Week 19 A7 – Success factors in adopting new technologies July 1, 2009

Read an article for this activity about adopting a smartphone. Do Smart Phones Make Smart Learners?

The key points of interest for me were:

• Studies where technology was on loan in the research swayed the results as people don’t invest in learning and personalising a new technology if it’s on loan/temporary.
• Important factors in the success of new devices
  • How to learn about it
  • Look and feel
  • Preparedness to substitute existing technologies/tools
  • Individual context
  • Technology problems – eg wifi connection – how to.
• Peer learning in learning the new technology was very valuable. Drop in sessions were offered but hardly attended but those who did attend rated them very highly. They were ran by peers, so better than IT experts as they spoke the same language and could deal with personally found solutions, people had little time for the group sessions, but one person would have liked a sequenced online activity to learn how to use the device.
• Technological barriers/problems – difficulty getting wifi and other functionality to work- deters adoption and satisfaction. Disincentive. Failure kills enthusiasm- you’ve got to get it right, one or two failures of the technology and you’ve lost the individual. (Eg Natalia)
• Choosing a device – difficult. So many functions and features and consumer patters. Keyboard attractive to some but not others.
• Quantity to learn – because the function on the smartphone are so explicit people think there is a lot to learn and reluctant to use it. However, PCs have lots to learn, and very little of their functionality is not used but functions are less explicit so cause less fear.
• Referring back to the title of this paper, smartphones may not make smarter learners because some people felt starting with a simpler device would be better.
• Key learning point about learning new technologies based on Vygotskian vicarious learning insights of learning from others who are at the same point as you .

Week 19 Activity 4: Mobile learning, ownership, formal learning June 27, 2009

Pettit, J. and Kukulska-Hulme, A. (forthcoming) ‘Mobile 2.0: crossing the border into formal learning?’ in Lee, M.J.W. and McLoughlin, C. (eds) Web 2.0-based E-learning: Applying Social Informatics for Tertiary Teaching, Hershey, PA, IGI Global.  http://learn.open.ac.uk/file.php/4473/Block3/ebook_h800_b3_week19_pettit-and-kukulska-hulme_mobile2_l3.pdf

1. How, specifically, are you bringing or might you bring Mobile 2.0 into your own learning and/or teaching – using that latter term broadly to include support of various kinds?

My learning: Mobile 2 – reading and contributing to forums via mobile phone.  Group blog contributions from phone.   Using dead-time.

My support of teaching: forums. Mobile versions of web pages and econtent to give choice

Announcements by text – as we know students don’t read the notice boards (online) or emails very well. This enables us to keep things shorter and succinct. Twitter would be good here to. A quick tweet on something that’s online with a link would be good. EG we’ve just added the past paper for Course101 here.

2. How far does this involve using and accommodating learners’ existing practices, and how far does it involve them in adopting new practices or new devices?

Need to get a device that works for you; as the study says, if the device doesn’t do it for you then you’ll forego the advantages of anytime-anywhere access for improved usability in a fixed locaton/time. Need to get practiced in reading/writing on a device and not on paper.  A change that needs to be practiced and perservered at.

3. How far, if at all, would any new practices/devices affect a sense of ‘ownership’ – the practitioners’ and/or yours?

You may recall, from the paper in Activity 2, Stephen Downes’ claim that ‘the students own education’ (2006). This is an issue you will explore later in Block 3 as you examine personal learning environments.

If a student has given us their mobile number and we use it for texting then it’s ok. they give us their emali adress so why not this too. I think the ownership issue is more relevant to using things like facebook for learning as this, to me is the student union.

4. When you read the interview data from the six practitioners – see the section headed ‘Experienced practitioners’ mobile practices’ – do you recognise the picture conveyed there? How far do mobile devices blur the distinction between personal and professional areas of your own life? Do you have a view on whether this is desirable?

The data here is the same as the students interviewed in Activity 2. Yes things are blurring. For example I often do personal stuff at work, but then I also do work stuffat home. People complain if I say I’ll be checking my emails while on holiday but I know it’s all balancing act and with a busy professional, student and home life I need to fit things into my day when and as convenient. Now if I could only find a way to cut the commute and save myeslf 1.5 hours a day, the cleaning, ironing and sleeping…

In my most recent employment, and therefore work email address change I decided to keep my work email separate from my personal email. Many people have all emails coming to work. I decided to keep it separate for to enable people to have proxy access to my mail when required without having to worry about personal stuff and when I left a job, being able to fwd emails without the personal stuff too. However, if someone walks in and I’ve got google.mail open it looks bad compared to the person next to me checking their personal email in the work system as it’s not obvious.  The other blurring is with studying this course, which is totally for my work purposes and career but I’m doing it all in my personal time.

