Mobile learning: the next generation of learning



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MOBILE LEARNING: THE NEXT GENERATION OF LEARNING

by
DESMOND KEEGAN


DISTANCE EDUCATION INTERNATIONAL
2005


MOBILE LEARNING: THE NEXT GENERATION OF LEARNING

Contents
Page
Chapter 1. The education background 3
Chapter 2. Examples of mobile learning in 2005 34
Chapter 3. Overview of mobile learning in 2005 106
Chapter 4. Tools and technologies for mobile learning 122
Chapter 5. The incorporation of mobile learning into mainstream 143 education and training
Chapter 6. Development of courseware for mobile learning 153
Chapter 7. Student evaluation of mobile learning 172
Chapter 8. Bibliography of mobile learning 216

CHAPTER 1. THE EDUCATION BACKGROUND
Introduction
Education and training is the process by which the wisdom, knowledge and skills of one generation are passed on to the next.
This education process has been going on since time immemorial. It is the central process in the conservation and development of human culture. It began at the dawn of time and has continued to today.
Eventually society developed for itself schools as the privileged places where the education process takes place.
Later, in the 12th century, universities were added to schools as additional places where the education process would occur. To these were added, more recently, training centres for the teaching and learning of skills that are needed for the functioning of society.
Today there are two forms of education and training: conventional education and distance education.
This book claims that distance education can comprise: distance learning (d-learning), electronic learning (e-learning) and mobile learning (m-learning).
Conventional education
Conventional education is also known as face-to-face education or ILT (instructor led training).
Conventional education has three fundamental characteristics:


  • The teacher and the learning group are assembled at a fixed time in a fixed place for the purposes of learning




  • The learner forms part of the learning group




  • Interpersonal communication is the means by which the process of education and training takes place.

Historians of education in the west like Bowen and Hobson (1974) traced the origins of western education back to Plato's dialogues in the Groves of Akademos and beyond. They traced the development of western educational ideas from Plato to Aristotle, from Aristotle to Augustine and Aquinas and Comenius; from Comenius to Pestalozzi and Montessori, ending up with Dewey and others in the 20th Century.


These are the figures who have guided western education and analysed its characteristics as the transmission from one generation to another of what is considered to be of value. This tradition has invariably been based on face to face communication from teacher to learner in the learning group. All these theorists analyse the communication strategies, the relationship between teacher and learner, and the characteristics of the learning group which have dominated the development of western education.
Today throughout the world, society provides itself with schools, colleges and universities to which students travel for the purposes of learning. The characteristic of the school is the bringing together of students with teachers at the same time and the same place in classes, in laboratories, and in recreation centres for the purposes of schooling.
At college level and at corporate training level young adults are grouped together in training centres, either corporately owned or government financed, at which skills and vocational and educational competence is provided to the future workforce.
At universities in the tradition of Newman, von Humboldt and other analysts, the learned community brings together students in either residential or daytime/nightime universities, at which lectures are given, research in the university libraries is undertaken and the development and transmission of knowledge from one generation to another is enhanced.
The evolution of university learning
This book addresses, inter alia, the question of whether society should allow governments and universities to award nationally and internationally recognised degrees to students who choose not to, or who refuse to, attend the university granting the degree.
The question is framed in this way because it is clear that governments and universities will award university degrees in this manner, whatever society thinks.
In the English-speaking world one can trace an evolution from the classic statement of the nature of a university, first published by Newman in Ireland in his The Idea of a university in 1855.
Newman saw the university as a place where scholars came together for the purposes of learning and argued that if a practical end had to be assigned to a university course it was that of training good members of society: 'its art is the art of social life, and its end is fitness for the world'.
His view was that the task of the university was to turn out an elite of people who are educated in a broad sense, who are not just specialists, but who have been enabled by their time at a university to see how their specialism may be brought into effective relation with informed general intelligence.
Similar ideas were put forward at the time by Arnold in England and von Humboldt in Germany.
In the English-speaking world one can trace an evolution from the residential university of the mid 19th century, the classical expression of Newman's 'the university is a place where scholars come together for the purposes of learning', to


  • the non-residential university of the later 19th century

  • the part-time day time university of the mid 20th century

  • the part-time night time university of the late 20th century

  • the distance teaching university (open university) of the 1970s

  • the web-based university of 1995-2000

  • the telephone-based university of the immediate future.

The evolution of the university in other cultures may be somewhat different, but I believe there is validity in this way of presenting it.



