I also went to the Mobile Learning European SIG meeting today. This group of mostly researchers has a great website at http://mlearning.noe-kaleidoscope.org/, with one of the best collections of available mobile learning research I’ve seen (with a mostly European focus; see also here). The largest part of the meeting was a recap of 2006-2007 projects by various researchers. Instead of me listing them all, you can go here to see them.
Some of the more recent ones that were mentioned but not listed on the Kaleidoscope project list include (for a complete list of projects discussed go to the slideshow):
John Traxler:
CO2lab, Trondheim, Norway (cooperation in learning technologies)
- MOTUS; mob learners @university
- FABULA; learning geographies in cities using wireless technology
- ASTRA; pervasive awareness applications to support connectedness
University of Salzburg; ICT&sS Center; Mark Kramer;
- Future of mobile learning on individual and collaborative learning (his PhD research)
- Cultural differences in mobile experiences (I really like this one; haven’t really seen anybody else do this)
- Mobile addiction
- Mobile healthcare (there’s a Microsoft call for proposals for this one)
- Ubiquitous and pervasive learning
- Citizen media (yes!)
Chris Dennett: University of Wolverhampton
- projectBluetooth; asynchronous; bridges sms and mms; free transmission to mobile devices (short range).
- spatial and temporal context-aware systems; generic sensor network technology; hardware establishes spatial context.
Ericsson
- CONTSENS project; context-sensitive education and training
Gábor Kishmihók
- Corvinus University Budapest is making mobile learning content available for 1000s of its students
Other items that were discussed at the meeting included:
- the formation of the International Association of Mobile Learning (affiliated with the mLearn conferences), and how the European Mobile Learning SIG can/will be a part of this (more on this to follow);
- using the Handheld Learning forum for discussions;
- several new publications that are either available or are coming, including:
Note that this list is not meant to be comprehensive. The slides with all the details will be posted on the Kaleidoscope site soon.
What I took away from this meeting is that there are lots and lots of interesting and good projects all over Europe, and beyond. What I do wonder though is why it seems like so many of these projects are done in isolation from each other. You would think we would start looking more at big picture types of questions and issues, which the two publications listed above attempt to do. So the big question is: how can we do this well?
Image Credit: Kaleidoscope Mobile Learning SIG:
http://mlearning.noe-kaleidoscope.org/
