An article on BBC News , tells of a lecturer in northern England that has given up lectures and replaced them with podcasts.
One of his main motivations seems to be that he would like to spend more time focused on tutorials and small groups. He also believes that his students will review more of his content if they can do that where they want, and when they want.
I am intriuged by this idea and commend Dr Bill Ashraf at Bradford University for trying it out, I do have some questions though. Will he get more time with the students? Will this free up his time or initially will it take up much more time with technical support of problems, recording the lectures etc? I imagine next year things will be more effective as the lecture series can be re-run and that will free up a lot of time - but what about this year's students will they suffer?
I imagine that things will balance out this year as students will be able to "attend" more of the lectures and also review the content as they are struggling with concepts during their revision and assignment work.
One of the other ideas, submitting questions via text message, I am not so sure of. I will be interested to see how many people use this route rather than in person or via email.
Providing all answers via a blog though must again only help students who need to review work for revision and other work. The body of work in this blog will also help students in succesive years.
Good Luck Dr Ashraf - and should you happen to come across this note - please keep us informed of your progress.
Saturday, May 27, 2006
Thursday, May 18, 2006
What might free wireless mean in the future?
Free wireless access is becoming more prevalent, this week New York city announced all of it's park areas would provide free wireless access. This trend is very interesting Philadelphia has announced plans to cover the entire city with free wireless, and other US cities are doing likewise (San Francisco another good example).
These trends are not just based in the US - Islington council in London has similar plans and other cities here are also looking into it.
The reasoning behind a lot of the free wireless access is to make sure that all of a cities population have equal access to information and services and that any "digital divide" is reduced. Brighton's council are putting together a wireless service to link up schools and remote offices cheaply, but also selling bandwidth to internet cafes, residents and businesses to help support this.
What might this mean for m-learning? At the moment when focusing on school age students our software does not rely too heavily on internet access. This is because the access they have to internet connections is limited and this is mostly because of the cost of connecting from a mobile phone to the internet. A new generation of phones is starting to provide wireless access along with normal phone connections, if the student can access free wireless then the internet can be relied upon much more.
Will this herald an age of connected/supportive learning with peers - perhaps "social learning"? Possibly - most computers today are internet connected and "social learning" has started to happen. Schools are now handing out home work via the internet and getting homework submitted via the internet. Students do use MSN and other chat programs to support each other during homework.
Perhaps the biggest aspect of "social learning" that mobile phone software will be able to foster will be motivation though competition, which can be quite important in motivating boys, by allowing them to publish their progress on a website.
Let's see what happens!
These trends are not just based in the US - Islington council in London has similar plans and other cities here are also looking into it.
The reasoning behind a lot of the free wireless access is to make sure that all of a cities population have equal access to information and services and that any "digital divide" is reduced. Brighton's council are putting together a wireless service to link up schools and remote offices cheaply, but also selling bandwidth to internet cafes, residents and businesses to help support this.
What might this mean for m-learning? At the moment when focusing on school age students our software does not rely too heavily on internet access. This is because the access they have to internet connections is limited and this is mostly because of the cost of connecting from a mobile phone to the internet. A new generation of phones is starting to provide wireless access along with normal phone connections, if the student can access free wireless then the internet can be relied upon much more.
Will this herald an age of connected/supportive learning with peers - perhaps "social learning"? Possibly - most computers today are internet connected and "social learning" has started to happen. Schools are now handing out home work via the internet and getting homework submitted via the internet. Students do use MSN and other chat programs to support each other during homework.
Perhaps the biggest aspect of "social learning" that mobile phone software will be able to foster will be motivation though competition, which can be quite important in motivating boys, by allowing them to publish their progress on a website.
Let's see what happens!
Friday, May 05, 2006
Primary Exhibition - first feedback from teachers
I traveled up to Manchester today to the Early Years and & Primary Education Exhibition Manchester 2006. I was there to get feedback from teachers on Alpha versions that we have of the Sums software for mobile phones.
