Free #eLearning magazines to follow with interest

This week the Learning Solutions magazine published an article I wrote on MOOCs as a new eLearning frontier. As I was writing the article, I suddenly noticed I had not mentioned my two favorite free and inspiring accessible, online eLearning magazines:

Learning Solutions magazine,
eLearn magazine.

If you have not put them in your RSS feed or if you have not connected to their e-mail newsletter, take a minute to get to know these magazines. They will keep you up to speed on various eLearning topics.

Learning Solutions magazine
This magazine is published by the knowledgeable Bill Brandon. The magazine is linked to the eLearning Guild. The eLearning Guild manages to bring together academics, the corporate world, and all of us interested in eLearning solutions. The magazine is published on a weekly basis and features a wide variety of topics, always keeping the articles brief yet filled with relevant and useful information. Since 2002 the learning solutions magazine published 430 articles.

The eLearn magazine
The eLearn magazine is published by ACM. They feature a variety of topics, including best practice and tips for online learning and research and case studies on eLearning. Their advisory board consists of eLearning experts (Jane Bozarth, Roger Schank, Lisa Gualtieri, Janet Clarey, Clark Quinn... all wonderful people that you can easily exchange ideas with as well) making their articles a good read.

Help us #save new born babies lives by using #mobile devices for #ultrasound

"Why not save the lives of new borns by making use of mobile devices that can be used for ultra-sound?" with this simple idea my wonderful and inspiring colleagues Vincent De Brouwere and Fabienne Richard started a quest to get a new mobile project up and running.

The project is now before a jury and it would be wonderful if as many people as possible could vote in favor of this proposal, as it will really save lives of new born babies and their mothers.

If we get enough votes, the project will be funded by the Belinda and Bill Gates foundation. Please feel free to support us by voting on the project (here is the link to the voting option), Remark: you must register here first (for free) to be able to vote, it only takes a moment and I think they do it to make sure the voters are 'real' people. You vote by first registering for an account, than signing in and clicking on the 'star' next to the project of your choice. Thanks in advance!

This is what the project is all about:

Title of the project: UltraSound4Africa
Organization:Institute of Tropical Medicine - Antwerp

Organization Location: Antwerp, Belgium

Optimal care during childbirth in rural areas of most low and middle income countries is hampered by 2 major problems: the limited equipment and capacity of health workers for diagnosis, and the quasi-absence of back-up from the hospital, which impacts on their motivation and competence. In order to improve the technical quality of care and the motivation of primary care maternity staff working in rural areas of low-income countries, the Ultrasound4Africa project proposes to develop a two-pronged integrated intervention:

• the provision of low cost smartphone-based ultrasound imaging systems (MobiUS device) that connect rural maternities with specialists. This telemedicine intervention aims at early diagnosis of life threatening obstetric complications, appropriate case management and rapid referral of critical cases to the hospital.
• The development of a network of primary care maternities with their referral hospitals, aiming at providing technical and moral support to health workers working in remote areas.

The pilot test will be implemented in rural maternities of 2 districts in Burkina Faso and Mali where access to Emergency Obstetric Care (EmOC) remains low despite a national policy of abolition of user fees for EmOC. This intervention is expected to improve utilization of antenatal care and skilled birth attendance by increasing women’s trust in primary care services and to contribute to reducing maternal and newborn mortality and morbidity. Ultrasound4Africa will be implemented by national teams at district level and supported by a multidisciplinary team (clinicians, public health specialists and IT specialists) with an extensive experience in sub-Saharan Africa.

New open journal #iJim issue is out on #mLearning topics

International Journal of Interactive Mobile Technologies (iJIM) has just published its latest issue at --> http://www.i-jim.org. We invite you to have a look at the Table of Contents here and then visit our web site to read articles and items of interest.

