free eBook on mobile learning just got published by Athabasca University, Canada

Jeroen Van Eeghem from Ghent's eLearning company U&I learning, twittered me this newly published eBook on mobile learning. The eBook is published by the Athabasca University library (2009).

The renowned Mohamed Ally is the editor and the authors that dedicated their knowledge and thoughts are amazing people. I had the pleasure of meeting: Agnes Kukulska Hulme, John Traxler and Marguerite Koole in the past and I can assure you if you have the possibility of talking to them, their knowledge will no-doubt add to yours (really great and knowledgeable people). The other authors are equally impressive (Tom Boyle, Gill Clough, Merryl Ford, Teemu Leinonen, ...) and even when you just roam the eBook chapters, you want to start reading the articles right away.

The book addresses: informal mobile learning (great stuff on which I have a project running with colleagues from Peru, started blogging on that project here), mobile teacher training, advances in mobile learning and different cases ...

Writing an article on how mobile learning devices can bridge DE challenges in developing countries, and this book certainly added to the background of the article.

Solar power for your small and big mobile devices!

While trying out different types of solar panels, I began to like the set of solar panels mentioned below. Just imagine having to go abroad and no longer having to worry about electricity... ah, what bliss!

With solar powered technology you will get all the workspace and electrical independence you need, even in your back garden. This sounds a bit like a sale pitch, so I have to warn you in advance, there are a lot of other solar panels for different equipments out there. I just like the ones below because it caters to a variety of models, is delivered with a wide variety of connectors and it is rather robust, that is all.

SolarGorilla and PowerGorilla
In this day and age the laptop is at the center of your workspace. With the SolarGorilla (137£) you can charge a wide variety of laptops and mobile devices straight from the USB-port. Techies: capacity: 500mAh @ 20V or 5V.
If you want to work all through the night (ahum), you might want to purchase the PowerGorilla (147£) as well, which is a perfect addition to the SolarGorilla. The PowerGorilla is a universal back-up battery that can fuel your laptop when you lack electricity. The PowerGorilla only works with laptops of 16V, 19V or 24V, so check before you buy! Techies: output capacity: 21000 mAh in 5V; 5500 mAh in 19V; 4200 mAh in 24V.

PowerMonkey eXplorer
If the above package is too much and you only need to charge your mobile devices, it suffices to use the PowerMonkey eXplorer (64£). Techies: output current: 700mAh max.

Both solar power packages can also charge your PSP, iPod, Nintendo DS, mp3-players or any USB chargeable device as the packages include different connectors. Power sockets for up to 150 different countries are also included.

How quickly does it charge?
There is no clear answer to that question. The charging time depends on the type of battery of your equipment, the type of sunlight (depending on your local coordinates and the height of the sun), whether you use a lot of Wifi or Bluetooth (this drains any battery) and how you aim your solar panel (depending on the coordinates of the sun, your panel is ideally tilted to maximize the sun’s intensity).

Can you use it less sunny regions, for instance Belgium? Yes, but as mentioned depending on the intensity of the light your charger will work slower or quicker.

Anyway, from now on you can work from your garden, hammock style.Green power rules!

My top ten tips for getting started with eLearning:

The eLearning Guild is putting together a list with top tips for starting with eLearning. Anyone who wants to contribute can send their tips to the eZine, maybe our tips will get quoted and published.

It ain’t always easy to dive into eLearning. It always looks much easier than it ease. Although everyone learns most from their mistakes, it does save a lot of money if you keep some tips in the back of your mind.

If you are indeed considering to start with an eLearning project, you might want to demystify some eLearning myths... just read this short list of eLearning myths to get your mind focused before leaping into any project.

Here is my top ten list of things you need to consider when you start with an eLearning project.

1. Try it for yourself and learn: if you have never developed an eLearning course: follow at least one full online course and if possible with a renowned institution or company. There is no substitute for real life experience if it comes to eLearning. While following an online course, keep track of your thoughts, ideas and learning processes. You can start your Personal Learning Environment if you feel up to it. Keeping track of your knowledge at all times will facilitate retrieving your knowledge later on. This will come in handy once you start developing your own courses.

