ELECTRICCHALK

Image by lanier67 Att-NC-ND

Last week Will , Steve and myself from Netskills went down to this year’s Eduserv Symposium in London. It was on the theme of The Mobile University and it was a thoroughly enjoyable learning experience.

The slides and videos are available here. Particularly worth a look are Paul Golding’s keynote and Christine Sexton’s presentations. They both give a great picture of how patterns of use are changing but from very different perspectives.

(Sorry about the wierd ratio. Best to click full screen anyway…)

Set aside a few hours if you can over the next few weeks to have a look.

I set out what I wanted to get from the conference in an AudioBoo.

What I found most interesting was that I had a bit of a reality check and had to reframe my expectations for what students were demanding from the university in terms of mobile learning.

I love using my phone for learning and reflection. I’ve got relatively easy access to my blog dashboard, I’m using AudioBoo more regularly and all the usual stuff like Tweetdeck, DropBox, capturing images and video etc. I find the idea of using my mobile to break my learning out of the training room or lecture theatre and to bring my daily experience into my learning world. Although devices like the iPhone are designed mainly for accessing and consuming media the most exciting aspects are the ones where learners can particpate in, explore and discover the world around them.

What surprised me (and I know this makes me look naive) was that it seems most students don’t view their technology in the same way.

Both Chris Sexton and Simon Marsden’s talks highlighted that students wanted something altogether more functional.

What they wanted was information. The things that are important to a student are things like where is my next lecture, can I view my library record, can I easily access my email, can I see maps of the campus.

This leaves me with one or two unresolved questions in my head:

• Do students partition their use of mobile technology? i.e. This is my social fun time and my learning time is different.
• If they were encouraged to use their mobile devices as a creative learning tool would this actually appeal to many of them?
• Should it be down to teaching staff to lead students towards this sort of use or should students be given the freedom to explore themselves? Will it happen anyway as mobile use increases?

I hope I don’t sound dismissive of student’s expectations of mobile learning. I was just one of those moments where you find your own perspective unexpectedly shifted for you. I realised that the majority of my use of my own device was for routine information purposes. The app I used most often over the few days I was in London was Tube Exits, helping my provincial self navigate the Underground. I highly recommend it by the way – well worth the money.

Ironically, this reframing was helped by a conversation I was having on the conference backchannel with Carl and Chris back at the office.

I still want to explore the use of mobile technology for creative uses but I think it’s important for me to keep my pragmatic hat on as well.