Dial M for Learning: mLearning ideas

Some interesting trends have been searched out by Ron Edwards at the Ambient Connection blog.

Two Australian cities in the Top10 – you’ll have to go look for yourself – I’m not giving it away

I attended the education.au seminar So what’s changed? in Sydney yesterday. As expected, there were some thought-provoking points of view from Phillip Adams and James Farmer. And it was interesting to hear about some of the projects being undertaken by Futurelab in the UK.

You can join the discussion or listen to the podcast of each speaker. If my time was limited I’d listen to James Farmer to glean ideas for immediate use followed by Phillip Adams for some thought provoking general ideas. I’d suggest a visit to Futurelab to check out their projects rather than the podcast. Those discussed by Annika were:

Savannah – a strategy-based adventure game where a virtual space is mapped directly onto a real space. Children ‘play’ at being lions in a savannah, navigating the augmented environments with a mobile handheld device.

Space Mission: Ice Moon – puts pupils in the roles of experts in an Emergency Response Team after a disaster in space. Working in teams in the classroom, up to 30 pupils use video-conferencing facilities, web chat and interactive materials to help resolve the disaster.

Racing Academy – a massively multiplayer car racing and vehicle engineering simulation which allows students to engineer and race realistic virtual models of cars. Online facilities allow teams and communities to collaborate and compete on the web.

Speaker profiles:
Phillip Adams – a controversial broadcaster, writer and film-maker. As presenter of Late Night Live, he has interviewed thousands and can boast to be ABC Radio National’s largest driver of demand for podcast downloads (50,000 downloads for May 2006).

James Farmer – a Melbourne based online communications designer. James is the founder of edublogs.org, the largest educational blogging community on the web. James has worked as a lecturer in research and education design at Deakin University and is currently the Online Community Editor at The Age.

Annika Small – CEO of Futurelab UK, responsible for developing the strategic direction, establishing partnerships and exploring new opportunities for Futurelab. Annika has focused on developing compelling interactive learning resources for those excluded from traditional education.

Here’s a great article with a long list of Blog search engines. Blog search engines have become more and more sophisticated, and nowadays you can do a blog search on a variety of topics. These should keep you busy for a few days – enjoy.

A fabulous series of articles from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI). Read an abstract and then downlaod a PDF which provides concise information on emerging learning technologies and related practices. Each brief focuses on a single technology or practice and describes:

• What it is
• How it works
• Where it is going
• Why it matters to teaching and learning

Covered so far:

1. Virtual Worlds
2. Google Jockeying
3. Remote Instrumentation
4. Screencasting
5. Virtual Meetings
6. Grid Computing
7. Collaborative Editing
8. Instant Messaging
9. Augmented Reality
10. Blogs
11. Video Blogging
12. Wikis
13. Podcasting
14. Clickers
15. Social Bookmarking

Now that should keep you busy for a while.

I’ve just discovered Pod Pedagogy – educational uses for the iPod. A blog covering news, tutorials, tips, and techniques.

It’s put together by Rodney McPhail from the Dept. of Biological Science at Purdue University, Indiana.

There’s a lot of good information and tips in non-technical talk that is easy to understand. Particularly check out the Tips & Tutorials section.

There are numerous places that you can set up a free blog – just run a search engine on ‘free blog software’ and you’ll have thousands to choose from. Here are a few I know of.
I can highly recommend Edublogs.org – free educational blogs for both you and your students.
Other more general options are:
Blogger – one of the longest running and now owned by Google.
MSN Spaces – of course Microsoft have a solution.
LiveJournal – they also have a paid version with more features.

Thanks to James Farmer for bringing the excellent Teachers’ Guide To Blogging and Podcasting to our attention. The online guide is an excellent explanation of how to get started with both. Enjoy….

If you have any other great resources for either of these topics please post them by making a comment.