Mobile learning II – Experience strikes back *
Hokyoung Ryu and David Parsons
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Centre for Mobile Computing, Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand * **
[email protected] ;
[email protected]
Mobile technology is at the heart of our society. This prevalent mobile paradigm inevitably affects our expectations about our day-to-day experiences, continuing to change the ways in which we act out our lives. Educational activities are no exception to this quiet revolution. As mobile technologies have become more pervasive, education practitioners have begun to question how we should use this technological evolution to enhance current learning experiences, and further, develop new mobile learning experiences, to take advantage of the any place, any time learning that mobility promises. This is an exciting idea, from both pedagogical and commercial viewpoints, and its advocates have been promising that mobile learning (m-learning) might replace current classroom or computer-based learning activities with a markedly different and engaging form of learning experience. There are already various forms of mobile learning application in use. One approach has been to re-interpret conventional e-learning systems, simply porting them onto a mobile platform so that learners can see the same benefits from e-learning systems but without the limitations of time and space. Other more ambitious examples focus strongly on social or collaborative interactions in contexts that traditional e-learning systems would struggle to support, for example the „Ambient Wood‟ project, a learning environment about exploring a woodland area to study its ecological system (Rogers et al., 2005). However such imaginative learner-centred developments have been the exception rather than the rule, and do not transfer easily into everyday learning activities. Indeed, people, institutions, and businesses have suffered enough from the prophecies of futurologists who promise that simply “going mobile” would be a solution on its own. We would propose instead that technology-driven initiatives are putting the cart before the horse, and the nature of effective mobile learning experiences should be analysed more carefully before simply adding mobile equipment to the learning mix. Speaking frankly, the actual learning performance of the participants has often been barely considered in many mobile learning applications. A concept that has thus become central is the learning experience. It is about how people feel about a learning activity and their attitude, engagement, motivation, pleasure, and satisfaction when doing it. It is important to point out that one cannot design a learning experience, only design for a learning experience (Sharp, Rogers, and Preece, 2007). In fact, many of us seem to approach the problem from the wrong direction. It is our belief that this is where the trouble begins. Therefore, to provide both exciting and commercially promising new forms of mobile learning, we must build on a
combination of first, an understanding of learning experiences and then second, relevant features of mobile technologies. That is, simply being driven by technical initiatives, with a narrow focus on the quality of mobile technologies themselves, does not capture the potential variety and emergent aspects of mobile learning activities. Practitioners as well as researchers should instead embrace the notion of learning experience (or learning themes), for a better understanding of the important qualities and values that mobile learning can reveal. These (mobile) learning experiences thus far build upon three core aspects; transforming the learner’s attitude, role-playing and engaging in the real world, and enriching a story-telling experience. Some of the exemplars of these aspects we discuss below aim at just one learning experience, but most are significantly more blended in nature. Transforming the learner’s attitude. Most tertiary institutions find their students to be isolated from active participation in learning activities. For instance, many university students in lecture rooms, if they bother to turn up at all, simply read through the presentation materials, with little or no interaction among the lecturer and the students. Many successful mobile learning applications (e.g., „Classtalk‟, at www.bedu.com) have been introduced to try to reshape these learning attitudes; for instance, Scornavacca et al.‟s (2007) SMS (Short text Messaging Services) classroom interaction system was found to be an effective tool for changing learning attitude. To transform their passive learning attitude into a more active one, students are allowed to ask questions via SMS on their own mobile phones, so the lecturer can interactively capture the questions and responses of the students. This attitude change in user experience can be also seen in participatory simulation. Colella et al. (2000) used the participatory simulation theme to model disease epidemics with high school students using electronic tags. A single tag was used start the disease propagation, and the students can then observe the virus jumping from tag to tag in various scenarios. Here, the focus is very much on developing an understanding of the system by discovery, through active participation in their learning activities. Perhaps the most significant aspect of these particular learning tools is that they transcend the usual boundaries of mobile phone based learning to the use of more pervasive mobile technologies, but very much as the servant of the learning experience rather than its driver, a precursor perhaps of future directions in mobile learning. Role-playing and engaging in the real world. In our review of mobile learning applications, we found that several mobile learning systems aimed at presenting highly situated and motivated learning experiences to students, so the students can play a particular role in their learning activities. The „Savannah‟ project, carried out jointly by Futurelab, HP laboratory (Bristol), the BBC Natural History Unit and the Mixed Reality Laboratory of Nottingham University, is a good exemplar of this type of application, encouraging children to develop self-motivated and collaborative approaches to building a conceptual understanding of animal behaviour (Futurelab, 2004). It is a clear
