Tag Archives: mlearning

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…”

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.