mLearn 2012: Call for Workshops and Tutorials

Together with Christian Glahn and Gill Clough, I’m co-chairing the workshops & tutorials at mLearn 2012. Looking forward to your proposals!

http://portal.ou.nl/en/web/mlearn-2012/call-for-workshops-and-tutorials

Call for Workshops and Tutorials

Mobile technologies are a vibrantly developing and constantly create new challenges for education and learning in a wide range of contexts and settings. In conjunction with the 11^th International Conference on Mobile and Contextual Learning (mLearn 2012) in Helsinki, Finland we are delighted to announce the unique opportunity for holding a limited number of scientific workshops and practice-oriented tutorials on mobile and contextual learning.  This provides a forum for special interest groups to exchange experiences and for experts disseminate best practices in the community of mobile and contextual learning.

Parties interested to organize a workshop are asked to submit a proposal of max. 3 pages outlining the theme of the workshop, workshop format, expected participants and domains addressed, dissemination activities, programme committee, and organizational requirements.

Parties interested to organize a tutorial are asked to submit a 2-page proposal that outlines the tutorial’s objectives, the target audience, and the format.

Both workshops and tutorials are organized as half- or full-day events on the day before the conference. Submissions for workshops and tutorials need to indicate if they are planned for a half or a full-day time-slot.

All submissions will be evaluated and selected based on their quality and the relation to the overall conference theme.

Workshop and tutorial organizers and participants are expected to register with the mLearn 2012 conference. No extra charges will be applied for the workshops.

The mLearn 2012 Workshop and Tutorial Chairs

• Christian Glahn (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, Switzerland)
• Yishay Mor (The Open University, UK)
• Gill Clough (The Open University, UK)

Submission briefing

• Workshop Proposals: Max. 3 Pages
• Tutorial Proposals: Max. 2 Pages
• Full Call for Papers available for download
• Submission template available for download

Important Dates

• Deadline for Submissions:               30 April 2012
• Notification of acceptance:               14 May 2012
• Last date of early-bird registration:    26 July 2012
• Workshop and Tutorials day:          16 October 2012
• Main Conference:                              17-18 October 2012

mLearning project ideas from my students

A couple of weeks ago Daniel Spikol visited my mLearning class. My students prepared a presentation, outlining their projects. I asked for their permission to share it with the world. Comments are very, very welcome. I promise to pass them on:

(I tried to embed the presentation, but the plugin doesn’t seem to work, so you can watch the presentation here)

beware of JamMo!

Last week at CAL I heard Lorna McKnight talk about JamMo. It sounded interesting, so I instinctively went to their download page and followed the instructions.

Big mistake.

The installation packages are enormous. They clogged up my system, then failed in mid-installation, leaving my poor little Ubuntu unusable. It took me a week until I realised there’s no avoiding root shell access (well, to be honest – I was walking in the Peak District most of it). Today I dived in, removed the jammo packages, removed its repository from the sources list, and rebooted. Haaaa. Nice to see that familiar screen again.

Now all I need to figure out is why my windows has gone blue-screen-of-death.

Join the open and free course on mobile learning: #MobiMOOC

from @IGNATIA WEBS:

Mobile learning (mLearning) is all the rage at the moment, but how do you get started and how do you maximize the mLearning plans you have? Simple, follow this free online course facilitated by 7 mobile experts and turn your mLearning knowledge into a practical project. Interested? Join the online google group, the course wiki and enter the mLearning conversation with other peers.

Grab your mobile and optimize its use
The MobiMOOC course will run for 6 weeks (2 April – 14 May). The target group for this course is … anyone interested in mLearning. Although the course is open to all, it is useful if you have some experience with social media. If you have a mobile phone or device, than grab it or go and buy one, it will make your learning much more authentic.

The MobiMOOC course will start with an introduction to mLearning, getting everyone comfortable with some of its key features, and gradually moving into the more complex technical, project planning and philosophical topics. The course will feature mLearning examples from the academic, corporate and non-profit world, and look at both simple and on the edge projects from both the North and South, as the South has been an inspiration for mLearning.

