile devices.
  2. Text will often get a faster response from students than email: One of the participants in our session room at the University of Illinois mentioned the case of a student who was sent an email notification that she had won a prize from the school. After a week she still had not returned the message. Then she was sent a text message to her phone. She texted back within seconds. She had seen the email, but for whatever reason, texting was the more convenient, easier, or available way for her to communicate back. While this example may not be indicative of the way all students communicate, in general texting is becoming the faster, reliable, and more commonplace way to reach students. As another person in our attendance group put it, “If you want to reach a teenager, send a text.”

    More universities are already using texts for emergency alerts. Some instructors are using them to send immediate announcements to students. A few schools are starting to use texts to send short teaching points about historical notes and holidays in other countries, moving past the concept of texting for necessary communication and on to texting for cultural enrichment.

  3. Mobile Learning is not just about smartphones. The ELI session seemed to be predominantly focused on the use of iPhones, as some schools are giving the devices to their students so that they can all incorporate them into their learning. However, as many session participants pointed out, the broader spectrum of mobile learning includes not just iPhones/iPod Touches, but other smartphones like the Blackberry and Andriod, as well as SMS (text)-enabled cell phones and netbooks.

    The ability to access the internet is a useful tool in a mobile device, but any phone that can send a text can post or receive messages on Facebook, Twitter, or other websites that allow SMS. If the device has a camera, the student can take a photo anywhere and send it to the instructor’s email address or post it to Flickr. This opens a door to several possible mobile-assisted course activities. Students can take pictures of specific leaves on a hiking trail for a biology class or snap photos of library shelves in a library science course. Students can text their thesis statement for an essay to their instructor. If the instructor can think of a course activity that can be accomplished with texting, the students can likely pull it off. Also, as participant bking23 commented, instructors can sometimes get students to help create activities that use mobile devices, as they are already using them and know what they can do. However –

  4. Sometimes less is more, if it means it gets more use by more people. Even though many students are using smartphones, iPods, and the like, many of them only know how to use a few basic functions with them. And, as many of us are working on an uneven playing field where not all students have the same device, it’s likely to be easier to get students to use a basic mobile function like texting or sending a photo than to use some of the more advanced features of a specific device.

Session notes from Twitter:

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