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

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.

An interesting story in the New York Times abut editorial control at Wikipedia. The volunteer administrators now have the authority to delete unsuitable articles and protect those that are vulnerable to vandalism.

According to the  New York Times: Wikipedia is not the experiment in freewheeling collective creativity it might seem to be, because maintaining so much openness inevitably involves some tradeoffs.

Personally I can understand that these control measures would need to be in place or we’d have anarchy

Of interest is how ‘open’ a wiki can be and and how does this impact on our use of wikis in mLearning? I’d be interested to hear about your experiences of using wikis in learning programs

PS: From the New York Times article I followed a link that took me to:
Congresspedia: a collaboratively written “citizens’ encyclopedia on Congress,” designed to shine more light on the workings of the U.S. Congress.

I’ll leave it with you…..

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.

In answer to the questions raised last week at AITD – I’ve consulted a higher authority & have the following answers.

RE: Reverting to previous versions of your work: Wikis are NOT about working collaboratively on documents – they are collaborative webpages – NOT documents.

RE: Can you track who made an edit? Yes. You click on details and you can see who said what and when.

Don’t forget to try out the AITD wiki.