International Journal of Interactive Mobile Technologies (iJIM)* Volume 5, Issue 3 (2011)

*Table of Contents*

*Guest Editorial*

***From the Interdisciplinary Conference of AHLiST 2010 Conference IS/IT Program Chair (Hyo-Joo Han) -- http://online-journals.org/i-jim/article/view/1666

*Special Focus Papers*

***Global Telecommunications Security: Effects of Geomagnetic Disturbances (D.J. McManus, H.H. Carr, B.M. Adams) --- http://online-journals.org/i-jim/article/view/1667

***A Software Tool to Visualize Verbal Protocols to Enhance Strategic and Metacognitive Abilities in Basic Programming (Carlos A. Arévalo, Estela L. Muñoz, Juan M. Gómez)--- http://online-journals.org/i-jim/article/view/1668

***Collaborative Rural Healthcare Network: A Conceptual Model (U. Raja, D.J. McManus, J.M. Hardin, B.C. Haynes) --- http://online-journals.org/i-jim/article/view/1669

***Interdisciplinary Approaches at Institutions of Higher Education:

Teaching Information Systems Concepts to Students of Non-Computer Science Programs (Roland Schwald) --- http://online-journals.org/i-jim/article/view/1670

***Advances in Integrated Vehicle Health Monitoring Systems (Debopam Acharya, Hyo-Joo Han) -- http://online-journals.org/i-jim/article/view/1671

*Regular Papers*

***A Short Review on the Trend of Mobile Marketing Studies (Mohammad Ismail, Razli Che Razak) http://online-journals.org/i-jim/article/view/1581

***Learning Mobile App Design from User Review Analysis (Elisabeth Platzer, Otto Petrovic) http://online-journals.org/i-jim/article/view/1673

*Calls*

***14th International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Learning -

ICL2011

(Call For Participation) --> http://online-journals.org/i-jim/article/view/1693

***Special Issue iJIM "Social Mobile Computing and Services"

(Call For Papers) --> http://online-journals.org/i-jim/article/view/1694

***Special Issue iJIM "VANETS"

(Call For Papers) --> http://online-journals.org/i-jim/article/view/1697

Looking for #online course tutor/developer in Belgium: send your resume and join the #eLearning team

At ITM we are looking for an online course tutor and developer to tutor a course called eSCART and collaboratively built future online courses as well. Feel free to forward this link to anyone you think might be interested or send your resumé and join our team!

The Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerpen, Belgium is looking for an online course tutor/developer to start working at the department of Clinical Sciences, in the Unit Infectious Diseases. Th e Department of Clinical Sciences concentrates on patient-based research, training and services, with emphasis on tropical and infectious diseases including HIV/AIDS, sexually transmitted diseases and tuberculosis in developing countries. Thee Unit Infectious Diseases is organizing di fferent courses some of which are developed as e-learning courses. The latter are organized with experts from the North and the South, including former students from ITM. A position has opened for a course organizer to manage the interactions between all stakeholders.

What will be your assignment? You will...
• be responsible for the guidance of the students during the online courses.
• be responsible for the coordination of the educational tasks of the experts.
• develop Standard Operating Procedure's (SOPs) for the online courses for the purpose of quality assurance.
• actively contribute to the content of the courses.
• design short online modules for continuing medical education.
• organize blended learning with institutions in the South.
• participate in the Community of Practice of the alumni of the ITM.

The profile we are looking for (please rest assured that even if you have some of these qualities, we will consider your resumé in detail)
• You are a medical doctor or you have a master’s degree in a medical field.
• You have high level computer skills and experience with web-based and mobile communication techniques.
• You have excellent communication and teamwork skills.
• You speak and write fluently English and French; knowledge of Dutch is an asset.
• You have experience with training and you are familiar with e-learning tools.
• You have working experience in low resource settings.
• You are willing to live in Belgium.

