Mobile Learning and School transformation.
Brendan Tangney, professor at Trinity College Dublin, in his keynote, looked at three questions. First off, for me it’s great to be able to listen to Bernard from Trinity college Dublin, as he’s from the same city as I am.
The 1st Question that Bernard researched is:
Can non-technies create interesting mobile AR learning apps using APP Inventor from MIT.
Their conclusion after trying, a number of fun experiments overlaying draughts (a simple form of chess) into a live game on a rugby pitch is the answer is NO, not yet it’s too complicated.
Now Bernard is moving on to a theme closer to my heart
Designing the 21C ‘classroom’ learning experiences.
Bernard kicked off with a quote ‘Stationary desks and chairs are proof that the system at hand is propagating slavery’ Montessori. and goes on to say that that’s a pretty radical statement, but that you have to be pretty radical if you want school change.
He mentions the SAMR model for technology adoption, which they use in their work,
Transformation (redefinition and modification) vs. Enhancement
The project Bernard is doing is called Bridge 21, they get students from regular schools to come into the University, to work. It started as an outreach project. They don’t beieve in one laptop per child model, they see laptops and technologies as shared devices. Collaborative working is central. They use a team model inspired by the scouting model, which is highly structured and from experience students adopt the team work approach very quickly but teachers find it endlessly difficult. For them it’s a revolutionary change.
Topics covered in the Bridge 21 program include multimedia making, programming and even core curriculum maths teaching to each other. With quite some success. We see a video of students at the program and sharing their experiences on it, and students clearly report increased confidence, and good to mention that the students they are working with would be from ‘disadvantaged backgrounds’ so this is a great achievement.
So what about systemic change? in ireland.
that being Bernards real aim.
As Bernard points out you can’t have a discussion about education without talking about PISA. Luckily in Ireland the education minister is keen on an overhaul and is going what Bernard calls the “Finnish Route’ This is a great opportunity for 21st century skills to get foot on the ground in schools and eventually have 21st century schools across the country.
Key 21st Century skills that they are working on are ‘Being Creative’, Working with Others’ Managing information thinking’ They have also come up with new ways of assessing these skills and their initial findings show some measurable positive changes.
Now the audience is asking questions and most people want to know about the potential in Ireland to transform the system and what parties are for and against.
You can find the slides Bernard used are here:
www.slideshare.net/tangney
Future Schools, SIngapore,
Presented by Yu Wei and Hyo-Jeong So.
An Evaluation Framework on Contextual Mobile Learning: Deriving from a Systematic Review
In Singapore 5% of schools are flagged to be Future Schools, they receive a lot of funding for this, and their research work works with these Future Schools. The Future schools, have for example,
1. Whole school ICT approach,
2. 1:20 teacher student approach,
3. students have own laptop and ipad for outdoor learning.
4. The school inside has a very open and flexible architecture.
Yu Wei and team have designed what they call Mobile Learning trails.
The evaluation levels they work with to know if this mobile learning and future schools are having desired results are:
1. Ministry’s goals
2. Institutional demands
3. Students experience.
They started with this question:
What consists of a good contextual mobile learning model, How do we evaluate?
I’m afraid I couldn’t quite follow, their process, which was aimed to evaluate students progress.
But this si the aim fo Future Schools
The FutureSchools@Singapore aims to equip our pupils holistically with the essential skills to be effective workers and citizens in the globalised and digital workplace of the future
John Traxler
Unpacking question around Digital Literacy.
I love listening to John unpack things, he seems to continually search for the nuance and the intangible and the cultural and ethical consequences of ideas and movements.
While part of a definition would be, ‘They are essential to an individuals life chances’ John says it’s often reduced to just meaning IT skills, which leaves out the cultural, community, political aspects of digital literacy.
Digital Literacy is probably a pre requisite for Digital Citizenship and Digital Scholarship and relates to the concepts: Digital Divides and Digital Inclusion. And is further confused by the terms and discussions round digital natives and digital immigrants.
From a ‘ready to graduate’ perspective the need for digital literacy relates the question / why and what for do we educate’ which has a number of changing dynamics currently. If we look at literacy, which usually means being able to read and write and manage numbers. Then digital literacy is being able to read and write with digital devices to express yourself.
And then how does this relate to mobile learning? Mobile digital literacy.
Yet Mobile technologies are socially pervasive and are transforming our society making the text all the more local, location based and transient. Making the idea of authority of the text all the less substantial. Which influences the variety of genres one would want to or need to ‘read’
Cyberspace vs. phone space. Technologies are breeding. What’s being read and what’s doing the reading is changing. And where does this leave literacy?
Here is John’s full paper on this: Identity and Context, The reader and the Read
http://blogs.ubc.ca/newliteracies/files/2011/12/Traxler.pdf
Emer Beamer 