First, a redirect — let’s take “mobile” out of it and look at the ideals of a Learning Strategy. Then, let’s consider how “mobile” could support that learning strategy.

Learning Strategy (Ideal)

1. Comprehensive: Rather than develop a bunch of different systems, one framework that incorporates all aspects of the university would be ideal.
2. Student-centered: If we approach that strategy from the perspective of student learning, we’ll need to recognize and address the fact that “classroom learning” (and much of what the current traditional university systems are built to address) are but one piece of the university experience for students. Our strategy must “play nice” with the other priorities of students to be incorporated fully into their lives.
3. Cost-Effective: Since we know that the most successful students are those who identify as being members of learning communities, the strategy must support student integration into, and development within, learning communities. Community support minimizes floundering time, and more fully immerses students into their career fields, minimizing the amount of time needed to finish school.
4. Personalized: Given that much of education is about the development of a personal path within a generalized curriculum, the strategy should support easy personalization, and allow flexibility for students to engage in learning activities in ways that both meet their learning preferences and challenge them to develop skills navigating alternative pedagogical techniques that others may employ/prefer.
5. Active: Embodied, experiential learning activities, such as lab work, group projects, presentation, and fieldwork can be pedagogically-powerful activities. The strategy should provide support for these types of activities by, for example, offering access to learning resources (content, process, mentoring) whenever students are engaged in learning.

Given these five ideals (and there may be others), let’s examine the role that mobile can play.

Mobile support for Learning Strategy

One feature/constraint of mobile devices is their size/portability. On one hand, they’re small and thus less effective for much rich content delivery (large visualizations, deep reading, etc.). On the other hand, their portability makes them amazing conduits for just-in-time connections to information, friends, and expertise — lightweight prompts that still put much of the learning on the individual.

1. Comprehensive: Mobile can support easy, anywhere, anytime access to a surface layer of all aspects of UW. This is great for reminders, prompts, and time and place-based notifications, but perhaps less effective for in-depth investigations of websites, texts, visually-rich lectures, seminar-style discussions, etc.
2. Student-centered: Mobile can play a huge role in supporting student schedules, and connections to classes, jobs, classmates, student orgs, family, friends, finances, food, laundry, sports. If students juggles it, it should be easily supported and accessible from their mobile devices.
3. Cost-Effective: Because mobile devices are intimate (pocket/purse/bedside) and accessible 24/7, students use them. We should tap into that by making their access to their UW life as seamless as possible — e.g. already-trusted personal devices should not require multiple logins (on small screens with tiny keyboards) to access their information. Let them choose to rely on their lockscreen password. If it’s a PITA to get to their “UW learning stuff” they won’t, and it won’t be cost effective. If they use the structure we provide, they will use it to develop their academic identity, and more effectively find their niche/identity in learning and affinity groups.
4. Personalized: For this, consider mobile’s role not as a content delivery system, but a route or means to connect with other learners. Perhaps the most effective way to allow personalization is to foster the peer-to-peer connections with like-minded learners in their learning communities. Fostering learning communities may also be the most effective way to challenge them to translate learning into formats that others prefer/understand.
5. Active: Mobile can support field research and investigation including citizen-science, citizen journalism, place-based investigations, tours, and interviewing. It can also provide portable spaces for note-taking and collaboration (e.g. peer review).

Community Gardens near me.

Local Food Systems Scenario: Players locate and map where food comes from in their neighborhood. Dairy farms? Community garden plots? Organic Farms and CSA? Canneries? Egg farms? Beef farms? Cabbage? Cranberries? Orchards? Processing plants?

Play: In the map to the right, I’ve outlined in red the community garden plots near me. For going over to them and walking around both sets, I’d get some points, similar to the UNM game Chris Holden created. If I became an expert on the locations of the other community gardens in my city, I’d earn some sort of badge. If I learned more by interviewing some of the gardeners about what they’re growing (and why), and sharing that in the game, I’d earn some further expertise points. I could add restaurants that use local food as well. The game is limited only by what the quests are, and in this game, I can challenge — and accept challenges — from other players, so there really is no limit.

Basically, I have a notion that if we got together with a few interested peers and students/PAs, we could come up with a really interesting interdisciplinary place-based field experience that offered multiple quests at multiple levels of expertise (ala “I’ll take Botany for 200, Alex”) that could be replicated in different areas across the state (and country). Although my initial thoughts center on using ARIS, they only extend as far as using ARIS as a prototyping tool — the actual game might end up in a number of different formats for different technologies.

My goals are these. I’ve been passionate about place-based/embodied learning for decades, and am now in a position where I’ve got access to cool folks and cool tools (Google Maps and ARIS, etc.), and a job where I can finally start to coordinate the creation of something amazing that combines them all. My big evil scheme is to get smart  brains in one whiteboard-filled room, and let ideas cross-pollinate. I imagine a large scalable tour/game/field experience with new quests/activities being continually added as they’re developed.

If we build a structure/frame together, it will be easier to add components individually, as needs/resources arise. And we can recruit players by luring them from other quests (i.e. I’ve played the Astronomy Quest, and like this activity — maybe I’ll try out the Ecology Quest to supplement my points!)