What do we offer?
• An intellectually stimulating, international and socially committed environment, in which personal initiative can be developed.
• A full-time position for 2 years (renewable), starting date as soon as possible.
• A salary set according to the pay scales of the ITM and the Flemish universities, depending on relevant experience and level of education.
• Reimbursement of public transport costs, bicycle allowance, private pension scheme (after two years) and luncheon vouchers.

Interested?
For further information on this vacancy please contact Dr. Maria Zolfo, (+32.3.247.63.64 or mzolfo@itg.be).
Send your CV together with your motivation letter to vacatures@itg.be and mention 'coming from Inge de Waard' in your letter.
Apply before August 15th, 2011.

Want to have a quick look at eSCART? Take a peek at this presentation which gives an overview on some course components, including the eSCART:

What to take into account when developing courses for low resource areas or developing countries

View more presentations from Inge Ignatia de Waard

Free #MOOC guide and #MobiMOOC on #mLearning resources

After getting requests on a summary of what came out of the recent MobiMOOC course, I gladly share this post with you all. This post is all about mLearning resources and what was/is learned during the MobiMOOC that ran from 2nd April - 14 May 2011.

Free MOOC guide for setting up your own MOOC course
In addition to the MobiMOOC resources, I gladly share the third Beta-version of a MOOC guide on how to set up your own MOOC. The guide is written as a wiki, to enable all MOOC'rs to add to it. You can edit the MOOC guide, by requesting to join the wiki. After you have joined the wiki, you will have editing rights and be able to add your ideas.

MobiMOOC resources
MobiMOOC was a course designed following the natural pathways of a MOOC (or Massive Open Online Course).

Ideally I will be embedding all these content and resources into a WikiVersity page soon.

The mobimooc wiki gives an overview of all the topics of each of the six weeks of the course. The topics included an introduction to mLearning (facilitated by me - Inge de Waard), planning mLearning projects (facilited by Judy Brown), mLearning in development regions (facilitated by Niall Winters), leading edge mLearning (facilitated by David Metcalf), global context of mLearning (facilitated by John Traxler) and mLearning in k12 (facilitated by Andy Black).

To enable discussions between the MobiMOOC participants, we used MobiMOOC Google groups. This works like a list server, enabling all of us to stay in touch of all the discussions, simply by looking at Google Groups, or e-mails.

MobiMOOC bookmarks on a wide variety of mLearning topics can be found here. There are over 300 links, and it is advisable to enter additional keywords to filter the MobiMOOC bookmarks :-)

There were many initiatives taken by the MobiMOOC participants, but one in particular might be of interest to all of you as it uses a wonderful (mobile enabled) crowdsourcing software: the MobiMOOC crowdsourcing map built by Sean Abajian (this is where the picture in the post comes from).

If you want to stay in contact with some of us MobiMOOC'rs, a linkedIn group was started as well.

Reformatting virtual classroom recordings to publish them in #mobile formats

During the last MobiMOOC we had some synchronous sessions where mLearning experts gave their insights in mLearning. Here you see an example of a session given by David Metcalf:

How to publish a virtual classroom recording into a mobile accessible format?

What I usely do to reformat synchronous virtual classroom sessions into mobile accessible files is record the screen + audio of the sessions via Camtasia (there is a 30 day free trail version: http://www.techsmith.com/download/camtasia/ )

With Camtasia you can record the screen and audio of the virtual classroom session. You can then edit the recording (maybe shorten some points, or skip immediately to where the session starts without the intro). After the editing you can produce the movie into a format of your preference (mp4, mp3 are most common and cross-device mobile standards).

You do have to take into account getting used to Camtasia, but it is an intermediately easy software (btw I am only an eLearning developer, not a Camtasia person :-D

There is a useful tutorial here on how to use Camtasia (14 minutes) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMwAxdMZOnM

After I have produced my virtual classroom session into mobile formats (e.g. mp4 or mp3 for audio podcast), I cut them up into videos no larger than 15 minutes and load them up to youtube (youtube does not allow videos larger than 15 minutes at first). This allows people with a variety of devices to look at the reformatted virtual classroom movies, as YouTube will now offer those recordings in the mobile YouTube format.

