Children and Mobile Phones

Thanks to BECTA in the UK for pointing out a report entitled Children’s Use of Mobile Phones — An International Comparison February 2009. Details are taken from interviews and data from Japan, Korea, China, India and Mexico. There is a lot we all can learn from such global initiatives.

"Mobile phones are becoming ubiquitous and, in line with this trend, children’s use of mobile phones has increased to the point where mobile phones are becoming commodities for them."

Included in the report is a section on mobile phone literacy as well as an appendix with examples of use of mobile phones by children in target countries.

The 60-page report was published in 2009 by the GSM Association and the Mobile Society Research Institute within NTT DOCOMO and is available for download here.

M-Learning Game Report

Thanks to the folks at Games, Learning + Society (GLS) in Madison, I just discovered "Experiencing the Past through the Senses: An M-Learning Game at Archaeological Parks" by Carmelo Ardito, Paolo Buono, Maria F. Costabile, Rosa Lanzilotti, Thomas Pederson, and Antonio Piccinno, University of Bari, Italy.

"M-learning—the combination of e-learning with mobile technologies—captures the very nature of e-learning by providing users with independence from the constraints of time and location. To exploit the potential of mobile technologies for learning, researchers must define new teaching and learning techniques. The Explore! m-learning system implements an excursion-game technique to help middle school students (ages 11 through 13) acquire historic knowledge while playing in an archaeological park."

The full 5 page report is available here. Unfortunately when they scanned it, the last page came out quite dark, but it is an interesting read.

New Zealand Mobile Learning

In searching for some reports from the recent Mobile World Conference in Barcelona I ran across the Unitec New Zealand wiki and a wealth of information on mobile learning initiatives in New Zealand over the past three years or so. There are presentations, videos, slideshows, discussions and numerous references.

Let's see now, where does a person even start? I know that it will take me some time to peruse, but wanted to share these wonderful resources now.

The initial site updated last week is MobilePedagogy2 - http://ctliwiki.unitec.ac.nz/index.php/MobilePedagogy2

Other New Zealand mobile learning materials can be found here:
Mlearning Workshops - http://ctliwiki.unitec.ac.nz/index.php/MlearningWorkshops
MlearnBlogging - http://ctliwiki.unitec.ac.nz/index.php/MlearnBlogging
MlearnMovingmobile - http://ctliwiki.unitec.ac.nz/index.php/MlearnMovingmobile
MlearningOverview - http://ctliwiki.unitec.ac.nz/index.php/MlearningOverview
Mlearning Trials - http://ctliwiki.unitec.ac.nz/index.php/MlearningTrials

2009 Horizon Report Focus on Mobile Learning

Yesterday the New Media Center (NMC), along with EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), released their 2009 Horizon Report. This 36-page annual report identifies Mobiles now with a time-to adoption of one year or less, from the two to three years identified in 2008.

The executive report states:

“Already considered as another component of the network on many campuses, mobiles continue to evolve rapidly. New interfaces, the ability to run third-party applications, and location-awareness have all come to the mobile device in the past year, making it an ever more versatile tool that can be easily adapted to a host of tasks for learning, productivity, and social networking. For many users, broadband mobile devices like the iPhone have already begun to assume many tasks that were once the exclusive province of portable computers. ”

You can download the report here.

Mobile Learning Related News

A lot has been happening lately in the mobile learning arena. Some of the more important items are:

• The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop has released what could become a very important report entitled “pockets of potential: Using Mobile Technologies to Promote Children’s Learning.” Directed mainly at K-12, hopefully administrators will read this and take note. Some of the advantages noted for mobile learning include:

1. Encourage "anywhere, anytime" learning
   
2. Reach underserved children
   
3. Improve 21st-century social interactions
   
4. Fit with learning environments
   
5. Enable a personalized learning experience

• Ambient Insight released their latest mobile learning report indicating that the US Mobile Learning Market is growing by 21.7 percent. Check out the press release here and the Executive Summary here.

• The International Journal of Interactive Mobile Technologies (iJIM) has just published its latest issue at http://www.i-jim.org. The Table of Contents includes:

Adaptive Approaches to Mobile Learning


Mobile Learning in Context — Context-aware Hypermedia in the Wild


Extending LIP to provide an adaptive mobile learning


Client Mobile Software Design Principles for Mobile Learning Systems


Investigating Mobile Devices Integration in Higher Education in Cyprus: Faculty Perspectives


M-Learning, Mobile Experimentation and Telepresence with Cell Phones and PDAs


A Time Series Modeling and Prediction of Wireless Network Traffic


A Learning-by-Doing Approach to Medication Management for Adolescent Diabetics


Survey on Context-Aware Pervasive Learning Environments


Integrating Gender and Ethnicity in Mobile Courses Ante-Design: a TELearning Instrument

• Rovy Branon from the Academic ADL Co-Lab has rolled out a social network site for mobilemedialearning for research and practice in teaching with mobile media. Check it out at http://www.mobilemedialearning.org

• David Metcalf and I were interviewed for ASTD's Learning Circuit's E-Learning 2.009. You can read it at http://www.astd.org/LC/2008/1208_kaplan.htm