attempt to develop a learning resource that makes extensive use of all sorts of mobile technology, game-playing and fun with a strong element of collaboration and role-play. Remarkably, there is no particular learning achievement arising from the experience. However, the children‟s engagement with the learning theme embodies in practice their understanding of these features of the environment and their potential implications. With the ongoing development of mobile technologies, engaging in the real world will no doubt become a more common theme in mobile learning. One aspect of this development is the emergence of mobile augmented reality systems, for example Nokia Research Centre‟s Mobile Augmented Reality Applications (MARA) projects. Whilst current prototypes focus mainly on enhanced GPS services that simply identify details about various locations, or augmented reality games, there is huge potential for learning activities using augmented reality. History students might, for example be exploring the Forum in Rome. They could point their mobile phone camera at a particular view, and the augmented reality systems can overlay a view of the Forum from 2,000 years ago. Geology students similarly could be shown how a particular landscape had been formed, with augmented animation. Such systems have the value of delivering the kind of learning experiences that field trip tutors try to provide on a daily basis, but in a more individual and powerful way. Mobile learning researchers would do well to anticipate the potential of such tools and their value in supporting the kind of teaching that already goes on in real world environments. Early experiments in this field include automotive assembly line training, with a special pair of goggles use as the mobile device (Doswell, 2006). Enriching a story-telling experience. Some learning systems are built around a story that is an aggregation of individual learning elements (i.e., episodic experience). Brugnoli et al. (2005) has developed a museum helper system to give a better exploratory experience to museum visitors using a mobile device, providing not only audio-visual help about exhibitions but also local guidance to other related exhibitions based on the narrative nature of the exhibition. This study showed that visitors had a greater museum experience with the motivating guide that led them through the exhibitions. This narrative approach to the museum experience can be seen as an important structural factor in enhancing the learning process. A big advantage of narrative is that it can be complex and explorative. Following from Csikszentmihalyi (1990), a learning environment that places narrative at the centre can help learners to reflect on what they have learned (i.e., episodes), enabling a sort of metalearning, illuminating the very processes by which they learn and providing an organising structure for knowledge. Many mobile learning systems have exploited the potential of narrative theme. For instance, the Ambient Wood project (Rogers et al., 2005), as briefly mentioned above, provided a playful learning experience where primary students could explore and reflect upon a physical environment that had been augmented with a medley of digital devices. It was designed to provoke students to stop, wonder and learn when moving through and interacting with aspects of the physical environment. A
field trip „with a story‟ was created, where children discover, hypothesise about and experiment with ecological processes taking place within a physical environment. Lampe and Hinske‟s (2007) “Playmobile Knights Empire Castle” is a very appealing example, offering an augmented playset of interactive story-making learning experiences. In this example, there is once again an aggregation of individual learning elements, with the narrative story woven from the learner‟s imagination. Whilst the mobile learning projects briefly described above hint at a wide variety of potential learning experiences, they also reveal some of the research challenges that must be addressed if mobile learning is to move forward. We face something of a double edged sword; some may think that mobile learning is too naïve in what it can deliver, while others may find that mobile learning systems require excessive investment in specialist infrastructure. Certainly many ambitious mobile learning studies have been „one-off‟ efforts rather than tools that can easily be integrated into day-to-day learning activities. One thing is for sure, the learning experiences that mobile learning has thus far presented could not be regarded as comprehensive, and further, that they need to be supported by complementary learning experiences. This implies that a blended approach between mobile learning and other learning experiences should be our focus. Examples such a Verdejo et al.‟s (2008) integrated mobile field trips and classroom activities give us an insight into the potential of such blended approaches. Of course, we cannot give a concrete answer to which learning experiences will be exemplified by mobile learning in the near future, and our categorisation of the three learning experiences described above may be too limited, and miss some critical trends in future mobile learning. However, at the very least, this article provides something of a road map of mobile learning in terms of learning experiences, and may help to open a debate about new research directions towards developing new and better themes in mobile learning. These challenges are being addressed in a number of new projects worldwide, and we hope this will be further discussed in a special issue of the International Journal of Mobile Learning and Organization (www.inderscience.com/ijmlo) on “Developing Themes in Mobile Learning”.
