Category Archives: Mobile Tech for Teaching

Is Mobile Learning a Thing?

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I find myself using the phrase “mobile learning” a lot lately. I use it in conversations about how tablets and smartphones can serve as platforms to get more digital content into the classroom and foster greater collaboration between students and teachers.

Here’s the problem: I’m not sure if “mobile learning” is really a thing all its own. I know what learning is. I know what mobile devices are. I’m not really sure that you get something discrete, specific and concrete when you put the two things together.

And that’s the trouble with language. When we try new things, we need to find language to describe what we are doing and define the goals we are working toward. And so we find ad hoc, pastiche terminology that evokes the sense of thing we want to help make happen.

And yet, when pushed, we must admit the poverty of this language. Mobile learning isn’t strictly about the mobility of the student, though mobile technology certainly facilities easier, more flexible opportunities for learning on-the-go. Mobile learning isn’t really about the devices, though the devices certainly enable opportunities for hands-on, context-based, personalized learning.

Personalized learning is a good term, but radical personalization isn’t really the goal. There is a core lesson to be learned and a constructed path designed to help groups of learners through.

Collaborative learning is another good term, but it fails to capture what’s novel about digital technologies in the classroom. Deep learning is almost always collaborative in some way. It requires that the student and the teacher meet in agreement in some shared mental space. The collaborative aspects of active learning-based projects are also not new, though the scope and scale of student ability to create, curate and share their own work seems unprecedented.

I like the term ubiquitous learning a lot. I would, of course, given my fondness for the word. I like ubiquitous learning because it gets to the idea that deep learning connects what happens during the few hours spent inside the classroom with everything that happens to students in the many more hours spent outside the classroom. Learning only happens when it is everywhere and connected to everything. But the term, I’m afraid, is a loser. Ubiquitous is a jawbreaker. Oh, and pretentious. Did I mention the word “ubiquitous” is also pretentious?

So, I’m on the search for a useful term for what happens when mobile technologies are brought with right intention to help foster deeper, more personal, creative, collaborative learning experiences.

Please send help. What do we call this thing?

Assessing iPad Ed

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My college is buying iPads for faculty to use in the classroom. We aren’t the first college to do this. We won’t be the last. Our goal is to help faculty explore tools and techniques to connect students more powerfully with their own learning. We call this connection engagement.

iPads aren’t magic. They can’t make unprepared or disinterested students learn. They can, however, offer a toolkit for teachers to design learning experiences that are more personalized, tangible, contextual, and collaborative.

We now have tools to dispel the false belief that learning happens only in the classroom. Most learning happens outside the classroom. Nothing new. That’s how learning happens. Great teachers are able to connect what happens during a student’s few hours inside the classroom with what happens to that student in the many more hours spent outside the classroom. Mobile technologies, particularly tablets, appear to be good tools for making abstract concepts more tactile and, thus, more easily incorporated into a student’s experience of everyday life.

We are at the beginning of our Mobile Engage campaign. A lot of faculty are about to receive and use an iPad for the first time. There will be a lot excitement about the device and learning how it works. There will be a lot of interest in apps — finding apps, getting apps, and using apps. There will be a lot of fun conversations and sharing new discoveries.

I hope there is also a great conversation about assessment. Our faculty are going to try a lot of new ideas in their classrooms. Some of these ideas are going to work brilliantly. Some ideas are going to fail. How will we help each other figure out what works and recognize what doesn’t? How will we celebrate our successes while also making ourselves comfortable with sharing our failures? The ability to share failures quickly is going to make everyone stronger faster.

There will be lots of ideas on how to recognize and track the success of our Mobile Engage campaign. Like everything else, our ability to assess will improve with our experience.

I am excited about what’s happening at my college and am glad I can be a part of supporting faculty as they try new things. We are about to issue a lot of new iPads. For me, success won’t be measured by how many new iPads we deliver. For me, success will be counted in how many new conversations I have with faculty that begin “How can I..”or “What would happen if…”

Open Education is about Student Control

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Lately, when people talk about “open education” they seem to be thinking mostly about the ease with which students enter an online course. MOOCs are generally free and easy to join. In this sense, they are certainly open and this kind of openness can be an important way to allow access to education opportunities to people who don’t have money or live in place without a strong educational infrastructure.

Open can also refer to the ease with which a student can interact with the course learning environment in order to carry resources in and out. The ability to access learning resources outside of the course management system is a pretty big deal.

I spend a lot of time researching and supporting the development of online learning at my college. Recently, I have been coming to this work as a student. One of the things I admire about Chuck Severance’s Internet History, Security and History MOOC is the ease with which I can download videos, export calendars to my mobile device and track conversations in Twitter.

