Carnival of the Mobilists #121

Now online at 3-Lib …

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RCETJ Special Issue on Learning While Mobile

In the past couple of months I’ve been the guest editor for RCETJ’s special issue on learning while mobile. The issue went live this afternoon, and I’m very pleased with the way it came out.  

Here is the lineup (articles are all freely accesible):

Bridging the Gap? Mobile Phones at the Interface Between Informal and Formal Learning
by John Cook, Norbert Pachler, and Claire Bradley

Affordances of PDAs: Undergraduate Student Perceptions
by Yanjie Song and Robert Fox

The Effect of Information Visualization and Structure on Mobile Learning
by Hyungsung Park

Using Place as Provocation: In Situ Collaborative Narrative Construction
by Deborah Tatar, Steve Harrison, Alli Crandell, and Matthew Shaefer

A Personalized Mobile Mathematics Tutoring System for Primary Education
by Xinyou Zhao and Toshio Okamoto

Thanks to all who contributed!!

To subscribe to the journal, please go here.

RCETJ publishes the original, refereed work of researchers and practitioners twice a year in multimedia electronic format. It is distributed free of charge over the World Wide Web to promote dialogue, research, and grounded practice.

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Net Neutrality Debate Still Far From Over, and the Saga Continues

Even though I’ve been writing mostly on mobile devices and learning as of late, the Net Neutrality issue is one that continues to be just as important (and connected to mobile as well, with the current push toward developing the mobile web further. SavetheInternet.com posted a guest piece by John Kerry yesterday asking for feedback about Net Neutrality. And feedback he got!! It’s actually more interesting to read than the post itself. There were 101 responses as of the writing of this post.

In short, people who commented on Kerry’s post unanimously support Net Neutrality and condemn the big ISPs such as Comcast. Their comments can be roughly sorted into the following categories:

• Protection of people’s rights such as freedom of speech against government and big corporate interests. According to Dale: The brilliance of the internet is that it provides everyone with an equal voice, an equal chance to be heard. To excel, to fail and to try again. To express alternate views in a world dominated by big commercial interests or repressive/regressive governments. To allow anyone to control this medium for purely commercial gain it, is to silence the voices we may most need to hear. Read also DynamicUno’s comments.
• Protection of small businesses: for example, Internetman states that I am a small business owner of an internet-based travel business. My wife and I rely exclusively on our websites for income. Because of network neutrality, we are able to compete for business with such giants as Microsoft’s Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz and make a very good living. If network neutrality was removed, our entire livelihood would be destroyed. I can’t afford to pay any premiums just to put my business on the same level playing field as these internet titans, I would have no option but to fold my business.
• Curbing big ISP abuses against customers and small ISPs: As cookseytalbott states: look at their behavior, censoring email from political sites, throttling applications like bittorrent, not fixing the golden mile, breech of privacy agreements for government domestic spying, not tending to massive bot nets on infected PC’s on their networks, random blacklisting of IP’s.

While education is mentioned here and there, mainly with regards to access to information for research and learning, it is not mentioned much. Imagine what could/would happen if government allowed the telcos (in this case Comcast and SBC) to basically control all Internet traffic. It is analogous to the ways in which governments and churches controlled society in the Middle Ages, by controlling the education of its people. Few people learned to read and write, and what they learned was determined mostly by the church, backed by the government. It wasn’t until the printing press (the Internet of the Middle Ages) was invented that things started to change, and many in power feared that the printing press would ultimately put them out of business. 

A free and unregulated Internet is a necessity for a democracy to work in today’s world. A democracy needs people who can think, be creative, have access to information that covers more than one point of view, and can express their opinions without the fear of being silenced by those in power who happen to disagree.

In any event, Net Neutrality is and remains an extremely important issue that seems to be disregarded by most major media outlets (I wonder why….). And as Crystal states in her comments:

If the internet does not remain free, you can change the Pledge of Allegiance to this

“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United Corporations of America and to the profits for which they stand, two nations, divided, with plenty for the favored few and slavery for the rest of us.”

A free people need education and information in order to act intelligently.

Please post your feedback here or with, even better, Kerry’s post.

Image Credit: http://www.savetheinternet.com

Carnival of the Mobilists #120; Death of the Mobile Web?

You’ll just have to find out the answer to that question yourself, so head on over to Skydeck for this week’s Carnival of the Mobilists!

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Handheld Learning 2008

 

Handheld Learning 2008, the world’s premiere conference on mobile learning, is on for Oct. 13-15 in London! The conference website went live yesterday, and how!! Even though I’m on the advisory team for the conference, Graham Brown-Martin told me he had a few surprises in store. And did he! Check out the list of confirmed speakers:

• Andrew Pinder, Chairman of Becta
• Steven Berlin Johnson, Cultural critic & writer
• danah boyd, Social media scientist
• John Seely Brown, Radical innovator & former Chief Scientist of Xerox Corp
• Professor Stephen Heppell, Learning visionary
• Keri Facer, Research Director, Futurelab
• Dr David Cavello, Chief Learning Architect, MIT OLPC project
• Professor Mike Sharples, Director of LSRI

The provisional program isn’t bad either, and can be found here. I’m already looking forward to the conference and I hope you are too (At least some of you are, the first registration came in within 10 minutes of the conference site going live). This one is very highly recommended, but make sure to register by July 31 to receive your FREE Nintendo DS!!

Also don’t forget that Handheld Learning 2008 follows right on the heels of mLearn 2008 in Shropshire, making it very easy (and tempting) to attend both.

Image Credit: www.handheldlearning2008.com

Carnival of the Mobilists #119

From mobilejones:

What’s amazing about this week’s offerings is that they themselves are a reflection of mobile’s push to data and multimedia in 2008. Handset companies, former handset companies, Internet companies, new entrants and social networking giants are all involved in mashups of services. And this CoM is a mashup of various media types to capture it all and bring to you….

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Carnival of the Mobilists #118

Issue #118 of the Carnival of the Mobilists comes to us from Paul Ruppert’s Mobile Point View:

 ”on the heels of CTIA from Las Vegas. I’m pleased to host this week’s gathering of all those–including yours truly–emerging from the haze of a week of playing, partying, partaking, praying for, and prestidigitating mobile deals at CTIA in Las Vegas.

Lots and lots of good posts this week!!

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Becta’s Emerging Technologies for Learning, Volume 3

Becta has just published the third volume in its series Emerging technologies for learning, an annual publication. This series is worth a read, and I’ve gotten a lot of good ideas from it in years past. This year’s line-up includes articles on

• Growing up with Google (Diane Oblinger),
• Information clouds (yours truly)
• Location-based and context aware education (Adam Greenfield)
• Trends in serious games and virtual worlds (Sara de Freitas)
• Search technologies (Emma Tonkin)
• Interactive displays and next generation interfaces (Michael Haller)

Given the impressive line-up of authors I have to say that I’m proud and a little humbled to have been asked to contribute to the 2008 volume of the series. Highly recommended!!

Image credit: “nptechtag”; cambodia4kidsorg’s photostream:
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