The MOOC format
MobiMOOC is a fully online course, which follows the MOOC (Massive, Open, Online Course) format. This format uses a lot of social media to enable all the participants and the facilitators to stay connected, build a network, exchange experiences. As the course is focusing on mobile learning, it is calledMobiMOOC. As much of a MOOC is about exchanging notes with peers, and constructing knowledge collaboratively, so responsibility of the learning is with you, the participants and as such you need to self-regulate your learning. To optimize your learning it is important to plan your learning actions. However, we are all in this together! You can be sure that with the mLearning expert facilitators of the course and your peers, you will get your hands on great resources, inspiring discussions and all of our minds will be challenged and inspired.
If you do not like e-mails, you can also add the discussion threads to a RSS feed.

The main course sites are accessible for a lot of mobile devices (e.g. google groups for discussing which uses e-mails, twitter, facebook…).

Interested? The when and where
The course will be running: from 2nd April 2011 until 14 May 2011. Every week focuses on a new topic.

Join the MobiMOOC google group (this will be the primary site for discussions) in order to get into the course and be kept up-to-date. You need to sign in with a google account. Important: once you have joined the MobiMOOC google-group, make sure you choose how you want to be kept up to date: recommended choices either an abridged e-mail (= you get a summary of the new activities each day) or digest e-mail (you get all the new messages bundled into one single mail per day). Google groups works like a listserv, so you can reply to a message send from the group via your e-mail, the google group mail: mobimooc (at) googlegroups (dot) com . After joining the group, please add a bit of information about yourself via the profile of your google group account, that way we all get to know one another a bit better.
Check out the course wiki (still a work in process, but already loaded with information)
http://mobimooc.wikispaces.com/

Get connected to the MobiMOOC twitter and Facebook account.
Facebook account: some informal learning or chatting
http://facebook.com/mobimooc
Twitter: mobiMOOC: tweetering thoughts and ideas and for speedy connections (hashtag #mobiMOOC)
http://twitter.com/mobiMOOC

Topics and facilitators?
Week 1: Saturday 2 April – 8 April 2011: Introduction to mLearning;
Facilitator: Inge ‘Ignatia’ de Waard

Week 2: Saturday 9 April – 15 April 2011: Planning an mLearning project;
Facilitator: Judy Brown

Week 3: Saturday 16 April – 22 April 2011: Mobile for development (m4D);
Facilitators: Niall Winters and Yishay Mor

Week 4: Saturday 23 – 29 April 2011: Leading edge innovations in mLearning;
Facilitator: David Metcalf

Week 5: Saturday 30 – 6 May 2011: Interaction between mobile learning and a mobile connected society;
Facilitator: John Traxler

Week 6: Saturday 7 – 13 May 2011: mLearning in k12;
Facilitator: Andy Black

So if you are interested, keep your agenda (a bit) free from 2 April – 14 May 2011 and join us.

oh, it feels good

I’ve just been told that my thesis has won the TELEARC PhD excellence award:

The second TELEARC award, addressing PhD excellence, will be delivered on the occasion of the 2011 edition of the Alpine Rendez-vous.

The Alpine Rendez-vous is an event, legacy of the Kaleidoscope Network of Excellence, now funded by STELLAR, the FP7 European Network of Excellence on Technology-Enhanced Learning. It is a set of independent workshops held in the same place during a week.  The 2011 edition of the Alpine Rendez-vous, will held from March the 27^th to the 31^st in La Clusaz. It is organized jointly with the JTEL summer school. Again a special attention will be given to “Orchestrating learning”, “Connecting Learners” and “Contextualizing learning”.

The Technology Enhanced Learning European Advanced Research Consortium (TELEARC) has been created with the mission to keep on the legacy of the Kaleidoscope NoE. Its key objectives are: to contribute to the shaping of the scientific evolution of technology enhanced learning, to strengthen the scientific collaborations between research teams and foster integration of European research teams in the field of technology enhanced learning, to promote the excellence of European research in the area of technology enhanced learning, and to raise awareness in the area toward the scientific community, policy-makers and the general public.

