Mobile Learning: Are We On the Cusp of Something Big?

Tina Barseghian — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 15:00:37 +0000

Flickr:From_Ko

One of the most exciting things about living in the digital age is witnessing huge cultural changes occur in real time.

We’re at just that point now with mobile learning. Whether it’s on an e-reader, a tablet, or a cell phone, there’s great excitement — though not a lot of research yet — around the potential of how these devices can strengthen learning.

“There are frontiers that we’re just beginning to learn how to reach.”

“What if your mobile device had a sixth sense?” asked Harvard professor Chris Dede, who’s researching the diverse dimensions of mobile learning, at the recent ISTE conference.

When most of us consider education, we think of learning happening in isolated places — schools. But mobile devices are upending that assumption. With innovations like augmented reality, different kinds of information and experiences can be superimposed onto the real world, complementing and adding another dimension to “formal” learning institutions.

Pilot programs are springing up all over the country (more on those soon), as educators and researchers determine what kind of learning can happen best with mobile devices.

“We know from generations of work that devices are catalysts,” Dede said. “The device never produces learning, but when coupled with changes in content, new forms of assessment, linking people together, that’s what enables learning.”

Mobile devices are getting more powerful with each new generation of gadgets. “But a lot of people are frightened by them and banning them in schools where they might make the most impact,” Dede said.

Dede’s job, along with others in the field, is to make sense of the devices’ strengths and weaknesses.

So what do we know so far?

When it comes to smart phones, some of what’s powerful on larger screens doesn’t relate as well to the small screen. “I do a lot of work in virtual worlds. We can’t put virtual worlds on cell phones and have them work well,” Dede said. “Visual immersion works with a large screen. Sure, you can watch a movie on a small phone, but it doesn’t have the same impact as watching it in an Imax theater.”

Yet students who’ve been given the choice between Netbooks and smart phones say they prefer smart phones simply because it fits into their pockets, Dede said, referring to recent research. Does that mean they’re more likely to engage in educational content on the smaller screen?

“We need to figure out what’s possible within that screen size and what they might be able to do if they had more screen real estate,” Dede said. “We want students to be able to bring their own technology to schools.”

The way to find out is to pilot projects in math, science, and social studies, and build curriculum on e-readers, tablets, and cell phones. “That way we get a feel for how learning happens,” Dede said. “There are frontiers that we’re just beginning to learn how to reach.”

In my next post, I’ll write more about the K-Nect smart phone-enabled math program.

Virtual Worlds in the Hands of Student Scientists

Tina Barseghian — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 23:25:34 +0000

Can video games really work as a learning tool? If so, what happens to the role of the teacher in this realm? Chris Dede and his colleagues at Harvard Graduate School of Education have been working on testing these theories and have come up with fascinating results.

I spoke with Dede at the Cyberlearning Tools for STEM Education Conference recently, and asked him to elaborate on his thesis. Here’s the video, and the full transcript follow below. The big takeaway: When combined with challenges and assessments, along with the guidance of a teacher, video games can lead students to rich learning experiences.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNAZXB0DnT4&feature=channel_video_title

Read the full transcript here.

ON THE MAGIC OF SCIENCE COMING TO LIFE

One of the big challenges of classrooms is that they’re very barren places. They’re isolated from the world. Teachers typically have very limited resources that they can bring to bear, and yet we know that science takes place in very rich, real world settings with lots of lab equipment and with a lot of access to technology.

So, how students learn to act like scientists is complicated, but cyberlearning is really helping us with this because through cyberlearning, we can bring immersive experiences like those that students have in games or Club Penguin or Second Life into classrooms so that they’re physically in the classroom, but psychologically, they’re inside of some sort of digital environment. And if it’s well constructed, and we build and study environments like this, we find that students can assume the role of scientists, and they can see the kinds of challenges that scientists face, and THEY CAN LEARN A LOT OF SKILLS THAT ARE THEN IMPORTANT FOR THEM LATER WHEN THEY’RE OUT OF THE CLASSROOM, AND IN THE REAL WORLD, bring science to bear on understanding problems.

ON THE POWER OF TEACHING WITH GAMES

We have four projects that deal with immersive virtual worlds in classrooms. One is curriculum oriented, where we’re building and studying digital ecosystems. One is assessment oriented, where we put students in a challenging situation, and we ask them to use their inquiry skills to figure out what’s happening. One is mathematics instead of science, and students land in the virtual world on a strange planet, and they have to use math in order to rescue their captain, and then the fourth goes back to the digital pond, and students are learning [about] social perspective taking and some skills out of social psychology and negotiating about land use.

So what we’re studying is how broad a range of 21st century skills and sophisticated kind of processes can students learn in virtual worlds. And what is the role of the teacher in all of this. How does the teacher help them interpret and reflect on these experiences that they are having in the world. So it’s fascinating to look out how these worlds can be used in different ways. And see what the strengths and limits are with each approach. So what we find is that if students simply experience a virtual world without any guidance, it’s fun for them, they are engaged, they probably learned something, but they don’t learn very much. Because the virtual world is simpler than the real world. But to be authentic, it’s still pretty complicated.

So we’re not trying to create some teacher in the box experience, where kids go into a virtual world and all by themselves they learn a great deal. Instead we find COMBINING A VIRTUAL WORLD AND A SKILLED TEACHER IS VERY POWERFUL, BECAUSE THE WORLD PROVIDES THE ENGAGEMENT AND EXPERIENCE, BUT THE TEACHER PROVIDES THE INTERPRETATION AND THE ABILITY TO HELP STUDENTS PLAN. So the next time they go through the magic portal and back into the virtual world, they can organize themselves more effectively. We’re also finding that collaborative learning is also very powerful in virtual worlds. It’s easy for the students to play different roles, in which each gathers another set of data. And to put their elephant together they have to combine their knowledge of the trunk and the ears and the tail. And that kind of jigsaw pedagogy is difficult to do in a standard classroom, but it works really well in a virtual environment.

ON SEEING THE SPARK OF ENGAGEMENT

When we think about how to bring cyberlearning into more conventional forms of instruction, I think that we need to think about the beginning and the end of a curricular unit. So, often students wonder, “Why am I learning this? I don’t see any relevance to my life,” and if you have a cyberlearning experience that’s authentic right at the beginning of a curricular unit, students see. They see why it’s relevant to their lives, and they also see that they don’t know what to do, that they’re confused and lost. So, now they have a reason to learn the curriculum. In the middle, I might use an assessment based on cyberlearning so that the students can see, “Yeah. I’m making some progress here, but there’s also some things that I still don’t know.” And then at the end, as a culminating experience and as an assessment, again, some kind of authentic cyberlearning can be really powerful. So, IT’S A LITTLE LIKE A DANCE, WHERE YOU’RE WEAVING CYBERLEARNING IN AND OUT OF FORMS OF INSTRUCTION THAT WE’RE MORE FAMILIAR WITH building on the strengths of each.

MindShift » Chris Dede