University learning

The ideas of Newman, von Humbolt, Arnold and others, about university learning found adequate expression in the work of the School of Philosophical Analysis of the University of London School of Education, best known through the publications of Paul H Hirst, R S Peters and Michael Oakeshott.


In a well-known passage R S Peters tells us that:
At the culminating stages of education there is little distinction between teacher and taught: they are both participating in the shared experience of exploring a common world. Learning is explained as a conversation or group experience in which there is 'intersubjectivity' between teacher and learner.
Oakeshott carries this onwards by asking
How does a person learn style, a personal idiom, honesty in research, willingness to submit cherished ideas to confrontation? His answer is that much of this is implanted unobtrusively in the manner in which information is conveyed, in a tone of voice.
Much of this kind of dimension for Oakeshott can only be learned in the presence of one who has the qualities to be learned.
Whether it be d-Learning or e-Learning or m-Learning, the essential feature of distance education is, however, that the teaching acts are separated in time and space from the learning acts and that the learning materials are offered to students one, five or ten years after they were developed and to students all over a country or overseas.
If the position of R S Peters and his group has validity, if the teaching-learning relationship, is, indeed, basically a group experience based on the 'intersubjectivity' of the teacher and the learner, then the establishment of a theoretical justification for claiming it can take place at a distance is crucial.
Distance education
The wondrous developments of technology during the Industrial Revolution brought about, for the first time in history, the possibility of distance education.
These developments were particularly important in transport and communication.
It was no coincidence, writes the German scholar Peters (1973), that the first trains, the first postal systems and the first correspondence courses commenced at the same time.
The first distance educators


  • separated the teacher and the learner




  • separated the learner from the learning group




  • used a form of communication mediated by technology

and still claimed that the essence of the education process was maintained intact.


Distance learning systems used technology to separate the learner from the teacher, and the learner from the learning group, while maintaining the integrity of the education process.
These systems attempted to replace interpersonal communication, and the intersubjectivity between the teacher and the taught, which is the essence of the educational transaction, by an apersonal form of communication mediated by technology.
In ILT (Instructor-Led-Training/face-to-face) systems in training centres or university lecture halls, this interactivity is automatically set up.
In distance learning it has to be artificially achieved by what is known as the re-integration of the teaching acts: that is, the development of excellent distance learning materials for students studying at a distance, and the creation of excellent student support services for students in their homes, or factories, or some other place not normally geared to education and training.
Benefits to society
Distance learning brought great benefits to society.
It freed up learners so that they could study at any time and in any place and in structures suited to their employment and family commitments.
Most of the goals that today characterise just-in-time learning, or life-long learning, were anticipated by distance learning:


  • Training when it is needed




  • Training at any time




  • Training at any place




  • Learner-centered content




  • Avoidance of re-entry to work problems




  • Training for taxpayers, and those fully occupied during university lectures and sessions at training centres




  • The industrialisation of teaching and learning.