Among the activities of TELEARC there is a PhD award which first edition, in 2009, was won by Dr. Gorgojo Guillermo Vega from the University of Valladolid (Spain). The second TELEARC award, addressing PhD excellence, will be delivered on the occasion of the 2011 edition of the Alpine Rendez-vous.

And if you know the history of my thesis, you know why this is especially rewarding.

6 notes on how to build a technology-rich educational system

1. Focus on teachers. Teachers are the primary change agents in the classroom. Empowereing teachers should be the fundemental guideline for any programme of using technology to enhance eduction. The same technology can work both ways: when interactive whiteboards were introduced in the UK they initially created a cinecmatic experience: the teacher had to darken the room and drag students through a pre-determained slideshow or movie. This resulted in an impofrished eductional experience, taking pedagogy back 40 years. Nowdays, teachers hardly use the boads directly: they send students to present their work or solve problems at the board, while they stay back and manage the whole class interaction. Teachers have approprited the tool to their needs, subjecting it to their expertese. This is the kind of process we want to support.

2. Focus on (techno-pedagogic) design. A good teacher does not deliver educational content – she designs an educational experience. There is an ubdundance of high-quility, open and free digital educational content. The critical resource is the knowlege of how to use it. Hewlett foundation invested vast sums in the UK open university’s openlearn project, pushing large portions of their excelant currucular resources to the web, using an open and robust platform that allows free use and even customisation and re-mixing of resoureces. Now Hewlett are funding research into why these rich resources are not being used.
Teachers (and educational leaders in general) need to be shifted from the position of consumers to that of designers. A consummer chooses among available immutable goods and makes do. A designer analyses a problem, in its context, and devises a solution. She then implements this solution using available resources. Teachers need learning design and development tools such as LDSE and LAMS, but they also need help in changing their mindset.

3. Open standards, open protocols, open market + guidance, quality contron and monitoring. There are many ways to learn and many ways to teach. Any centralist solution will be good for some and less so for others. Centralised design and implementation choices disempower school leadership and desolve their responsibility. School leaders need to be able to make their own technological choices, but the system needs to ensure that these choices are sound and that the local overhead is minimised. They way to achieve this is to define a set of techno-pedagogical standards for educational technology – from the generic level of operating systems and office suites to the particular tools used to teach specific subjects to specific age groups. Such standards should define the functions and qualities of the technology and their interfaces with other systems (e.g. handles for assessment), but should not dicatate any specific technology. These standards should be supported by a central regisration and management extranet. This system would work like the way Cisco manages its ecosystem: it would provide suppliers with clear specifications of the expected standards, allow them to register and certify their services and products, and offer these to school leaders. These, on their side, will have to document their choices and evaluate them.

4. Same stuff, new ways. Some topics don’t change, but the way we teach them should. Dr. Yifat Kolikant from the Hebrew university is using internet-based dialogue between Israeli and Palestinian students to teach history in a deep and provokative way. By confronting students with conflicting perspectives, they are driven to engage with and strive to understand their own national narrative. The WebLabs project used computer programming and on-line collaboration to drive to develop their a mathematical language and explore complex issues in science and mathematics. Technology enables teachers and students to make the curriculum their own, individually and collectivly, it allows them to draw on a multitude of resources and connect their educational experieces to their real life. The only advantage a computer has over a textbook is its ability to connect people and build networks of knowledge.

5. New stuff, new ways. Our children live in a world which is radically different than the one we grew up in. The skills they need to develop did not exist when we went to school. A common mistake is to interpret this statement in a technical, or rather – technophobic – manner. Children need no more help in learning to use powerpoint than they need in operating their cell-phone. They do need help in understanding what it is they want to tell the world, how to formulate this message, and how to reach their audience. Powerpoint may be a tool they use for this purpose, as may be FaceBook or YouTube. Using any tool is easy, but choosing the right one is hard. Our children have more opportunities and confront new dangers. We need to help them leverage the former and manage the latter.

