Category: Distance Education

The Handheld Learning Conference attracts mostly UK educators interested and funded to pilot, develop and assess formal learning using mobile devices. The conference attracts the gadget freaks and sales staff from companies selling the ever newer, smaller, more functional and often cheaper tools and toys. Probably 50% of the attendees come from K12 school system, which was somewhat of a surprise, given the very scant attention to mobile devices by k12 teachers in Canada- well accept to insure that personally owned devices (cell phones and smart phones) are not used by students while “in class”.

I left the conference with a sense of how useful these devices can be for organizing and documenting one’s personal learning. For example hearing of case studies where PDA’ s were used to photograph physical educational activities, gather data from field trips, find data from Net resources and most importantly combine personal learning and interests with formal education. Examples of the heightened integration of home and school by ‘at risk’ students being able to share (with excitement) what is happening at school via these devices, was very impressive. These tools have a place in schools most notably to prepare learners for lifelong learning. It seems almost a no brainer to assume that all of us will continue to use ever more powerful mobile learning tools.

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I just spent a very enjoyable and learning packed three days at the 12th Bi-Annual Cambridge Distance Teaching and Learning Conference. My keynote went OK, and the other three were outstanding! A notable (and very welcomed) addition to the conference was the number of African attendances as well as others from Europe, North America and the US. The conference is quite small with daily “home groups” and everyone eating together at a Cambridge college, so it was a cozy event.

One of the contentious issues (as usual with distance educators) concerned the use of technology in delivery of distance education programming. This may seem strange to those new to the DE field as ALL distance education, by definition is mediated by some sort of technology (from postal service to SecondLife), but there is a real ideological split between those who advocate maximizing access and those more interested in maximizing learning effectiveness. I could hardly cast myself as a neutral player in this debate, as I’ve long been a proponent of exploiting the technologies when they offer learning advantage. However, the ‘other side’ seems to think that unless the technology is ubiquitous to at least 99.99999% of the population we shouldn’t use it. This thinking has a very strong and long tradition in DE – after all increasing access has been the defining feature of DE since its inception 150 years ago. The well respected researcher Ormond Simpson from the British Open University gave a presentation on the issue, claiming that a technology to be used had to meet four criteria – illustrating each using perhaps the world’s first use of pneumatic learning (blowing a balloon up with the lead letter inscribed in felt pen as he introduced each criteria). The criteria Simpson identified are Access, Reliability, Cost/Complexity, & Price. I noted that he had forgotten to add an e- in front (to be topical these days) and an Australian colleague noted that rearranging the lettered balloons then produced e-CRAP – but that was a distractor.
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Google Scholar has tremendous potential to aide academics, students and lifelong learners because it is fast, easy to use and always accessible. But how well does it does it work?

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