2. Clearly indicate your learning objectives: learning objectives are at the core of the activities of your eLearning course. Any content can be stripped down to its learning objectives. Analyzing your learning objectives will also increase your understanding of what it is you want your learners to achieve. This in its turn will allow you to decide which type of eLearning activity should be developed (educational games for simulations, quizzes to check information assimilation, discussion forums for looking at in-depth understanding or group work…)

3. Develop your own content: try to limit the amount of content that is outsourced. Most of the time content needs to be updated regularly; you will pay too much if you need to ask outsiders to update it for you. If you develop your own course, you will be able to keep it updated. If you do outsource it, ask the outside developers to make the course generic so you can adjust it to your need and possibly reuse it in other courses.

4. Interactivity is crucial: do not limit your project to (multiple choice) quizzes, but see if you can fit in interactions between peers and peer-to-tutor: discussion forums, letting the learner build part of a course, providing knowledge not only information.

5. Use social media: use social media as a means to increase the peer-to-peer and peer-to-tutor interactivity. In this day and age you should implement social media in your new eLearning projects. If you are not accustomed with social media (or web2.0) enroll in a couple of social media applications (Flickr, Friendfeed, blog, twitter…) to feel what it can add to a course. Social media will allow your learners to learn in an informal way, thus adding to there lifelong learning skills as well.

6. Address different learner skills: use text, pictures, video, and audio in your provided eLearning content. By diversifying the content you address different learner types which will increase your learner’s satisfaction.

7. Bite size content for easy updating: in this rapidly evolving era, it is essential that you can keep your content easily updated at all times. Especially if your content is specialized or provides just-in-time learning. Use software that makes it possible to quickly put in new information.

8. Bite size content to keep your learners focused: try to limit scrolling down webpages or multimedia courses that extend 20 minutes in total. Keep your content bits small, this will keep the learner motivated to go on and give them a sense of speed. It is much better to have ten chapters that each take up to 15 minutes to learn than to serve your learners one lengthy 150 minutes piece of content. You want to keep your learners focused, so give them time to breath.

9. Take low resource learners into account: not all learners have access to high speed broadband connectivity. If the technical reality of your learners is very diverse, it is good practice to provide your learners with a CDRom containing the eLearning content and basic plug-in’s needed to open your eLearning content.

10. Test everything in a pilot course: first you test your course on a small group of people you know, than you gather a pilot group of learners that are part of your learner target group. This pilot group of learners will allow you to learn, see if your learning objectives are indeed reached, adjust your material were needed, see whether the student investment time you had in the back of your mind is indeed realistic and … start the real course with the knowledge that it will be a rock solid eLearning course.

Yes, eLearning thrives on creativity and organizational capacities. Looking forward to reading your tips!

(image from http://lals.la.psu.edu/ling001/myths/intro/index.php)

Why mobile learning is on the rise and benefits diverse populations

In January 2009 Carly Shuler (a fellow at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center) came out with a fabulous paper on the benefits of mobile learning entitled: pockets of potential - Using Mobile Technologies to Promote Children’s Learning.
Although the document focuses on mobile learning for children, you can easily deduct the benefits for all learner groups. Carly Shuler recently graduated from the Harvard Graduate School of Education with an Ed.M. in Technology, Innovation and Education, where she studied how new media and emerging technologies can be used to effectively educate children.

The document is 56 pages so you can read it easily on trolley or bus.
Some of the issues talked about are known to most of us:

1. Encourage “anywhere, anytime” learning Mobile devices allow students to gather, access, and process information outside the classroom. They can encourage learning in a real-world context, and help bridge school, afterschool, and home environments.

2. Reach underserved children Because of their relatively low cost and accessibility in low-income communities, handheld devices can help advance digital equity, reaching and inspiring populations “at the edges” — children from economically disadvantaged communities and those from developing countries.

