Tag Archives: mobile learning on a vle

Day 28: Golden edtech oldies

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).

DVD pedagogy in a time of digital poverty

DVD
Photo by Phil Hearing on Unsplash

The challenges of digital poverty are making the news, with demands to ensure students have access to devices and connections. What isn’t making the news so much is demands to rethink the curriculum design and delivery so that it is less reliant on high end devices and good broadband!

Could we deliver content and learning via an USB stick or even on DVD?

This tweet by Donald Clark of a suggestion by Leon Cych to use USB flashdrives, reminded me of a presentation I delivered fifteen years ago.

Back in 2006 I was looking at how learners could access learning content despite not having a fancy laptop (or desktop) or even internet connectivity.

I was intrigued about how consumer devices used for entertainment, information and gaming could be used to access learning.

I also did a fair amount of work reflecting on how to convert learning content (from the VLE) to work on a range of devices from the PlayStation Portable (PSP), iPods, mp3 players, as well as devices that usually sat under the television, such as DVD players and media streaming devices.

So for an online conference I prepared a presentation on this subject.

Continue reading DVD pedagogy in a time of digital poverty

Fifty six million articles – Weeknote #98 – 15th January 2021

No travelling for me this week, well that’s no different to any other week these days… Last year around this time on one week I was in London two days and went to Cheltenham as well. It doesn’t look like I will be travelling anywhere for work for months, even for the rest of the year!

Had a number of meetings about ideas for consultancy offers with various institutions, which were interesting.

writing
Image by Pexels from Pixabay

Continued to work on the strategy, which is now looking good. It’s not a huge shift from what we had before, but it takes on board the lessons from Jisc’s Learning and Teaching Reimagined programme. It will also lead into some work we are doing on thought leadership. I have to say I am not a fan of the term thought leader, it’s up there with the term social media guru, as something you call yourself, but no one would ever describe you by that term. However the concept of future thinking is something that I think we should do, if people want to call that thought leadership, fine.

Reflecting and thinking about where you see higher education could go in the future, as well as thinking about where they are now can be useful. Sharing those thoughts with others, is more useful. I see these pieces are starting discussions, inspiring people or even making them reflect on their own thinking.

With all the media talk on digital poverty this week, I was reminded that fifteen years ago I wrote an abstract for a conference, the session was called: 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.
comic strip

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.

Back in 2006 I was looking at how learners could access learning content despite not having a fancy laptop (or desktop) or even internet connectivity.

I was intrigued about how consumer devices used for entertainment, information and gaming could be used to access learning. Could you format learning activities for the PSP, an iPod, even the humble DVD player?

I even found a video of the presentation, which I have uploaded to the YouTube.

Nothing new really, as the Open University had been sending out VHS cassettes for many years before this.

Wikipedia was twenty years old this week. The first time I wrote about Wikipedia on this blog was back in 2007, when they published their two millionth article. They now have fifty-six million articles. I met Jimmy Wales at Learning without Frontiers ten years ago this week.

I managed to have a few words with Jimmy and wished I could have had a few more, seemed like a really nice and genuine guy.

My colleague Lawrie had a post published on the Advance HE blog Leadership through a digital lens where he reflects on what we have learnt over the past year from having technology front and centre of HE, asking how we ensure that we do not adopt a techno-solutionist approach but look at our goals through a digital lens.

My top tweet this week was this one.