Mobile Learning

This post is about my reflections on various readings on designing mobile learning.  The research paper by Herrington, Herrington and Mantei is very informative and captures the essence of designing m-learning activities.  What captured my interest was the summary of procedural elements of projects.  The various examples are almost a checklist of a project guide to students - clearly delineating what must be done by the teacher and the students.  I wish I had something like this when I started creating m-learning projects.  

Using this as a guideline, I would now look at mobile learning project as a cluster of assignments that enable students to go through stages of preparation, execution, reflection and dissemination.  The first two stages of mobile learning are no different to other learning activities.  I can now see the extending the learning by adding reflection and dissemination and mediation could very well turn a traditional learning activity to a m-learning.  Depending on the depth of content, each phase of the project could be one assignment.

What is important in this process as also highlighted by the research is working with a community of practice.  This is so important in fostering the adaption of innovation into teaching and learning. Samples of student work in mobile learning from within the same community would motivate and encourage students to taken on the challenge of demonstrating their learning in different ways.  

Indeed, a holistic approach to mobile learning. 

Posters - Literature Review

Why do posters make good assessments of learning? From my personal experience of using it in two courses now, I found posters had some benefits such as:

• Encourages students to be creative in presenting material in a limited space.   
• Is a hands-on way of learning.  Students can see their work unfold and often begin to self-critique rather than wait for feedback from the instructor
• Forces them to be focused on the theme of the poster because it requires them to be succinct
• Motivates them to work in smaller segments of the poster which is critical when it is group.  This makes the task more manageable
• Helps to distil ideas and present them in a visually appealing way.  Creating a mock helps to ensure there is a flow to the elements
• Lends itself to peer and anonymous evaluation.  

Online posters or interactive posters can incorporate other elements making them more relevant to higher education

• Video clips from interviews conducted by the students during the course of data gathering 
• Links to other relevant websites or research
• Append data files to support data analysis

These factors help to make the assessment robust and complete

Posters have some challenges too.  

• Content elements of the poster needs to be well defined, without which the poster can become a trivial activity.  Instructor needs to legwork before setting up the assignment
• When using posters in the context of higher education, anonymity of business/people should be discussed and maintained if deemed necessary.  This is particularly the case when conducting studies relating to quality problems, management studies etc. 
• Rubrics need to well designed to balance content, creativity and presentation which can be challenging

 Some of these facts are further evidenced in articles found on these links.  

http://www.brookes.ac.uk/services/ocsld/resources/methods.html

http://eprints.qut.edu.au/38093/1/c38093.pdf

http://www.merga.net.au/documents/MTED_1_Zevenbergen.pdf

http://www.enhancementthemes.ac.uk/docs/case-studies/using-poster-assessment-to-facilitate-learning-and-skill-development.pdf?sfvrsn=6

  

Implementation Plan

The context for this implementation is creating interesting and challenging assessments for students.  As all good teachers do, the quest is to create an assessment that ensure learning continues to happen when students work on it - an assessment for learning and not of.  To enable this, a good practise that I like to adapt is designing feedback points to ensure that they are on the right track and.  Working on small chunks of the assessment at a time makes it less daunting for students - a modular approach from my days as a programmer!

Having used posters as an assessment once - quite sceptically, I was quite satisfied with the way it panned out. It required students to summarise their research/case study, to be succinct in their choice of words, use visuals to highlight findings and more important be creative.  A natural extension of this format would be to use an online poster for an assessment in a course in Quality Management.  Students would develop a poster with a supporting summary document to identify a quality problem in an organisation, examine the impact, analyse cause and effects and suggest a solution.  With a bit of preliminary research, I decided to use Glogstere  a popular tool with educators.  It seems very easy to use and I was impressed with the body of work done mostly by school students.  Although, I have not seen too many examples of its use in tertiary education, it seems to have the potential.

I'd like to follow up with a literary review of posters as learning/assessment tools in general and the potential of graphical and interactive blogs as emerging technology tools.  A short survey or a focus group meeting with students is part of the plan to obtain their feedback and incorporate it into my evaluation.

That's the plan.