#mLearning at #museum's is a thrill for all #art lovers

mLearning started out to be a more formal, corporate and academic field. After its initial phase a lot of inspiring more thrilling applications started to take shape. One of the most intriguing and inspiring sectors to explore mobile implementations for increased knowledge creation are the museums. So I thought it was high time that I had a peak at some mLearning or mExperiences from the art world. But I must admit, this overview could not be possible without Michael Sean Gallagher and other MobiMOOC'rs that provided these wonderful links.

Mobile initiatives were always one of the key ways to get information across to museum visitors, just recall the audio guides, or the booklets that can accompany visitors. So it is no surprise that these heart and soul of museums everywhere are embracing the new mobile options that cell phones, tablets... are providing.

Starting with the new initiative launched at the Paul Getty museum in Los Angeles.

The J. Paul Getty Museum collection comes alive with Google Goggles

The Google Goggles team has worked with The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles to “Goggles-enable” their permanent collection of paintings.

You can use the Google Goggles app on your phone to take a photo of a painting from the collection and instantly access information about it from the Getty’s mobile-optimized website and the rest of the web. It's possible to fit only a small amount of information on the wall next to a painting but visitors with Goggles can now enjoy the full story online.

For more information about the Getty-Goggles project, visit mobile.getty.edu/gettygoggles or scan the QR code below.

Gallery Tag at the Brooklyn museum
This is an initiative from the chief of technology at the Brooklyn museum (Shelley Bernstein) on a mobile application with which you can add tags to the paintings or art works that you encounter at the Brooklyn museum. The Gallery Tag! is in fact a mobile game, enabling people to add tags to art works, which (the tags) are then openly shareable with other visitors of the museum as well.
Gallery Tag! is a pretty simple mobile tagging game, specifically designed for use in the gallery. Select a tag or create your own, go find works in the galleries that match, enter accession numbers and earn points and prizes.
You can either choose a tag left by other museum visitors, or you can add a tag describing your feeling or impression of a specific painting.

Roam! One of our institutional aims of the Brooklyn museum is to get visitors looking across collections and that’s always a challenge in this very large building. To encourage players of Gallery Tag! to cross boundaries in the building, they gain more points if they tag objects on different floors.

Crossover! One of the big issues we’ve seen with BklynMuse is that it’s chock full of information and various paths to take and that can be an overwhelming amount of choice. The recent simplifications are going to help, but we want to implement different ways to get people into that content. As players use Gallery Tag!, there are links that crossover into BklynMuse.

Convergence! All of the tags created go right back into the online collection, bridging the physical and virtual.

If you are coming here with your device hit m.brooklynmuseum.org to get started!

MuseumPunk: make your own museum tour and share it with others
Of course apart from the mobile apps that are provided by the museums themselves, there are also those mobile initiatives that are run by the visitors themselves. If you browse the Web, you can find many self-made museum tours (e.g. WalkExplorer for iPhone fans), a nice overview on how to build such self-made tours can be found here.

For us Android loving mobilers, take a look at the mobile Android museum applications listed at the MuseumPods website which cover a lot of (mostly NorthAmerican) museums.

If you are interested in interactive museum applications (mobile and others), be sure to link up with Nina Simon's blog called Museum2.0. She keeps track of great museum apps with wonderful interactions and is author of 'The Participatory Museum'.

#MobiMOOC has ended #eduMOOC will start

The MobiMOOC experience was (and is still) a blast. The MOOC format worked well and for many of the MobiMOOC'rs including myself, the knowledge that was shared amongst all of the MobiMOOC participants was incredibly enlightening.

For those interested in getting into another educational MOOC, feel free to join the EduMOOC that will cover the idea of Online Learning Today and ... Tomorrow. This MOOC is organized by the Center for Online Learning, Research and Service at the University of Illinois Springfield and yes, it will be a great experience. Currently over 1800 interested people registered for the course.