3. Improve 21st-century social interactions Mobile technologies have the power to promote and foster collaboration and communication, which are deemed essential for 21st-century success.

4. Fit with learning environments Mobile devices can help overcome many of the challenges associated with larger technologies, as they fi t more naturally within various learning environments.

5. Enable a personalized learning experience Not all children are alike; instruction should be adaptable to individual and diverse learners. There are signifi cant opportunities for genuinely supporting differentiated, autonomous, and individualized learning through mobile devices.

But what I found very interesting and useful was the section with the Goals for Mobile Learning. In this section she touches a point on 'Understand mobile learning as a unique element of education reform' which is VERY important in our current educational environment. In many schools mobile devices are banned, and as such young learners do not get the necessary responsibility to enable them to work with this new tool that offers immediate contact to knowledge and content. She dives deeper into this topic in the paragraph 'Engage the public and policymakers in defining the potential of mobile devices for learning'.

If you are into mobile learning or you think about adding mobile learning into your learning environment, this gives a good overview of the issues that are currently being discussed worldwide and the advantages it offers. It also offers great resources.

Big Question: get your innovative eLearning ideas out no matter what others think!

Big question of April launched by Tony Karrer via the Learning Circuits Blog is: stuck/unstuck or how to cope with old-school learning when your head buzzes with new eLearning methods and ideas.

eLearning is fun, great, innovative, wonderful…. up until the moment you meet – most of – the clients (corporate or educational) feedback. While talking with a teacher-centered drilled client, your initial eLearning models and suggestions can be downsized in a way that leave you feeling bewildered.

Creativity can seem weird, unprofessional and irrelevant TO THEM, additionally anything2.0 is unsafe (“sorry we firewall it”) and inefficient in their eyes (“it is just a waste of time”); interactivity is reached by adding (multiple choice) quizzes and at best a discussion forum might be part of the eLearning course you are asked to develop because “that is proven to work throughout time” – read: the past is safe, what has been done works.

Yes, that is the moment you sigh and you want to yell “If only the proven things were worthwhile, than humanity would never have evolved!”

Enter the different stages of being stuck… let me tailor it on my life in the stuck/unstuck roller coaster.

First stage: get all droopy and wonder why I do not go to the Arctic Circle and live of the land (conveniently forgetting the ending of ‘Into the Wild’). It worked in the past, so why would I want to work towards the future anyway?

Second stage: after a night filled with angry cries in the dark; I get out of bed all fired up. And than I remember what Randy Pausch said in his last lecture “The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.“ I have never taken no for an answer! So I look into my reference files: is there any research that I can use to build my case in favor of what I propese as an eLearning project. After that I write down arguments that can be used in future, similar discussions in a face-to-face situation: the military always works with the latest innovations and they need to stay on top (scores very good with conservative minds): blogs in Irak, educational games to increase survival…all have been successfully used by them. Or I have a convivial talk with them about children (yes they already use new technologies, even in primary school) or other regions (Africa is indeed into social media, and they leapfrog the North with their innovative mobile applications, India is getting very competitive with their innovative approaches)… something that might just move the clients frame of thought a bit, because everyone wants to be seen as someone who knows what is happening on a global scale.

Third stage: strategy is always important. So I promise myself I will develop a plan that will include innovation – hey, it is my name on the developed program - but it will be a plan disguised in sheep’s clothing, so not to shock them. Example: don’t call it micro blogging/twitter for learning, but staying on top with all the learners and adding to the much needed team spirit to increase performance as is proven by (any big company or big local university will do: let’s say IBM or Harvard depending on which identity the client has). And if possible pull out your show cases to convince them (be sure to make some show cases they can relate to, meaning do not make everything to flashy).

Possible fourth stage: You do not have a solid showcase for this proposal, time is running out: so you launch a call for help in your informal network. Maybe they have something that proves your point. If necessary I go the hype way: “it is what got Obama elected, it is the new world”.

