Mobile learning changing notion on ‘contact’ education

July 12, 2006 BDRA: Leicester University 1

Mobile learning changing notion on ‘contact’

education

Dick Ng’ambiCentre for Educational Technology

University of Cape Town


Outline Introduction Challenges Notion of ‘contact’ education Mobile Learning Projects SMS Collaborative Questioning Not so fun projects Research Questions / Discussion


Introduction Project seeks to use prevalent

mobile technologies in our resource-poor context to support teaching and learning in higher education curricula

Research Stimulation Fund (UCT): 2003-2004

Support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant - Digital Cornerstones -: 2005-2007


CET urgency to ensure that all students have

fair and equal access to a new world order

driven by a commitment to educational and social inclusion no matter what a student’s educational background, mother tongue or previous exposure to computers might have been

believes that a transformed higher education requires participation in a new communicative order as a necessary outcome of a graduate education.


Key national challenge

…to redress past inequalities and to transform the higher education system to serve a new social order, to meet pressing national needs, and to respond to new realities and opportunities” (White Paper: 1.1). (Department of Education South Africa, 2001)


Key national dream Every South African manager, teacher and

learner in the general and further education and training bands will be ICT capable (that is, use ICTs confidently and creatively to help develop the skills and knowledge they need as lifelong learners to achieve personal goals and to be full participants in the global community) by 2013 (Department of Education South Africa, 2004:p. 17)


Educational Context Educational disparities - manifested along

racial lines due to the political, economic and social policies of the pre-1994 era

Contrast: In the UK, participation in higher education

has increased since the 1940s but participation of higher socio-economic groups still exceeds that of lower socio-economic groups (DFES report, 2004).


Performance indicator (PI)

increase the demographic representation among graduates and reduce the demographic difference between student intake and graduate throughput

WHILE Ensuring quality of educational provision Without funding until throughput


Contextual Challenges

Students’ Academic Unpreparedness Low attention space

Diverse student population Different learning preferences / styles Socio-Cultural effects Multilingualism

Class sizes Personalised attention difficulty Demand for meaningful feedback


‘Contact’ notion Contact is a convergence of:

Distance, space and time Education is independent of:

Distance, space and time “Contact Education” attempts to

coverge D, S and T for creating an experience that is independent of D, S and T.


Learning from students


Teaching vs ‘learning style’ “…I always used to get quite panicked,

‘cause you go to a lecture, and you come out of there, and it’s all this new stuff and you have to go and read up to kind-of get onto the next level. And just as you’ve got there you next go to the next lecture and, there’s a whole lot of new stuff, so you feel like you’re constantly quite out of breath ‘cause you’re just not getting there.”


Not enough contact “…if we are paying close to US$ X fees

a year, which is a lot of money, and we… if you look at the amount of time that we actually spend in class with the lecturer, it’s not relative, it’s not relative to what we’re paying.”


Fallacy of physical spaces “…we need a full-time job, to actually

be able to pay your fees to do a degree. So all of us are finishing work at 5, and you don’t get to the lecturers. So it seems almost ludicrous in a way to be paying those fees when you’re not sitting in a class.”


Time misalignment “…I mean things like weekends are the,

basically the only time that you do have to study, because you’re working during the week, …I’d go to my lecture on a Monday, I’d try and work in the evening… And then you don’t have access to your supervisor anyway; ‘cause that is the only time that you’ve actually got.”


Changing to Sakai

Sakai a win-win solution: participate in a consortium

jointly developing and maintaining an open source

solution

WebCT:WebCT:Inflexible, Inflexible, and risk of and risk of

vendor lock-vendor lock-in and in and

license cost license cost escalationescalation

connect:connect:home-grown home-grown (flexible), but(flexible), butfuture growth unsustainable


Mobile Learning Projects


5 million landlines 19 million mobile phone

subscribers SMS ‘texting’ traffic higher than

verbal Extensively used among studentsStudent PC ratio is 1:15; no 24-hour

access 98% of our students have mobile

phones

Background


Mobile learning…learning on the move and learning in any location enabled by wireless technologies

…computing to come to education instead of education going to the computer [education in right context]

Focus of mobility is on a learner and supportive learning environment


Some motivation “…the value of deploying mobile

technologies in the service of learning and teaching seems to be both self-evident and unavoidable” (Wagner, 2005)

“…there is very little extra effort required to get people to adopt and use mobile phones” (Wagner, 2005)


Mobile Learning Project @ the Centre for Educational

Technology Funded by Mellon Foundation, USA

GOALS: Create a 70% anywhere anytime student

support by 2007 Integrate 20% of curriculum through

suitable mobile pedagogies by 2008

Strategy: Collaboration with faculties / academics Infrastructure – exploit technologies

already available to students (SMS).


Exploiting SMSC Store-and-forward system

Messages are sent to a SMSC (Short Message Service Centre) from various devices

SMSC interacting with the mobile network determines availability of a user and user’s location to receive SMS

If phone off, SMSC waits until phone is turned on

If successful, a “messages received” is sent back to the SMSC


SMS usage stats SMS sent global 1Q04: 135 billion Global monthly SMS: 36/user 18.7 million users of mobile phones

in RSA (June 2004) Estimate 19 million (2006) [1 in every

3]

“It seems reasonable to assume that majority of professionals in the country have, or have access to a cellular phone. With this in

mind, the most obvious and effective way to provide notifications is to use the cellular networks (SMS)” Halse and Wells (Rhodes

University, South Africa).


