From 2006.
Mobile Learning on a VLE?
Wouldn’t it be nice if all learners in an educational environment had access to a wireless laptop and free wireless access to their digital resources at a time and place to suit their needs.
The reality is that learners don’t always have access to what we as practitioners would like them to have.
However, they do have access to some mobile digital devices which could be used, these include mobile phones, iPods, mp3 players, portable video players, PSPs… These devices are used extensively for entertainment, but rarely used for learning.
However, though many of these have limited web access, most are unsuitable for viewing traditional webpages, can not access a VLE or e-learning content, and often can’t read PDFs, Word Documents, PowerPoint presentations, or other complex documents.
Virtually all however can read images, short video clips and some have the potential for interactive content.
Most will work fine on buses, trains, planes, cars and even on foot, using a laptop or desktop in this way can be problematic…
The question is how does a practitioner convert and distribute content to their learners in the preferred format easily and quickly?
How can a learner access this content easily and quickly?
How can you ensure that mobile content will enhance the learning experience for learners?
Some devices have communication facilities, e-mail, SMS, MMS, Video, how does the practitioner interact with the potential learning activities which can utilise this functionality?
The WCC core team working with our partner colleges have been investigating the means and mechanisms to ensure that practitioners can both easily work with content for these mobile and portable devices, but also that the learners can access this content.
We shall demonstrate the processes been developed and implemented to allow learners to access their learning content and activities at a time and place to suit their needs.
We shall show how the WCC shared VLE is being used to host this converted content and distributing it to the learners.
There will also be some discussion on the use of similar processes being used for home based digital devices such as DVD players and media streamers.
The submission will be a short paper (webpage format) with examples of content for various mobile devices being made available for download and use.
Though I didn’t post these posts each day in June (and to be honest I didn’t post it each day on the Twitter either) except the final day, I have decided to retrospectively post blog posts about each of the challenges and back date them accordingly. There is sometimes more I want to say on the challenge then you can fit into 140 characters (well 280 these days).