References Brugnoli, M., Morabito, F., Bo, G. and Murelli, E. (2007). Augmented itineraries: Mobile services differentiating what museum has to offer. PsychoNlogy, 4, 311-335. Colella, V. (2000) Participatory simulations: Building collaborative understanding through immersive dynamic modeling. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 9, 471-500
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. HarperCollins: New York. Doswell, J. (2006) Context-Aware Mobile Augmented Reality Architecture for Lifelong Learning. The sixth International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies, Kerkrade, The Netherlands, 5-7 July, 372-374. Futurelab (2004) Savannah, Retrieved December http://www.futurelab.org.uk/projects/savannah
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Lampe, M. and Hinske, S. (2007) Integrating interactive learning experiences into augmented toy environments. Pervasive Learning Workshop, Toronto, Canada, 13 May, 1-9. Rogers, Y., Price, S., Randell, C., Fraser, D.S., Weal, M., Fizpatrick, G. (2005). Ubi-learning integrates indoor and outdoor experiences. Communications of the ACM, 48, 55-59. Scornavacca, E., Huff, S. and Marshall, S. (2007). Developing a SMS-based classroom interaction. International Conference on Mobile Learning Technologies and Applications (MoLTA), Auckland, New Zealand, 19 February, 47-54. Sharp, H., Rogers, Y., Preece, J. (2007). Interaction Design: Beyond HumanComputer Interaction. John Wiley & Sons.: Chichester, U.K. Verdejo, M.F., Celorrio, C., Lorenzo, E.J., Millán, M., Prades, S., and Vélez, J. (2008). Constructing mobile technology-enabled environments in support of an integrated learning approach, in Ryu & Parsons (Eds.) Innovative Mobile Learning, IGI Global: Hershey, PA.
About the Authors Hokyoung Ryu holds a Master degree in Industrial Engineering from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Korea (1999) and a Ph.D in Psychology from the University of York, U.K (2004). His current role is as a Lecturer in Information Technology, at Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand. His current research interests include Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), mobile usability and mobile learning, publishing more than hundred peer-reviewed articles in conferences, journals, and book chapters. He is currently preparing to edit another mobile learning book tentatively entitled “Designing Themes in Mobile Learning”. He is also authoring two books – "Mobile User Interface Analysis and Design" and “Affordance Design”. Dr.
Ryu is a member of the British Computer Society‟s HCI group and the Centre for Mobile Computing at Massey University. David Parsons was born in the United Kingdom in 1959. He holds an honours degree in Music from the University of Sussex, U.K (1981), a Certificate in Education from Garnett College, U.K (1986), an MPhil in Electronics and Computer Science from the University of Southampton, U.K (1996) and a PhD in Information Technology from Nottingham Trent University, UK (1999). He has worked both in the university sector and commercial software development, including academic posts at Southampton Solent University and professional roles at The Object People, BEA Systems and Valtech. His current role is as a Senior Lecturer in Information Technology, at Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand. He has published books on Object-Oriented Programming with C++ (London, Thomson, 1997) and Introductory Java (London, Thomson, 2003). His areas of research interest include mobile learning and agile software development. Dr. Parsons is a member of the British Computer Society‟s Software Practice Advancement group.