I have no doubt that players would quickly find that many skills overlap from discipline to discipline. So if I kicked butt in and really enjoyed a Probability sub-quest in the Botany line of quests, I might want to jump over an rip through some Probability sub-quests in the Language line of quests (e.g. um… probability of multi-vowel adjacency in billboard ads in Wisconsin?).

Where did it all start?

If you need help, contact dd@sucuri.net or visit us at http://sucuri.net/index.php?page=nbi

Malware removed.
Empty lines removed.

Completed.

As you may know, the Clifton StrengthsFinder measures the presence of talent in 34 categories called “themes.” These themes were determined by Gallup as those that most consistently predict outstanding performance. The greater the presence of a theme of talent within a person, the more likely that person is to spontaneously exhibit those talents in day-to-day behaviors.Focusing on naturally powerful talents helps people use them as the foundation of strengths and enjoy personal, academic, and career success through consistent, near-perfect performance.
Below are my top five themes of talent, ranked in the order revealed by my responses to the Clifton StrengthsFinder. How well do you think these themes describe me?

Click here to open a Google Doc of “Teaching with Technology”

Then read through it for ideas, add your own ideas to it. Comment on parts.

Hopefully, this will provide a good experience to understand some of the power of collaborative creation.

While I could nit-pick on the categories, I think it’s definitely an interesting exercise to consider things in this framework.

The Six Technologies are no surprise to those of us who have been advocating and developing mobile learning practices and tools. They are:

1. mobile computing
2. open content
3. electronic books
4. simple augmented reality
5. gesture-based computing
6. visual data analysis

If these look at all familiar, it may be because you are already using them via your smartphone. They are all  fiercely personal, socially connecting, and deeply embodied. The iPhone and iPad has ushered in an era of apps that take advantage of the geo-locative technologies, brilliant displays, touch screen and accelerometers of these devices to make many of the items listed already either mainstream or nearly-so — highlighted in popular “near-future” media representations.

What they do no explicitly mention, but what is implicit in the current uses of many on this list is games. Mobile games are huge, often rely on complex visual data analysis and gesture-based input.

I’ll be adding more commentary to this as I have time.

“Yes, today you can chat with friends, collaborate on projects, read the news, play games, or share videos of your kids, all online. But you could do all that stuff offline before 1991. It’s just much easier and faster now. What’s different—what’s fundamentally different—is the size of your social space, and of course the size of everyone else’s. The Internet has made these spaces much, much bigger.”

The bigger space means more opportunities to connect — not just with your existing friends, but with folks you don’t know, who are interested in similar things or working on similar problems.

Enter Twitter and its social media siblings.

Wait! you say, doesn’t this mean I’d need to force my students to buy a smartphone, get an account on a non-school-blessed resource, and make them do stuff outside the classroom?

All good points. Sort of. Don’t make them, but don’t deny them the opportunity to use the devices they already have, and that you already have (you do, don’t you? — you should. Really.)

I’ve started researching some of the online and offline resources for using Twitter in Learning, and I’ll start posting them here with my own commentary on how they might apply to university-level learning. Please note that I’m not stressing teaching. It’s all about learning, and fostering learning environments for me. Whether you’re a researcher, teacher, or student, you’re a learner — you’re all three. Researchers learn from and teach their colleagues. Teachers research and learn about their subject to teach it better. Students research subject matter and teach each other in the process of learning.

So here are a few links on the subject:

• Using Twitter for Professional Development: Finding Other Academics in Your Field: featuring the tweets of our own Annette Vee, this may be the place to start if you’ve not used Twitter before and want to know what it’s good for. Once you start using it (and valuing it) for your own work, it will be easier to understand how and why to use it in your teaching.
• Twitter for Teachers: A video introduction on why teachers might want to use social media like Twitter.
• 3 research studies on potential advantages of using Twitter in the classroom: Yes. There’s actual research on this stuff. This post summarizes and links to three of them. (and yes, that makes this post a meta-meta post.)
• Teaching with Twitter: While a bit mono-toned, this video has good information for college-level teaching.
• “Don’t Lecture Me!” (with Twitter track): This is a different and cool look at the back-channel of a Donald Clark Eluminate lecture (be sure the “Interactive Transcript” is enabled to see the Twitter feed below the video). As he speaks, the listeners tweet their reactions, questions, etc. This is very common at conferences now, and a great way to get extra added information (but they can be disruptive, and require some planning and more of a willingness to “go with it” than traditional lectures required).
• HootCourse: is a more formal framework for the educational use of a number of social media sites. Rather than leave it up the the instructor to cobble together a way to use them, they offer a ready-made solution. In their words: “HootCourse sticks solely to the role of classroom. It’s a virtual environment built to facilitate the free-flowing dialogue of an educational setting. Like a real-world classroom, it leaves teaching materials and format to the teacher.”

There’s much more out there, but what are your thoughts?

• Do you use Twitter for your research? Why?
• Do you teach with it? How? and Why?
• What other social media do you use for learning, research, and teaching?

Thanks!