Every video lecture resides within the course management system but is also published on YouTube and available for easy MP4 download for offline viewing. This is a strong consideration for users who may not be able to watch the lecture videos while online. The user has the option of where and how they want to engage with the lecture portion of the class. I must admit the download option worked great for my laptop but I haven’t taken the time to shift them to my iPad for viewing. The in-course streaming hasn’t been seemless due to inordinate buffering. YouTube viewing has been my favorite option. It works well.

I understand that the native Coursera-hosted video version has additional content like embedded, interactive quizzes. I haven’t seen those yet so I will reserve judgement as to whether the trade is worthwhile. The point is I have several options and can choose the one that best suits my need.

I also like being able to export the course calender into a Google calendar which I can then carry on my mobile device. There is also an iCal option for Mac users to synchronize with their device calendars. This isn’t a huge deal for this course since the calendar is pretty spare right now, but if I were a student managing several courses, I would definitely want to carry everything with me in one place.

A few days ago I wrote about my first experience with the MOOC discussion boards. The introduction board was the heaviest use since most students are posting to that board. The other boards have less traffic and, so far, are easier to monitor. That said, class conversation isn’t limited only to native discussion boards. The class chat also happens across Twitter, Facebook and GooglePlus. Given the scale, the class conversation can spread across three social platforms without much trouble. Twitter is the highest use channel and the only one I really watch at all. Again, I have choices.

This brings me to my main realization. The current course management system (CMS) at my college is designed as an environment where students visit to discover, access and use course materials, lectures and supplementary learning resources. Students who want to send a message login to the CMS. Students who want to check their class schedule login to the CMS. Students who want to watch lecture or do class readings or make notes login into the CMS. Everything is contained in the CMS and nothing really comes out. The student goes there for everything.

I know part of this is instructional design, but the default condition is to use the CMS as a destination and/or storehouse. Instructors who want their students to take resources outside of the classroom figure out hacks.

I know really good students who use this system. They sometimes carry resources, schedules and materials out in Google docs to ensure that they can access and organize those resources in the way they want, when they want without having to be online and at a computer screen. There has to be a better way.

Mobile-friendly learning design is no longer optional for online learning.

Why Mobile Matters: Take 2

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The iPad is not a disruptive influence on our current system of education. The iPad is really only a symptom of the actual disruption, which happened several years ago while no one was paying attention. The Web matured, and that changed everything. The iPad and other touch screen tablets are more or less natural outcomes of a simple, powerful truth: information is no longer scarce.

I have been thinking a lot about mobile internet technologies, like tablets and smartphones, and imagining how they might best be used in our libraries, classrooms and personal lives to facilitate communication, idea sharing and learning.

I took a pass at a Mobile Learning manifesto several months ago (see Why Mobile Matters: Take 1). Here I go again.

I don’t necessarily believe or grasp everything I say here. I am testing ideas to see how they fit. Please improve these ideas with your comments.

Information is no longer scarce. Information is easy, sometimes almost effortless, to get. People don’t have to visit libraries to begin finding out things they are curious to learn. People don’t have to visit classrooms in order to hear lectures and be told things by content experts. People can Google, Wikipedia, and Bing. People can use Facebook and Twitter to crowd source answers to basic questions. You Tube and eHow offer a rich trove of “how to” videos on most any topic that are much more useful than any product manual.

More and more books (though certainly not all) are available either in part or in whole online through Google Books, Project Gutenberg and various eBook sellers. Many of the most useful of these books are not free and are not easy to get unless you buy them, but they are increasingly out there in some form or fashion.

People don’t read magazines and journals. They read collections of magazine and journal articles filtered, curated and reassembled into interest packets by RSS feeds, blog posts, Tweets and article aggregators.

We don’t go to information anymore. Information comes to us.

Information isn’t scarce but context and authority are. We are  buried alive by our personal media collections and information sources. We can instantly access terabytes of saved data, articles, opinions, document and other artifacts but often have difficulty seeing how these interrelate. We know everything yet understand nothing. Learning is the process of making sense out of nonsense (or not sense), like Rumpelstilskin spinning gold out of straw. Making sense from not sense is not an easy skill. It takes practice and patience. Making sense from not sense requires mindful attention and focus.

Information is common but context and authority are uncommon.  Just because information is easy to discover does not make it useful. Just because information is factual does not necessarily make it true. We need authorities to help establish facts we can trust and turn into knowledge. We need authorities who can help us see how ideas interrelate and how we can use information to create useful knowledge.

Okay, enough of that for now.

Here’s the short take:

We live in a world where information is easy to find. A person no longer needs to be an expert to find things out. The 19th century schoolhouse, or “factory”, model of teaching is over. We don’t always need to spend time sitting in a classroom and listening to a lecture to find things out. We can now listen to the lecture on our own time, where we want and when we want through video, podcast or other Web-mediated information transfer. Sitting in a seat and receiving information is not always the best use of our time.

