Pilot Plan Discussion

Finally, it is time for Mobiled developers to finish some mobiled features, which have not yet been ready, such as MMS feature and some new physical phone lines. I hope they are ready for the pilot in February.

Planning the Mobiled pilot in Helsinki, I had a meeting with Teemu Leinonen discussing about Mobiled, my field study in Finnish schools and some Mobiled-related issues.

I suggested to conduct the pilot with the Arabian Comprehensive School because I had previously conducted a series of field work there and found that mobile learning could be interesting and useful for them. In addition to good ICT infrastructure and tools for teaching and learning activities, the school has already adopted ICT for many years. Most of the teachers are ICT-literate people. Some of them are active ICT users, while the others prefer to use non-ICT artefacts in their pedagogical activities. Teachers have been using computers, Internet, smart board, camera projector and online encyclopedia in combination with other creative conventional teaching methods. The students are also generally ICT-literate.

Despite of high ICT literacy among the teachers in the school, they have not yet used mobile phones for teaching and learning. Even though most students and teachers own and bring mobile phones to the school, they cannot use their mobile phones during classes. In the context of education, some teachers use mobile phones only to call or send messages to other teachers and also parents about student problems. One of the teachers enthusiastically said that the application of mobile phone as a teaching and learning tool would be challenging.

During the meeting, Teemu suggested that the pilot does not have to be the same with the previous ones. I agree with him, because each school in each country faces different challenges. I also think that we need to understand the school situations, problems, challenges and potentials before embarking on a pilot.

Having got some inspirations from other mobile learning projects, I think it is a good opportunity to try out the Mobiled outside the physical classrooms because I believe in the idea of mobile learning as a vehicle to support flexible and contextual learning. The African team has previously tried out Mobiled to enhance indoor classroom activities, so I think it would be interesting to try it out for outdoor activities, especially if the students have to listen, record and submit information from the field. One of the main challenges is to make the activities interactive for both the teachers and students.

Inspired by mobile learning projects in Sussex and Maryland, I suggested that students work on some tasks in groups or individually within a limited range of area, where they can retrieve information about their tasks from some posts. For some tasks, Teemu suggested that students can call Mobiled server and retrieve related information using some search terms given on each post. He further suggested that it would be interesting to try out some materials combining science and English in the form of multimedia.

For the group tasks, I suggested to create some collaborative tasks that require information retrieval from Mobiled to accomplish their tasks in the field. I am particularly interested to try out the Mobiled's capacity as Wikipedia. Since the capability of Mobiled to add information is still limited, I suggested the use of available mobile phone services and features for enhancing such activity.

At the end, the active involvement of the school headmaster and teachers is crucial for this pilot, so I plan to arrange a meeting with them and discuss about the feasibility of conducting the pilot in February.

I'll catch you with my "cam" phone

Recently, I have been observing the use of mobile phones by several children from 4 to 8 years old. They used different kind of phones, such as Nokia N70, Nokia 5140i, Nokia 6630 and Nokia 6680.

All of those children were very fascinated with camera functions of mobile phones. In the beginning, they thought that it was cool to take a picture with a mobile phone. It seemed for them that interacting with a camera phone was easier and safer than a digital camera. Their parents often warned them when they touched and played with digital cameras. Yet, nobody reprimanded them when playing with mobile phones. They could also use one hand to play with them as well as move easily while trying to catch pictures of their friends. Most of them have already got some interaction with phones, either to make a call, send SMS or just playing with them. None of them have used a mobile phone with a camera.

When they were about to take a picture, they faced difficulties because they did not know what to do/press. Some of those children did not yet read or read fluently. The user interface and interaction on the mobile phones were more complicated than a normal digital camera. Compared to one button to press in taking a picture with the digital camera, there are more steps to do with mobile phones. Those steps include defining buttons to press, scrolling down choosing the right function, defining whether they want to take “image” (photo) or video clip, pressing a button to take the image or video. What the children usually did was coming to me and asking what to press and choose, then they tried to remember the steps by hearts executed the actions and repeated the steps .