Development
In spite of these benefits the first 100 years of distance training were marked by criticism.
Governments largely ignored distance training, university professors criticised it, corporate trainers focused on ILT.
A major breakthrough in both the quality and quantity of provision came in the 1970s with the foundation of the open universities, notably the Open University of the United Kingdom at Milton Keynes, the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia at Madrid, and the FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany.
UK Universities quality league
Distance learning finally came of age in the late 1990s when the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education of the British Government set up structures to measure academic excellence in more than 100 universities in the United Kingdom, including the Open University.
To many people's surprise, The Open University was ranked in the top ten of British Universities in terms of academic excellence. When one realises that the average age of Open University students is about 40 years and more then 40 per cent of them do not have the required A-Levels to be allowed to study at any other British University, one can see that this is a remarkable achievement.
It means also, that over 100 British Universities teaching full-time students on campus, with their full-time professors and lecturers, cannot achieve the same level of academic excellence as that of the distance teaching university. It shows that distance learning has come of age and that excellence is now demonstrably achievable at a distance.
The statistics placing the Open University in the top ten in Britain with Oxford and Cambridge have been repeated year after now for more than five years now and cannot statistically be explained as a fluke.
Here is the listing of the leading British universities showing the Open University in the 10th position in the first division, with Oxford and Cambridge in the leading positions with York University. The British press chose to present these results in the form of football leagues and there are three other divisions besides the premier league presented here:
The first division comprised: Cambridge, York, Oxford, UCL, Warwick, LSE, Durham, Sheffield, Open University, Southampton, Nottingham, Lancaster, Bangor and St Andrews.
If one were to repeat these Thatcherite measurings of learning on a European basis, one can be fairly sure that 90% of German universities, 90% of French universities, 90% of Italian universities would be ranked after the British distance learning university, as their standards are not essentially different from Oxford and Cambridge.
Individualisation
Streaming has been a central focus of analysis of western education in the 20th century. Theories and practices about vertical streaming or horizontal streaming or alphabetical streaming or various ways of structuring the learning group have played an important part, especially in British educational theory in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and the discussions continue today.
Streaming is an essential characteristic of education and training when it is conducted in the learning group, whether this education or training is provided in the school, at a training centre, at a college or at a university.
In each of these situations the students who come together are individuals and each one is different from the next. They bring to their education or training the inherent skills, both physical and psychological, and years or even decades of nurturing of these skills in schools, colleges or universities.
Some students have difficulties or deformities and this characterises their learning. Some students are lazy and this characterises their learning and the volume of learning that they have gained before they proceed into the next learning task. Some students are brilliant and study with intellectual rigour and characteristically are much more advanced than their peers when they approach their next learning task.
Despite the vast application of research money and research theory to this problem it remains a characteristic of conventional education and in theory will remain so as long students are taught in groups in schools, colleges and universities.
Conventional education and streaming
It appears clear that the conventional education system has no answer to the problem of streaming or to the problem of the inherent abilities, developed skills and qualities of the students whom schools colleges and universities choose to put together in classrooms, lecture rooms, laboratories, field trips or research groupings.
The logistics of any educational system mean that cohorts of students are grouped together either by age or by study goals or by level of previous examination results and are then taught in classes, tutorials, seminars, lectures or research cohorts. The individual characteristics of these students, their disabilities or their brilliance, are brushed aside and they are placed in groups with their teacher, mentor, facilitator, lecturer or professor.
The damage to the slow learner, the weak learner, the dyslexic learner, the learner with native language problems, the foreign language learner is often great. The damage to the brilliant learner, the high achiever, the future intellectual leaders, held back by the learning group, and held back by teachers teaching at their conception of an average ability level of the learning group vaguely decided upon, can also be great. Streaming holds back and damages the learning of the best students.
Streaming and the bypassing of the individual abilities of students in group-based learning situations is best regarded as an inherent characteristic of conventional education.
Distance education and streaming
Distance education is different. From its outset in the middle of the last century, distance education broke the structure of the learning group and treated its students as individuals. In many cases an individual tutor, not a group based teacher, was provided and in many cases it is claimed by scholars, especially researchers from Scandinavia like Rekkedal, Bååth and Holmberg that a creative one-to-one relationship was set up in the best distance teaching systems which had great benefits for learning.
In more recent systems, structures like the Open Learning Institute at Richmond in Vancouver, British Columbia, in its original design, granted unlimited toll free telephone conversations from a remote student to a lecturer at the institution. This again provided a creative one to one teaching/learning interaction, as students could study the learning material for many hours and then pick up the telephone and dial toll free to a remote tutor who would analyse, correct and gear the study of the individual student to the requirements of the certification and examination process.
Most of the structures of distance systems have thus been based on the individualisation of learning. Printed materials, though aimed at a vast audience are often written in a style that focuses on the individual student. Some even approximate to the 'guided didactic conversation' advocated by Holmberg, in which the student is addressed as 'you' and the whole process is conceived as a conversation between a teacher and a learner.
Materials, whether audio tapes, video tapes, floppy disks or other electronic devices are characterised by SAQs, TMAs, CMAs, that is self assessment questions, tutor marked assignments and computer marked assignments. The institution treats the student as an individual and his or her work is focused on a summative and formative individualised assessment system.
The rapid development of internet and web-based courses in the late 1990s has re-emphasised the individualising of teaching in a distance system. Web-based courses are directed at the individual. A new type of student is emerging: a student who spends 20 hours per week in front of a computer screen, is linked to the internet by his or her company or corporation, can write HTML or edit pages in it and who wants to be taught on the net.
The thought of travelling to a school or training centre, college or university is not attractive to the web-based student who wishes to remain an individual in front of his or her computer screen while linking study to professional and vocational advancement. E-mail conference packages and bulletin boards remain intrinsically individual educational activities, even if directed at a vague and remote audience of students.
Thus distance education systems from their start to today have constantly focused on the individualisation of teaching, the individualisation of student learning and the individualising of the communication between student and student and between student and institution.

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