Craze-Mill

Trying to find out whether the presentations from Mlearn 2008 have been posted up yet and came across this slideshow – useful for making people think (didn’t actually see the presentation mind you)

and this slideshow – useful for my museum teachers…

Just following up on a man I met at MLearn 2008 who works for a company with an SMS educational solution. Thom does a great job of summarising it so I’ll leave it to him. Be cool for my next conference presentation…

The content of the workshops was interesting, fascinating in some cases – it is just a shame presenters didn’t take a risk in how to get that across.The quality of the workshops in terms of actually taking advantage of mobile technologies was minimal – lots of talk about rather than doing/demonstrating. Even video clips would have helped – letting us see what the learners were doing and saying.

Also -

We were totally removed from the rest of the world. A mobile learning conference with no wireless internet access! Whilst locked away “inside” the global economy crashed, Russia bought Iceland, New Zealand went into a depression – all these rumours circulating and no way of proving or disproving them. [I was in student accommodation so didn't even have a TV and daren't risk the expense of international G3!] Have discovered that I can last a total of three days without access to information and then I lose the plot…

My first experience of RFID – which seemed to stand for Reaching For Inspiration Desperately – the techies spent most of the time bums ahoy…

Oh – and daily being asked by the other foreign delegates what was for lunch and even I found it hard to describe

A few other delegates thoughts:

Andy Black

Thom Cochrane

Overall the food doesn’t matter, it is the conversation that counts and I met some great people. But boy was it nice to get back on Facebook…

We all wore lanyards with RFID tages built into our name badges. The plan was that we link them to our mobile phones and then we should receive all the handouts when we walked into a workshop. I linked mine to my mobile phone but it never worked…

No one really mentioned the application to teaching other that the lady from NSW who was using the ID tags pinned to the back of cards so that students with learning difficulties could access web pages – in a similar fashion to this example here:

http://innovate.ecn.purdue.edu/news/04_30_2006_rfid_becomes_a_teacher.html

Need a definition?

Research model: Wenger communities of learning

Looked at the informal learning that takes place through geocaching. Could have used any number of organizations including terracaching or navacaching but she used geocaching.com

Thesis…not yet finished but based on geocaching website data, a web survey – quantitative and qualitative
case studies -groups of geocachers based around a geocache

Learner trajectory

- homepage
- learn about it
- join – profile
- list of geocaches near you
- integrated with google maps
- learnt loads about their own area
- create a narrative on the spot if web mobile or go back and do it
- get a geocache

What do you learn?

- rules
- coordinates
- narratives of others / info on the location / vegetation
- log find and contrib with images, links etc
- stats: how many you have done
- collaboration: facebook, blogs, you tube video intros, twitter geocache
- contacts

Extension activities – travel bugs / cross country exchanges