We do need the help of experts to teach us how to use this information, how to assimilate and make sense of the information we have found.

That’s why some teachers are experimenting with flipping their class — lecture at home and activity-based learning in the classroom.

People learn best by doing things. People learn by making things. People learn by synthesizing and connecting ideas. People learn by sharing ideas and having those ideas explored, critiqued and improved. People learn by exploring on their own and by exploring together.

Tablet computers can be useful in the classroom to help accelerate this process. iPads can let students search for relevant information and report. iPads can help students share their ideas easily and have those ideas critiqued and improved. iPads can help students offer feedback on how well they have understood key concepts and synthesized new ideas. iPads can help students gather textbooks, lectures, notes and other resources together in one place to be used and understood.

The iPad hasn’t changed the world. The world changed and made the iPad necessary.

Mobile learning is about student expectations

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I love my wife. She makes me stop and think about why I am passionate about the things that matter to me. Tonight at dinner I was telling her about Friday’s mobile learning mini-conference at Roane State. She shrugged and asked, “Why should you want faculty to teach mobile-ly? Isn’t it hard enough to teach already?”

After talking to dozens of people about what mobile learning needs to be and reading hundreds of articles, this was a fascinating way to phrase the question.

Obviously, tablets and smartphones should make teaching more powerful, not more difficult. The technology we use should help solve teachers’ problems and make teaching easier. I get inspired by the potential for responsive touchscreen graphics and animations to help make abstract concepts real to students and offer teachers ways to connect classroom learning to out-of-the-class learning. If students are only thinking about the course material while sitting in a lecture hall chair, they are not really learning.

But there is an even more basic element: access to course materials. Mobile learning is about helping faculty appreciate the ways our students expect their course materials to be available. Students expect to be able to access their course materials wherever they are, whenever they want. Students expect to be able to work toward class assignment deadlines on their own schedule and to connect in some way to their professor in between classes. Students want to always know how they are doing in the class and want to create things that are both challenging and personally meaningful.

They want to connect with others. They want to share stories. They want to be engaged.

Mobile learning isn’t about iPads, Androids or Kindles. Mobile learning isn’t really about technology at all.

Mobile learning is understanding how students expect to access and use the learning resources available to them. Once we have done that, we can help students  expect much more of themselves. We can help them discover they are capable of being creative, interested and involved in their own learning.

Small ironies from my TLA 2012 conference presentation

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I had the privilege of presenting yesterday afternoon at the Tennessee Library Association’s 2012 conference in Knoxville. The topic was “TBR Libraries on Any Screen: Creating Mobile Libraries”.

I co-presented with Sally Robertson from Nashville State Community College. The main focus of our presentation was that Tennessee Board of Regents Libraries should build an infrastructure to share progress and problems with our various, individual mobile library projects so that we can all build our pilots faster, learn from each other and avoid repeating the same mistakes.

Two major elements of any presentation on mobile libraries: availability of wireless internet access and eBooks.

So here’s the irony part. The hotel conference wireless worked really well in every room except for the one room in which we were presenting. Sally discovered this the day before when her presentation was crippled a bit by the lack of internet access. Our work around for her was to find someone willing to let her tether the laptop to their phone wireless. It worked well. Object lesson: be creative and ask people for help.

He wouldn’t tell us exactly how much that particular act of kindness would cost him. We knew we couldn’t ask that same person to allow us to tether two days in a row.

Much of my yesterday morning was spent testing my laptop’s antenna, borrowing laptops from friends to test their access in the same room. It all came to nought. And then we had the fortune of meeting Rusty, who isn’t exactly the hotel IT guy since the hotel doesn’t exactly have an IT guy. Rusty is the friendly person at the hotel who helps set things up for conferences, knows where they keep the ethernet cables and is willing to help. If anybody needs to come up with a name for their next child, please consider Rusty.

Irony #1: we presented about the importance of strong, reliable wireless internet access in our libraries by using a laptop physically wired to the ethernet.

By the way, a side observation: despite all our fannish raving about the miraculous iPad as a teaching/learning device, you cannot plug an iPad directly into the ethernet cable. If we had been presenting with iPad only, as we considered doing, we would have been DOA.

Okay. So, no real problem. You roll with things and people help you figure them out.

Irony #2: We wanted an easy way to give attendees the URLs to our project website. Being good librarians, we created bookmarks. While handing them out, it occurred to me that anyone who reads primarily on an eReader has absolutely no use for a bookmark. We can keep giving them out, but at some point we might consider not calling them bookmarks and just call them long, skinny handouts and let the people who need a bookmark make the leap.

It was a fun presentation. I learned more from giving the presentation than people listening likely learned from me. That’s why I agree to present.

