Dial M for Learning: mLearning ideas

If you’re not sure what RSS is and how to use it then go to this website. The folks who put this page together really do mean EVERYTHING! Enjoy.

The 4th World Conference on Mobile Learning, mLearn 2005, was held in Cape Town, South Africa from 25 to 28 October 2005.

Abstracts & papers from the conference are available for download in PDF.

mLearn 2006 will be held in Banff, Canada 22-25 October.

FreewarePalm has lots of free, downloadable programs for your Palm. You could spend a month looking for things, but a quick look at recently added programs in the Educational section includes the following, which will give you an idea of the type of stuff that’s there.

AuSlang v1.2
A must-have if you’re reading this blog & you’re not an Aussie!! This is a collection of Australian sayings for anyone wanting to visit Australia, knows Australians, or Aussies needing to brush up their Slang. (I haven’t tested it for accuracy yet!)

Spanish Verbs
Regular Spanish regular verbs and their conjugations.

Species Inventory v6.3.3
The Species Inventory application assists with creating, sharing, and managing sighting logs that are formatted as tab delimited text so they easily import to a spreadsheet application such as OpenOffice Calc or Microsoft Excel.

There are a lot of annoying banners & ads – but that’s what you have to put up with to get free stuff Maybe there’s something useful there for your mLearning students.

The AACE Digital Library is a valuable online resource of peer-reviewed and published international journal articles and proceedings papers on the latest research, developments and applications related to all aspects of Educational Technology and e-Learning.

The AACE Digital Library enables users to:

• Conduct scholarly research.
• Keep current on the latest research and publications in their fields.
• Access and fully search to publications in an easy, searchable, and efficient manner.
• Maintain their academic interests in the area of information technology in education.
• Receive Table of Contents Alerts prior to publication.

For decades Nintendo has been exercising your thumbs. Now they’re going to exercise your mind.

Their recent game is called Brain Age and is surely something we teachers can’t be unhappy with. In their own words:

What is Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day?
Exercise is the key to good health, both for body and mind – and now there’s finally a way to make mental exercise simple, fun, even competitive. Inspired by the work of prominent Japanese neuroscientist Dr. Ryuta Kawashima, Brain Age features activities designed to help stimulate your brain and give it the workout it needs like solving simple math problems, counting people going in and out of a house simultaneously, drawing pictures on the Nintendo DS touch screen, and reading classic literature out loud.

View the video

You can read about Brain Age and even the scientific Neurological explanation for how it all works.

There are some interesting possibilities here for mobile learning – in fact it IS mobile learning. Now all I need is to find a teenager with a Nintendo and I can check my own Brain Age and go for some improvement!

Learning Technologies 2006 Conference
Sunshine Coast, Qld, AUSTRALIA
9 & 10 November 2006

The theme for this year’s conference is Learning Partnerships.

We are seeking 30-minute presentations of papers that provide case studies about Learning Partnerships you have been involved in and how these have been actioned and managed, from planning to fruition.

Papers will not be refereed. We welcome joint presentations, however only one presenter for each paper will be given a discount conference fee of $295 (includes GST). Joint presenters will be given the Super Early Bird discount rate of $395 (includes GST).

The audience will be teachers, lecturers, trainers and educators who use, or are thinking of using learning technologies and who are interested in all aspects of Learning Partnerships.

Click here for more information.

LearnEnglish is a free site that helps learners and teachers of English. LearnEnglish comes to you from the British Council, the United Kingdom’s international organisation for educational and cultural relations.

There are stacks of tips and activities on the site. You can test your skills in vocabulary, grammar, listening and reading.

LearnEnglish Kids is a fun part of the site. Find games, songs, stories and activities about all sorts of topics. And learn English!

No – you’re not at the wrong place. I decided we needed a new look. I hope you like the calming greens and the easy to read headings.

Wikiversity is a centre for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities. Its primary priorities and goals are to:

• Create and host a range of free, multilingual learning resources, for all age groups in all languages
• Host scholarly/learning projects that complement existing Wikimedia projects (eg. a project devoted to finding good sources for Wikipedia articles)
• Host and foster research based in part on existing resources in Wikiversity and other Wikimedia projects (such as Wikibooks, Wikisource etc.)

See more on Wikiversity/Scope.

What Wikiversity is

• A repository of free, multilingual educational resources.
• A network of communities to create and use these resources
• A group effort to learn. Which may or may not, be lead by an instructor (who, again, may or may not be an expert on the topic).
• A collaboration to improve other projects. When participants have significant results they may be used to improve other Wikimedia projects, and indeed other online learning, reference and data sources.

You can participate in discussions of the Wikiversity proposal on the discussion page.