This software has been built using content ideas from Sums Online, which is already being used in 700 UK schools. The Sums Online software covers 80 different aspects of the Key Stage 1 & 2 curriculum and we have adapted 4 of these games for the mobile phone to test usability and interest with children.
Whilst gathering feedback from the teachers we also had a questionnaire, which turned up some interesting results. The results of this survey can be seen on our site.
The feedback on the software gave us a few points that need to be refined, but most of these we already knew as it was the Alpha version. Overall the feedback was that teachers would recommend the software, once it was shown to have a positive impact on children's learning.
It positive to have a general acceptance from the teachers of the ideas. There were a few teachers who felt that children should not be encouraged to use phones anymore than they already do. The teachers who were resistant to the idea, did also say that they themselves should review their attitude to new technology as they couldn't see students putting the phones down and in that case it was better to have educational programmes being used.
This software has been built using content ideas from Sums Online, which is already being used in 700 UK schools. The Sums Online software covers 80 different aspects of the Key Stage 1 & 2 curriculum and we have adapted 4 of these games for the mobile phone to test usability and interest with children.
Whilst gathering feedback from the teachers we also had a questionnaire, which turned up some interesting results. The results of this survey can be seen on our site.
The feedback on the software gave us a few points that need to be refined, but most of these we already knew as it was the Alpha version. Overall the feedback was that teachers would recommend the software, once it was shown to have a positive impact on children's learning.
It positive to have a general acceptance from the teachers of the ideas. There were a few teachers who felt that children should not be encouraged to use phones anymore than they already do. The teachers who were resistant to the idea, did also say that they themselves should review their attitude to new technology as they couldn't see students putting the phones down and in that case it was better to have educational programmes being used.
Thursday, May 04, 2006
Use Bluetooth to revise? Already happening
Whilst in Belgium for the weekend I met a geography teacher and we talked about some of the ideas motivating us at the moment.
He told me about a brilliant idea where students from different schools travel to The Hague to join a student version of the UN - see here for more details. He had recently taken a group who got the privilege of taking Israel's seat (each school represents a real UN country). The experience was eye-opening for both him and the students, seeing how they were treated by other "countries" and to reflect on Israel's history. I was very impressed with this idea and think that it is a fantastic opportunity for students to understand the UN and world affairs.
We also talked about mobile education ideas and since I have been back he posted me a link to this site: www.radicalgeography.co.uk and in particular this article.
Tony Cassidy the guy who runs the site, teaches in Nottingham and has been getting Bluetooth education going for a while in a nice and simple way. Teachers and students are creating small images that have text overlaying a picture which helps re-enforce a concept. These pictures are easy to create with standard windows software and are made small enough to be seen on a mobile phone screen.
Bluetooth is then used by students to swap the images between each other. As we have seen in our interviews Bluetooth is used in schools already by most students for messaging and file transfer, so this is a nice way to make sure it is used positively.
There is no mention on the site about how successful the idea has been - but I look forward to more news coming out from there.
He told me about a brilliant idea where students from different schools travel to The Hague to join a student version of the UN - see here for more details. He had recently taken a group who got the privilege of taking Israel's seat (each school represents a real UN country). The experience was eye-opening for both him and the students, seeing how they were treated by other "countries" and to reflect on Israel's history. I was very impressed with this idea and think that it is a fantastic opportunity for students to understand the UN and world affairs.
We also talked about mobile education ideas and since I have been back he posted me a link to this site: www.radicalgeography.co.uk and in particular this article.
Tony Cassidy the guy who runs the site, teaches in Nottingham and has been getting Bluetooth education going for a while in a nice and simple way. Teachers and students are creating small images that have text overlaying a picture which helps re-enforce a concept. These pictures are easy to create with standard windows software and are made small enough to be seen on a mobile phone screen.
Bluetooth is then used by students to swap the images between each other. As we have seen in our interviews Bluetooth is used in schools already by most students for messaging and file transfer, so this is a nice way to make sure it is used positively.
There is no mention on the site about how successful the idea has been - but I look forward to more news coming out from there.
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