Mobile learning thoughts

Mobile devices are getting extremely powerful and this opens up plenty of possibilities for learning and teaching. the iphone, gphone and windows mobiles are not only more powerful than the desktops and laptops we had a few years ago, they are also much better connected and have applications that let us publish and share things instantly which brings its own affordances.

In a previous job I had to cart around 2 laptops and 2 projectors for a training course we delivered at a remote site. Even though the projectors we had were relatively portable I longed for a lighter set of kit. The phone I have now has a TV out facility. The phone itself has the ability to run and edit Powerpoint presentations. I should therefore be able to edit a presentation on the way to an event and then run it by connecting my phone to the projector when I get there. This is nice to be able to do, even if it doesn't bring anything new pedagogically. I'm going to give this a try. From what I have read, the quality of the output is pretty good.

I can blog and tweet form my phone. With Twitpic I can include images taken from my camera. These images will be instantly available to the world (if they follow me or go looking for hashtags). Watching twittervision or flickrvision is not only hypnotic, it illustrates the speed, volume and sponteneity of information on the internet. There are plelty of educational opporrunities. On a fieldtrip you can take an photo and upload it straight to the web, complete with gps location. I'm sure this could be mashed up with Google maps to create a great resource.

It's the ease and speed that is amazing. I think Asimov said any technology worth its salt should seem like magic. I agree, I want technology to be amazing ans easy to the degree that it is transparent and I can fcus on what I am using it for, not how I do it. Whilst a lot of elearning tools have a way to go some technologies are close to magic.

I'm very impressed with some apps on the g-phone that augmented reality with data. A colleague showed me one that employed the camera in the phone together with the gps so that you could stand in say the centre of newcastle and point the phone up, down lft and right. When you pointed it at soemthing Wikipedia knows about, it gives you information on it.

This connectivity is leading to things we hadn't thought of a few years ago. There are lots of possibilities, and we'll see which ones take off and becomed tools of choice. Smartphones are still a minority sport amongst students though, so we'll see how menu acquire iphones in the next few years. Will it then be an iphone app that is the next big thing?

GoAnimate an online tutorial

There are now some very flexible and easy to use tools out there that are free to use with potential benefit to education. Go animate is one such tool. It lets you create simple animations with a variety of characters and prop. You can upload your own images and use them within the animation. In the example below, I uploaded screenshots of our Blackboard implementation and used the character as a virtual tutor in the guide. It was a wet and rainy Saturday afternoon, so quite distracting ;-)
GoAnimate.com: New duo by Mic Cam


Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun!

I'm not sure how useful it is, or whether some would find the approach patronising, but it is at least fun and easy. These tools allow for some creativity. I'm going to add the animation to some training courses and see how people take to them.