Dr Debbie Holley presented work by her and Dr Sue Sentance at the Bristol Ideas in Mobile Learning Symposium (6/7 March 2014), and was intrigued with the enabling technology surrounding the event. The whole conference was open online via Googleplus webcasts https://plus.google.com/u/0/105941544613476615848/posts to any interested participants with all the events filmed in Cloudworks, the free OU application and available to watch live on youtube. All the abstracts and media were captured in the Cloud, enabling abstracts, slides and video to from a living archive, in that comments can be added to the individual pages.
Mobile ‘comfort’ zones: overcoming barriers to enable facilitated learning in the workplace
The affordances of mobile technologies are well documented (cf Sharples, Vavolua, Wali, Cook, Pachler). Linked with the rapid expansion of the ‘SMART’ phones, where users access fast/high quality information, new opportunities are offered to engage students at a time/place of their own choosing. Our small-scale study is located within the dominant discourse of mobile learning literature of context specific learning; it explores the attitudes and habits of trainee teachers using their own mobile devices when working full time in a school setting. Our findings indicate that students have complex/interwoven narratives that relate to issues of identity, personal/private space and their involvement in an emergent community of practice. We map these key themes into a framework for looking strategically at mobile learners in different personal/ professional contexts, and identify of the design barriers to be overcome before the full potential of mobile learning can be successful with our own students when isolated on placement and juggling busy, complex lives.
The whole conference can be accessed from here:
And Debbie’s talk, slides and abstract is here,
To create your own cloud, or to find out more: http://cloudworks.ac.uk Coming up: Open Education Week (10/14 March) is a celebration of the global Open Education Movement – watch out for lots of free events…
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