Student support Consultation Virtual Noticeboard

Collaboration & knowledge construction Voting & Consensus Collaborative Questioning SMS Broadcasting

Project plans


Extending WWW interface to 2-way SMS communication

Anytime anywhere consultation with peers and staff

Current focus

Developing use cases https://www.connect.uct.ac.za/sakaiwiki/index.php/SMS


Value added service to DFAQ Anonymous SMS 2-way communication On-demand (pull rather than push)

Design considerations

Mediating Tools


Communicative competence A group of subway “free riders”

exchange SMS messages about location of fare police

Young men avoid facing rejection in person by using SMS to ask for dates

People get out of relationships without confrontation via SMS: “U R dumped” or “I H8 U”.


London: October 15, 2005A teenager is being treated for text messaging and email addiction in what is believed to be the first case of its kind in Scotland.He was sending about 700 texts a week and resigned from his job after bosses found out he had sent 8,000 messages in one month. He told BBC, “I like it, it’s like a game of ping-pong, as you send one and get one back.”


Mobile-phobic issues new technologies have implications for

changing forms and practices of literacy Rather than thinking in terms of old skills

being expressed through new media, and of trying to ‘squeeze’ new technologies into familiar ways of doing things

Need to attend to the reality of new and emerging literacies and new modes of human practice and ways of experiencing the world(Green & Bigum, 1993; Synder 1996, 1997).


SMS a “Discourse”

Discourse are human practices which bring together and combine such things as beliefs, actions, values, world views, goals and purposes, standards, ways of dressing and gesturing, ways of behaving appropriately, as well as ways of speaking, reading and writing. (Lankshear et al., 2000: 29)


SMS a “discourse”

discourse refer to the language “bits” with Discourses. Every Discourse is mediated by ways of using language – written, spoken, gestural – that make sense within that Discourse. (Lankshear et al., 2000: 29)


Handling discourse

Learning how to handle the reading and writing components of a Discourse requires

being immersed in social practices where participants ‘not only read texts of this type in this way but also talk about such texts in certain ways, hold certain attitudes and values about them, and socially interact over them in certain ways (Lankshear et al., 2000: 29)


SMS dictionary (a discourse)


SMS Mediated Scaffolding


Giving students a voice


SMS enabled consultation


Feedback – educator / student


Part of DFAQ


News flash can be posted using a web browser, or SMSed by educator to DFAQ

Newsflash on demand


Posting News

To post class announcement or news, send the following.

Edn5023-news DFAQ will be introduced to Edn5023 class on feb 27, 2006. DFAQ SMS

number is 31642.NB: News can only be posted from authorized cell numbers.

To post a news item, SMS


Users can retrieve latest news via SMS.

Reading news


SMS news To get latest news, send the

following.

Edn5023-news

To read latest news, SMS

DFAQ responds with message: “DFAQ will be introduced to Edn5023 class on feb 27, 2006.

DFAQ SMS number is 31642.”


Using a web browser, responses to questions can be posted.

Asking via browser


Question Queue

All new questions wait in a queue until responded to.


SMSing Questions To use SMS to post a question,

prefix question with course code followed by a question

Edn5023 How does society and culture affect human development?

To ask a question, SMS

Every question is assigned a reference number. E.g. 16


Reading responses


Getting responses via SMS To get the latest response to a

question prefix message with course code and question refno. E.g. for question 16.

Edn5023-16

To retrieve latest response to a question, SMS


Collaborative Questioning (CQ)

Prefix message with course code and question refno, put a + (sign) and type new question.

Edn5023-16 + how then does development create new cultures?

To add to question 16, SMS

New Question 16: How does society and culture affect human development? + how then does development create new cultures?


Definition (CQ)

In collaborative questioning a group of learners collaborate to formulate a single question by interjecting and adding to an initial question. Additions to questions may also arise from responses.


Example (CQ)


Observation (CQ) Collaborative questioning provides

access to peers’ questions and gives learners an opportunity to interject and add to questions they may not have thought of asking themselves and to extend a questioning engagement based on responses received.


Responding via SMS Prefix message with course code and

question refno, and allows SMS responses to be posted.

Edn5023-16 Just look at how SMS has created a new culture of texting and socialization.

To respond to question 16, SMS


Seamless monitoring of web / SMS behavior. DFAQ monitors responses.

Feedback from artefacts


Seamless monitoring of web / SMS behavior. DFAQ tracks when last retrieved

Age by reference / popularity


Applications


Applications 2 To teach critical reading skills

(Cognitive Development Course - Education)

To teach questioning skills (Project Management Course – Information Systems)

To teach how organisations learn from peers (Organisational Psychology)


Applications 2 To teach Xhosa (Multilingual

Education Group) To allow students to

confidentially share information on discrimination and harassment

To provide feedback to academics/HOD on students/staff concerns and learning/working frustrations


Other mobile projects


Example


Not so fun projects SMS broadcasting (notifications)

in Health Sciences and Humanities

Community building (SMS birthday broadcasting to a class) in a 1st year Commerce Degree


Thank you

Dr. Dick Ng’ambi

Centre for Educational Technology

University of Cape Town, South Africa

[email protected]

Contact details:

Mobile learning changing notion on ‘contact’ education

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