I was recently invited to speak at Abilene Christian University's Connect Summit, held February 28th-March 1st on the university's campus. The conference was focused on all aspects of mobile learning, covering everything from pedagogy to technical and logistical elements of mobile technology implementations. I came to share about Penn State's efforts around mobile learning, including our iPads in English project and several Media Commons projects including our iPod Touch pilot and Kaltura.
See: Abilene Reflections: Mobile Track/Part 2 (DoubleTake)
I thought that instead of doing one big, monolithic travel report on my visit to Abilene Texas, I'd break this into smaller, more readable chunks around some specific topics. I'll start with reflections on the Media and Mobility track, where I presented and spent most of my time.
My presentation started by challenging my audience to think broadly about mobile learning, to go beyond just thinking about mobile devices, to include consideration of learning space design and cloud-based services in mobile learning strategies. For instance, if we are expecting students to learn outside of classrooms and computer labs, to use mobile devices to access educational material and to collaborate with peers, then we need to design learning space to accommodate these sorts of activities. Likewise, if students are moving from device to device (laptop to phone to tablet) , they need to be able to access a common store of information (think Google Docs or Kaltura). We should be designing instruction to explicitly factor in these things. Our instruction shouldn't lock students into doing their work in a specific place or platform that isn't conducive to mobility, but rather encourage them to explore their environment and engage with their learning and their peers however/wherever works best for them.
Next I talked about the mobile media workflow that myself and the Media Commons team have been working on. I'll post some more detailed information about this on the MC site, but in short we are looking into using the iPod Touch and a series of apps to support an entirely mobile video production workflow, where one can shoot video, edit, and publish, all on the iPod, without need for a laptop at any stage or production. The pedagogical implication here is that this workflow allows for a high degree of immediacy, where students can do creative intellectual work right in the moment. This removes the need to leave the place where the "action" is happening, possibly causing a person to lose their train of thought, but rather capture spontaneous reactions and to immediately encode those into a form they can share. We are currently piloting this with three courses (2 in IST and 1 in Education), and assessment of this pilot will focus on students ability to complete video tasks with these devices, and determining if they are able to actually do qualitatively different work this way.
In my next post, I'll discuss presentations by my colleagues at USC's Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, who have been doing some great work around iPads and mobile journalism, as well as DoubleTake, a mobile video platform developed Kyle Bowen's team at Purdue University.
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