***SPOILER ALERT!*** The iPad3 does not cure cancer.

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Apple announced the new iPad (3rd generation) today. We are all very disappointed to learn that it does not cure cancer. Nor does it restore sight to the blind, heal the lame or help you detect rifts in the space-time continuum. Even worse, there’s no iOS6, which was rumored to be able to establish world peace and end world hunger.

What the iPad does bring is a better screen resolution, faster processor and a violation of the normal naming scheme.

Okay, everybody take breath. Sometimes change is revolutionary. Sometimes we just improve the window blinds. If everything Apple does feels revolutionary, then we are all doing something wrong.

Despite the mocking tone, I am happy to see the new iPad generation arrive. It gets us past March 7, 2012 so we can start looking forward to the March 2013 release of iPad4!

Let’s stop talking about “mobilization” so we can start talking about mobile learning.

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A minor epiphany while sitting in a meeting today. Educators are starting to throw the word “mobilization” around a lot. As in, we are going to “mobilize the college”, or “mobilize the classroom” or “mobilize higher ed”. The problem is nobody know what this means. It sounds very martial. Are we mobilizing now? Excellent. Shall I grab my boots? Will we be mobilizing long? Should I pack a lunch?

The trouble with the term “mobilization” is that it doesn’t convey anything. Mobilization is a process but does not say what is being mobilized and how and where and why. If mere mobilization is our goal, how will we recognize when we have done it? How will we know when to stop?

Much better, I think, for educators to talk about “mobile learning”. That’s learning on the go. That’s learning with mobile devices like smart phones, tablets and laptops. That’s ubiquitous, real life situation, student-centered learning. We can measure that. We can describe that. We can recognize when it has happened and, hopefully, we will know when to stop.

Why Mobile Matters: take 1

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I’ve been working on a short statement explaining why mobile learning technologies matter so much to academic libraries.

I want this statement to be clear, concise and compelling.

I would welcome your comments.

Why Mobile Matters

Learning doesn’t only happen in classrooms. Truly transformative learning reaches outside the classroom to connect new ideas to our daily lives. This isn’t radical. This is how people learn. Learning requires a person to actively do something with new information to connect to their own experience and assimilate into their understanding. That’s what makes knowledge.

Libraries are often referred to as information centers. We want to be knowledge centers. We want to work with our faculty to develop and deliver extraordinarily rich resource collections that encourage intellectual curiosity and inspire exploration. This is about books, but it is about much more. TBR Libraries provide eBooks, journals/eJournals, video/eVideo and other learning objects. This includes mobile apps.

Apps represent a new kind of learning resource. The best mobile apps blend text-based learning with other modes of learning. Consider the rich potential of new books which blend text, video and interactive animation in a focused way to make a thesis more than understood.

Many of our students carry smartphones, eReaders and tablet computers. As mobile technologies proliferate on our campuses, our faculty are excited about the potential for using these commonplace devices to increase student engagement and extend learning outside the classroom.

The rise of smartphones is not about voice and text messaging. It is about ubiquitous internet connection. Many students and faculty now live our lives with a constant, direct access to the internet wherever we go. We are always connected. We are always communicating. We are always learning.

Library resources need to be as easy to discover and use as Google and Wikipedia. We imagine a college where library books, journals, videos and other collections are available “on demand” when and where they are needed.

We want to partner with our faculty who see the huge learning potential of mobile teaching technologies. We want those faculty to have access to the resources, tools and best practices required to develop powerful new ways of teaching.

We want our administrations to understand their libraries as active partners for creativity, knowledge and innovation.

We want our students to trust their libraries to be available when and where they need them and to think of their librarians as learning guides who can make their learning easier and more effective.

We are committed to creating mobile-friendly library environments that are useful, relevant and convenient. We are committed to understanding the desired learning outcomes of our institutions and delivering library services that support those outcomes.

We are TBR’s mobile-friendly libraries, and we are ready to help.

How my iPhone helped a blind student

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Here’s one of those small daily miracles that comes from having ubiquitous internet access in your pocket and ready for action.

A blind student came into the library today. He asked for someone patient to help him scan his chemistry lecture notes into Word using OCR so the text to speech reader could parse his instructor’s notes for him. We talked about this a bit, and I told him I thought we could help.

I quickly discovered that our lab scanner is not currently equipped with OCR capability. You scan a document and can only get JPG, TIFF and PNG files. No good for text to speech readers.

Turns out there isn’t a single public use OCR scanner at the entire college. That’s a problem I intend to fix pretty quick. In the meantime, this student was out of luck and his chemistry notes were inaccessible.

Then I remembered the document scanner app I recently downloaded onto my iPhone (ImagetoText). A 25 page document. I snapped a picture of each page with my phone, let the app translate the image into text and then emailed the file to myself so the txt file could be pasted into Word. Somewhat labor intense but worked pretty well. I was impressed by how well the text rendered. His notes are complete since the chemistry diagrams are non-textual but a pretty great solution in a pinch.