On Tuesday we held a mobile learning event at the Leyland Hotel, just off the M6 near Preston. We’d had quite a few problems with the organisation, totally down to me being unprepared and not giving myself time to do things. Fortunately, Kev stepped in and he and Helen our events organiser managed to put a programme together. In the end it was a really great day. Dave Sugden gave a brilliant introduction to mobile learning and the MoLeNet projects and then Paul Coulton from Lancaster University showed some fab stuff that he’s working on. He’s part of a Nokia group of developers and a lot of their work can be found on the MobileRadicals wiki. He demonstrated locoblog in which photos and GPS can give an accurate representation of where you’ve been and various games which incorporated a heart monitor and involved jumping in order to ‘fire’ – who needs a Wii fit? The list of applications that the group are working on is huge and it’s worth checking out the wiki – I’m sure someone will be able to use these for learning out in the FE community. one of the applications was the production of 3d photographs. This of course involved wearing the silly glasses – so attractive.
For the rest of the day we had presentations from 8 different colleges and all very different. We saw and had a go at using Nintendo DS, iPods, PSPs and saw lots of evidence of learning taking place in a less traditional way. If the Nintendo DS have done nothing else they have made mental arithmatic cool! Interestingly, 5 of the 8 presentations involved projects for learners with some sort of learning difficulty or disability.
Sheena from Trafford had the delegates lined up and ‘speed dating’ discussing steps to acheiving collaborative learning. As someone who bangs on about collaboarative learning it was a bit of an ‘Allelluia’ moment for me.
The final presentation of the day was from Colin Hawksworth from Birkenhead Sixth form on encouraging learners to use their own devices – another Hallelluia from me!
We’d set up a hashtag for twitter and other feeds – #MNW09 and were delighted to get nearly 4 pages of posts! – definitely a something we’ll use again. By the end of the day, I was pretty exhausted and so probably didn’t do a very comprehensive feedback but it was a great day with lots of sharing of ideas and discussions.
Inclusive Learning 