The – sometimes - fifth stage: the client smells out any innovative initiative I might want to launch or smuggle into the project. I am stuck, there is no way out. If that is the case I will build my own set of learners (free lecture, volunteer for something...) and tryout the ideas I have. If all things are well thought through, chances are the class/lecture in itself will become a promotion for the techniques used. As long as I remember that some people are willing to dive into new learning, I stay hopeful and energetic. Additionally my showcase examples grow.

These are my levels of being stuck. It is my solemn belief that you have to unstuck yourself at all times and at all levels during your life. Life is too valuable to leave it hanging in the hands of others. So build your showcases and promote innovation.

But the best strategy to not get stuck is giving clients the idea they came up with the innovative approach or part of it. Let them get the feeling they put the idea forward. Never be proud, if a person thinks the idea comes from them, they are bound to be more motivated to back it up.

Great innovative work by Opera: facial features to surf the net

Blogphilosophy: Ten reasons why sharing what you learn/research will add to your life's quality

A lot has been written on the ups and downs of open source software and movements and building on that philosophy, the topic of open source content in education (not umbiased I linked to 'old' - read March 2003 - comprehensive article on the topic by George Siemens and building on a discussion with Stephen Downes. I believe in open content sharing) . But fear for sharing keeps existing in the hearts of a lot of people.

This topic of sharing content rekindled because I attended a 'writers day' (basically a day in which you could choose to augment your writing skills). During the day many people raised the question "What if I send my manuscript/column/text to a publisher and that publisher gives the idea to another writer?" Many beginning writers seemed to be afraid that their work would be kidnapped. My friend replied to them: “as long as people think their idea is brilliant and they do not want to share it, they are no thread to me”, I can only agree.

So here are ten reasons why I think sharing is winning

Keeping your idea to yourself will kill it
Say you have a world changing idea, you do not know how to mold it into something useful, so you keep it to yourself hoping you will get the means to develop it one time or another. That idea will either be picked-up by someone else (ideas float through space, anyone can pick them up and develop them) or it will die. Nevertheless, it is a sad result.

Going for an idea will make you smarter
No matter if the new idea will work out, you will have learned a lot anyway. Ideas can look fantastic, but trying to develop them can be a painstaking process that has some result at best (ideas are not always useful – unfortunately). How do you know an idea has potential? By either relentlessly going for it because you belief in it (think Edison) or by discussing it to an amazing extend with people who’s views you value (think Plato). Afraid your partners in the discussion will run away with your ideas? Stay cool, just say to yourself “Who is mad enough to belief in it as much as I do?”

No one is brilliant
No one person is brilliant. No one has ever been brilliant, not even the greatest minds (Newton, Marie Currie…). They all build on the knowledge of others. Of course they were great minds, but it was not the idea that was going to make them cross into a new scientific frontier, it was their analytical thinking, there vision. And a vision never just floats in space, it is built on past ideas, simple things your mind is superimposing on.

Great ideas arise all over the world
If an idea comes into your head, you can bet you are not alone with the idea. Both Steven Jobs and Bill Gates saw a niche, but the one with the best (diverse) network won the (economic) race.

Informal learning is on the rise, for this you need to share
Locking content behind doors prevents people from informal learning or increasing their personal learning space. If your network is deprived of knowledge, your network and yourself will loose out.

Let go of your ego for the better good: give your too difficult idea a chance to live
You might have a great idea, but no means to go for it. You either post your idea, send it out into the world or you try and find like-minded people that might be able to help you. Nevertheless sharing will give extra energy to the idea and its development. As Blanche Dubois said in ‘A streetcar named Desire’ “You can always rely on the kindness of strangers” and I like that thought.

Sharing ideas is like sharing peace and energy
Looking at ways to fuel positive brain functions seems to me much more interesting than promoting the idea of improving. Sharing ideas is like building good karma, giving is good.
Even if some of your ideas get taken: let go of that frustration. If you are indeed a creative mind, more ideas will come. No matter what age, where you live, … your time will come.