Mobile Devices – group discussion June 27, 2009

Not many of us on H800 are using mobile devices. Not many want to.

The Activities are leading us to believe that we should design learning to incorporate mobile devices as people want to use the dead-time to study while travelling, waiting etc. The latter of this is true, but we shouldn’t be designing learning for mobile devices we should just be making sure all content is accessible in lots of different ways to give the student choice.

As Jonathan says “I think we need to keep the pedagogy and learning outcomes at the forefront of our minds and be careful about letting the technology lead us. This is just something I’ve been thinking about as I do this week’s readings – there seems to be a lot of effort put into finding ways of incorporating mobile technology into learning simply because we can.”

Week 19 A.2 Use of mobile devices by MAODE students June 27, 2009

Pettit, J. and Kukulska-Hulme, A. (2007) Going with the grain: Mobile devices in practice. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology 2007, 23(1), 17-33.  http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet23/pettit.html

Study of the use of mobile devices for personal and professional lives by MAODE students, aged 35/54.

which mobile devices were used by alumni of a Masters program, and for what purposes. how far embedded in personal and professional lives of people with an interest in ODL.

1.  Of the various interviewees in the paper – Interviewee A, B, C, etc. – whose account do you find most interesting, or most relevant to your own personal or professional life, and why? You could start at the section headed ‘Interview data’ about half-way through the paper.

2. Where would you place your own use of mobile devices in comparison with those of the alumni in the paper above? I don’t mean, ‘Do you do more than them, or less?’ After all, they varied considerably. But what are the similarities and differences, and is this connected with the fact that the data for the paper was gathered in 2005?

A and B’s use of mobile devices while travelling interested me because I know our students do a lot of travelling and if I commuted by bus/train I too would like to use this dead time effectively but wouldn’t want to lug paper /books around. My only concern would be, as for E – the size of the screen and the difficulty in writing on a mobile devise. I was using my mobile phone last week for online access and it does not have a QWERTY keyboard so found it difficult using texting buttons to write notes/messages.

I relate to B as I like to type my notes rather than write them, as he/she says, it’s easier to distil it rather than writing, rewriting, transcribing etc. However, unlike B and more like D I prefer the laptop for it’s size and ease of typing.  But if I had a QWERTY mobile device I might feel differently.

I was looking at a net book yesterday, they are so dinky and yes I’d love one, but the screen is so small. I find the laptop’s 15″ screen small when I’m trying to read a journal article and make notes in notepad at the same time. I’ve now converted by to my 20″+ PC and screen as it’s much bigger, even if much slower. Shame you can’t try before you buy.

C said they liked using a laptop because free wifi was widely available where they lived. When I travelled to Kazakhstan last March I took the laptop with me on the plane thinking that I could a) use the wifi and the connecting airport and b) use it on the plane to study, offline. How wrong was I. It was too big for the plane, even though it was what my employer calls a travel laptop (but not a net book), it was heavy and cumbersome to carry around, the battery pack wasn’t good enough and the wifi in the connecting airport was too expensive. Instead I would be better to have downloaded stuff and used another kind of reader which is what G does, to avoid dead time.

While on holiday last week I used my mobile device to access weather forecasts for the area I was in to help plan the week – rainy day or sunny day, what shall we do tomorrow. This was really useful as I could see further in the week forecasts to know if today was going to be better or worse than 2 days time. Person E used their mobile device to access news and other information.

The personal touch for informal learning stated by T is interesting, s/he (a Spanish teacher) says that students sent him/her texts in Spanish, they didn’t see it as homework but personal BUT very much learning, and they didn’t realise it.

H’s use for taking notes, following up on reading interested me. I never thought of using dead time like this. I could use normal study time at home for formal study, but all the stuff I want to revisit or read more on I could do with a mobile device. Once again though, this depends for me on the usability of the device.

Notes below