Since my last blog post a long time ago I have now successfully completed my MSc in Blended and Online Education with my final dissertation exploring student attitudes to the use of an app to learn vocabulary in English as a foreign language. I will maybe post something more detailed on that later but to sum it up, the students were very happy with the use of this tool and found it made learning more fun and less like hard work. Unfortunately the exam results for the vocabulary section showed no significant difference to previous ones but on the positive side there was no negative impact either. From what I have read and heard so far this seems to be a very typical result for this type of research.
Rather than discuss my findings, today I actually want to begin a series of posts on my experience at the 13th World Conference on Mobile and Contextual Learning which is now taking place in Istanbul. This is my first ever time at a real conference and also my first ever time in Istanbul and Turkey so there has been a lot to take in. The official conference doesn't begin until tomorrow but today there was a range of pre-conference workshops on offer for interested participants.
The full details of the conference can be found here. The first workshop I attended was on "iPads in Higher Education" and was hosted by Nicos Souleles and Fernando Loizides. The two hosts were actually joined by a string of guest presenters in the UK, Australia and the United States who talked about research they had been involved in. I knew that some universities, especially in the US, had sponsored iPads for their students but I was not aware of the scales involved. One university in Australia already has 30,000 iPads and will buy another 15,000 soon! One question none of us were able to answer is what the true benefits of mobile learning are and how we are able to implement them. The session ended with more answers and questions but with plenty to think about, I especially liked the summary from one study participant that iPads gave teaching staff "A licence to thrill"!
The afternoon's session was on "Using Free Tools and a Pedagogical Framework to Promote Teacher Efficacy with mLearning". In this session Rob Power, Dean Cristol and Belinda Gimbert shared their experiences using the CSAM framework (Collaborative-Situated-Active-Mobile) and in particular while using a free LMS called Canvas and a mobile website creation tool called Winkspace. The tools
did indeed seem easy to use and it was an interesting model. Rob was especially interested in creating reusable learning objects which seems like a very good idea so I will be tries to use this model in my future development work.
The conference proper begins tomorrow when there will undoubtedly be a whole lot more good ideas and interesting insights to take in.