Sharing knowledge is what brought humanity to where it is today
Networking, discussing, sharing and non-sharing build our history and made scientific evolution possible (or not depending on the era). I wrote on some of the ethical issues of sharing a couple of months ago during the CCK08.

A brain likes to play, so do not stop it
If you keep an idea and protect if from others, your brain will most probably not be that thrilled. A brain likes to think, likes to share. So if you keep your knowledge closed up, why should your brain search for a new thrilling idea? It's like kids, if you stop creativity, they just stop all together and become passive. For me I need to feel the playfullness of my brain, it keeps me happy.

So I share my ideas gladly with anyone and I like to pick-up other ideas as I go along. Feel free to add additional benefits of sharing ideas and knowledge.

And to top it off... the tenth reason: it even gives you an advantage over your competitors says Jason Fried of 37 signals.

Call for Papers: Mashups for Learning (MASHL2009)

A contemporary way to get people's attention for a call of papers coming to us from Austria and send to us by Martin Ebner (Graz University of Technology, Austria) and Sandra Schaffert (Salzburg Research, Austria).

It is nicer than the more traditional calls for paper.

Call for Papers: Mashups for Learning (MASHL2009)

View more presentations from sandra_slideshare.

The Big Question of March: a Belgian/Indian/American two cents of a human/machine interface

Tony Karrer challenged us all with his Big Question for March, he asked how we see workplace learning in about ten years time. While I was searching for an additional comment that was not mentioned before by any of the other bloggers, I saw the movie underneath and .... the answer suddenly became very easy. (I am having a movie rush in my blogs lately.)

In the year 2019 the office space will look different because there will be an augmented human/machine interface bringing us closer to the internet of things.
Jay Cross embedded the Microsoft Office Labs vision of technology, but I would like to add a real life update to that vision.

To illustrate this future change, just take a look at this TEDtalk featuring Pattie Maes (a Belgian YEAH) and the genius Pranav Mistry.

For a more elaborate description of the Sixth Sense project, you can look at the website of this fluid interface. For me training departments will indeed still be there, someone has to be the content gatekeeper or building latest invention/usage tutorials that no one has build before, but the environment will be different (and at the same time, more natural).

So for me, workplace learning ten years from now will be based on:

• human/machine interfaces (much more mobile);
• mixed/added reality that enhances learning.

mobile projects and crowdsourcing in developing countries

Thanks to Ellen Trude (blogging in German), I got hold of this 38 minute video on mobile phone use in developing countries (focusing in this video on the sub-Saharan part of Africa). If you are into mobile applications, this is worth watching.

Nathan Eagle (MIT) teaches computer scientists in Africa how to program mobile phones at first, but is now involved in mobile crowd sourcing projects. What is nice about him is that he is always looking at the interaction between human and machine.

Some interesting facts from the movie:
Developing world uses 59% of the cell phones in comparison to 41% in the developed world. But the mobile applications in Africa are most of the time disconnected from the mobile users in Africa. So African companies are refurbishing mobiles and material adding to the real need of Africans.
There is a ubiquity to using mobile phones and if the users are more aware of this the applications that are developed will be more tailored to the user’s needs also.

Examples mentioned:

• How prepaid cards can be used to get water in Kenya, electricity in Rwanda…
• Real time monitoring of blood supplies;
• Day laborers organizing themselves through sms.

And 21 minutes into the speech he gets into mobile crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is interesting and feasible in a region were a lot of people are unemployed.
Some examples are mentioned: citizen journalism, translating (a lot of languages across Africa, so if by crowdsourcing you can build a dictionary, the phone companies can use this data to develop localized mobile interfaces – this is something that might be useable in education).
All these mobile crowdsourcing projects got some money in the pockets of the users.

Nice movie to keep in touch what is going on in Africa on the mobile side.