The EduMOOC will start this Monday, 27th of June 2011 and it will cover 8 weeks of intense and powerful educational topics. Each EduMOOC week will cover a different educational topic:

• 1. Online Learning Today
• 2. What the Research Tells Us
• 3. Online Technologies Today and Tomorrow
• 4. Online Learning Apps and Mobile Learning
• 5. Public, Private & Open - Online Learning
• 6. Personal Online Learning Networks
• 7. Collaboratives, Collectives and Clouds
• 8. Online Learning Tomorrow 2011-2021

And each topic will be facilitated by a team of knowledgeable educational guru's. The EduMOOC uses googlegroups: When you're ready to participate in the discussions, you may go directly to http://groups.google.com/group/edumooc and they have a twitter hashtag #edumooc.

As with all MOOC's this is a free course, so join all of us participants and register today.

My teacher is two weeks old and I starved him (almost) ...

On the 4th of June 2011 I became a mother of Isaak. Ever since he is born he has been teaching me and I noticed that I have been a poor learner at times but willingly picking up what I can.

All of a sudden all the books on cognitive learning, child evolution and so on fall into pieces. As always learning can only really happen when doing and ... from this time onward (if all the gods and sciences are willing) I will do it for the rest of this life thanks to this new life.

I had never imagined that all of a sudden my ways of handling and taking care of the baby connects me not only to my deeper self, but also to my forefathers and -mothers, my peers and friends. In my actions I see and feel all of them, as if time is willing to lift up its veil for a moment and show me timelessness in Isaak's eyes.

In his short life, I have been overheating him, under-cooling him, giving him not enough food, changing his diapers in ways he clearly stated was not the right way (apparently not to be used as a turban, nor low hanging skirt). On many occasions I simply looked at him with a startled face not knowing what to do. Time and time again he showed me what to do with basic feedback of cries and gestures, oh yes immediate feedback is important.
This learning cannot be done on my own and there is no formal training. Parenthood is clearly learned informally and luckily it happens in collaboration with other, more experienced people who are willing to share what they know.

It is startling to see how all learning follows the same paths. We probably could make a unified learning theory?

So within two weeks Isaak taught me that in life we will always stay learners, and that a network of friends, family, connections will help each and everyone of us to find solutions enabling us to live a better life. I am humbled by his simplicity and the universal aspect of life and learning at every stage in our lives. And although people say babies learn the most, I feel they teach us even more.

For those who wonder, Isaak is doing well despite my rather poor parenting skills, and he laughs at my feeble baby wisdom that I got out of books. His name actually means 'he laughs', and ... it fits him.

How to have an impact and how to make the world a better place through innovative learning?

"Let's come up with ideas to relief some of the harsh situations people around the world are facing!", this simple motivational sentence was launched at the MobiMOOC course.

The MobiMOOC course is in its fourth week and discussions and exchanges of ideas keep on going. This week’s facilitator of the course is David Metcalf from MetilLab in California, US. He offered a view on some of the latest mobile innovative edge projects ranging from sports to learn statistics, over free mobile medical applications, to aid relief and augmented reality. If you are interested, his webinar was recorded and if you are interested you can follow the four part YouTube movies here or via the depicted QR code below.

(QR code kindly provided by Lavender)

There was one specific thought that David raised which has given me gray hairs for the past few days, so I want to share it in the hope some of you can come up with some ideas.

David raised the idea that we need to look at collaborations between the academic world, companies, non-profit organizations and possible funding agencies to solve some of the world’s high priority issues, pointing towards the Millennium Goals that are only 4 years off and are still hot issues (primary education for all, gender equality,…)

The only problem is, what can we do? How can we make this beautiful globe a better place while using mobile technology? There have been many initiatives, and some really make a difference (empowering women, mobile literacy classes…) but what is within our power AND who is willing to go for a grand impact collaboration?