I also observed how a very young child used SMS to learn alphabets and numbers by pressing the buttons of the mobile phones. The child could also learn some metaphors from user interface of the mobile phones and their applications. During the process of writing an SMS, the child was suddently confused when they could not erase some words because there was no “C” button on Nokia 5140i, because the child had memorised that by using other phones that a mistake in writing SMS could be erased by pressing the C button.

I learn that it is important to design a consistent user interface and interaction of mobile devices and applications for children. A mobile phone usually has limited numbers and possibilities for physical interactions, yet a physical button could conveys multiple functions instead of one-to-one correlation. Young children may not be able to read, but they interact by memorising a set of procedures. Consistent graphical user interface, metaphor, physical and visual interaction are important in reducing cognitive burden of those children and developing more enjoyable experience when using mobile devices. These aspects are also worth to consider when designing a mobile learning system for this group of users.

Pilot plans - soon in Helsinki, Finland

It is planned that there will be school pilots conducted in Helsinki in February 2006.

I am very excited with the plans as we will try out updated version of Mobiled. Hopefully, I will see a significant improvement and better user experience of this mobile learning service through the pilots.

The Finnish schools normally have already got good ICT infrastructure and facilities, so I hope that these technical matters at the school would not be an issue in the pilot.

I am currently going through again the results from several field study that I conducted during spring and autumn 2006 at Arabian and Laajasalo Comprehensive School, which I believe would be useful for planning some pedagogical activities for the pilot.

Mobile Learning (m-Learning)

For the past few years, during my work in the field of mobile learning (m-Learning), people frequently asked about the meaning of mobile learning, how it is different from the usual educational practices and also its comparison with e-learning.

The answer has never been simple.

During the Internet boom era, people started to talk about e-Learning. e-Learning is a process of learning, which is not limited to physical places, due to the possibility of having virtual presence. Tutors and students could be present in different physical places while participating in a learning process. Learning materials are usually available in the forms of electronic documents and multimedia.

Nonetheless, e-Learning has never been a hit in developing countries, mostly due to the limited infrastructure for accessing the Internet.

Mobile learning is about to change this state of affairs.

Most people in any part of the world regardless of age, socio-economical status and background are the loyal users of mobile technology, in particular mobile phones. It is often more convenient for people in developing countries, such as Indonesia, to access mobile features than the Internet through fixed and often costly infrastructure.

In mobile learning, mobility is a key aspect. Learning activities are no longer limited to physical classroom interaction. With a high degree of mobility, mobile learning process is more apparent as some socio-cultural activities than a learning process based on text-books and experts (teachers, lecturers or tutors).

Consequently, mobile interaction should support learning activities that are more contextual than the usual classroom or e-Learning practices.

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tools, such as mobile phones, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and tablet PCs, should play an important role in a framework that supports learning activities. For example, the use of Push-to-talk (PTT) service could make group communication in learning easier.

With all the mobile learning potentials in the horizon, it is difficult to ignore that mobile telecommunication service cost and mobile usability remain the main barriers of mobile learning.

RFID and mobile technology in learning

We have got numerous and various examples of social softwares, groupwares, mobile and digital television medias already available in front of us. Some have been used for learning while others only for fun. I do not think that we should add by creating another similar one, instead we should consider combine or hybrid them into a new one.

Designing a mobile learning system that incorporates RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology, social software and digital television for both formal and informal learning sounds very challenging.

The use of RFID and mobile technology has opened up different possibilities how to make business better and life easier and more comfortable. The potentials for learning are certainly there. Yet, they just need to be investigated further.

In Tokyo, people can use their “wallet phone”, an RFID-enabled mobile phone, as a train pass, as their money to make a transaction, as a means to get updated information and discount coupons from the “bookmarked” local stores in the neighborhood.

In Korea, people have a possibility to read a book in a futuristic apartment without flipping it from a large screen equipped with RFID.

RFID and mobile technology has also been investigated for edutainment in the Museum of Natural History in Denmark.

Nokia has launched its first product that supports Near Field Communication (NFC), an emerging RFID technology, which was claimed to be the first in the world, in 2004. There are nowadays more RFID phone product lines being launched. This fact certainly contributes to a greater worldwide opportunity of new media learning.