6. Coding, a basic skill. Computer programming is wrongly perceived as an elite technical skill. In fact, good programmers specialise in one thing: solving problems. They analyse problems, creating abstract models of complex situations, and use whatever hardware, software and social conventions they can get their hands on to devise solutions. Programming is an art that combines analytic reasoning with creative innovation. We do not expect every student to become a master artist or noverlis or a professional sportsperson, yet we teach art, literature and sports from an early age. We see these subjects as essencial to children’s well-being and happiness. They provide them a rich perspective on the world and cognitive tools for dealing with the issues they encounter. Mathematical thinking, and its practical embodiment in computer programming, should be seen in a similar light. Computer programming is a tool, and it should be integrated as such across the curriculum.

How your school is promoting digital literacy and internet safety

From @datruss‘ blog, via @lyndsayg

I wordled my phd

I wordled my phd.

internet makes you smarter, and these here scans show it

Next time some apocalyptic bore starts yapping about how facebook causes cancer pull out your copy of Small, Moody et al. or Small & Vorgan’s  iBrain and show the audience that brain scans demonstrate how middle-aged and older adults with little Internet experience were able to trigger key centres in the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning after just one week of surfing the Web.

Guess my X and other techno-pedagogical patterns: my EuroPLoP’08 paper

I’ve finally posted my EuroPLoP’08 paper on telearn.

One of the most successful activities of the WebLabs project was the Guess my Robot game. This game served as a model for several other activities, and eventually gave rise to a set of design patterns for learning mathematics through construction, communication and collaboration. As often happens, I was too busy with other projects to properly publish the results. I mean, I’ve published a few papers which referred to the game or its descendants, but the patterns themselves have always remained informal creatures.

The first attempt I made at collating these patterns for publication was at EuroPLoP 2008. The feedback I received there are invaluable, and encouraged me to rewrite the paper dramatically for the proceedings.  Since then, the patterns have made their way into my thesis and in the process changed again. So there are some things about the proceedings version which I obviously wish I had done differently. But there’s no end to that. It will take some time until my thesis gets processed to publications.

“publish early, publish often”, right? so here it is:

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Mor, Y. (forthcoming), Guess my X and other patterns for teaching and learning mathematics, in Till Schümmer & Allan Kelly, ed., ‘Proceedings of the 13th European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs (EuroPLoP 2008)’ .

Most people see learning mathematics as a demanding, even threatening, endeavour. Consequently, creating technology-enhanced environments and activities for learning mathematics is a challenging domain. It requires a synergism of several dimensions of design knowledge: usability, software design, pedagogical design and subject matter. This paper presents a set of patterns derived from a study on designing collaborative learning activities in mathematics for children aged 10-14, and a set of tools to support them.

http://telearn.noe-kaleidoscope.org/open-archive/browse?resource=2232

http://www.bibsonomy.org/bibtex/29f1b2f14fa9ced9995e5fc803bbbb4d7/yish

Related:

Mor, Y. & Noss, R. (2008), ‘Programming as Mathematical Narrative’, International Journal of Continuing Engineering Education and Life-Long Learning (IJCEELL) 18 (2) , 214-233 .

http://telearn.noe-kaleidoscope.org/open-archive/browse?resource=493

Mor, Y.; Tholander, J. & Holmberg, J. (2006), Designing for cross-cultural web-based knowledge building, in Timothy Koschmann; Daniel D. Suthers & Tak-Wai Chan, ed., ‘The 10th Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) conference (2005)’ , Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Taipei, Taiwan , pp. 450 – 459 .

http://telearn.noe-kaleidoscope.org/open-archive/browse?resource=238

Mor, Y.; Noss, R.; Hoyles, C.; Kahn, K. & Simpson, G. (2006), ‘Designing to see and share structure in number sequences’, the International Journal for Technology in Mathematics Education 13 (2) , 65-78 .

http://telearn.noe-kaleidoscope.org/open-archive/browse?resource=237

Matos, J. F.; Mor, Y.; Noss, R. & Santos, M. (2005), Sustaining Interaction in a Mathematical Community of Practice, in ‘Fourth Congress of the European Society for Research in Mathematics Education (CERME-4)’ .

http://telearn.noe-kaleidoscope.org/open-archive/browse?resource=533