#ict4D: the complex mLearning challenges for specific ethnic groups #mlw2013

Leslie Dodson from the University of Colorado on The mobile utitly gap and literacy challenges in oral-language communities: sms use by Berber women.

These are my live blognotes coming from UNESCO's mobile learning week enriched with tweets from Ronda (@glam_mobileleo).
Leslie used an epigraphic research approach and working in the field for 8 to 9 months.

For those interested in the number of challenges that can be encountered when diving into a mLearning project with very specific target learners... this is it!

Pressing issues
conventional wisdom assumes

• women with mobile phones can text
• illiterate women and numeration
• mobiles obscure gender

this is not the case

• many women are only able to use expensive voice services
• functions that rely on counting or nubmer sequences are confusing
• cultural restrictions on communication between men and women extend to mobiles

These issues are bigger than a community of Berber women (approx. 500 billion women are illiterate)

Population: women and work

• Berber communities: tribal, traditional, Muslim, conservative, rural, arid and poor.
• Women lack formal education
• women's livelihoods are tied to the Argan tree (oil production, or as a home lifelyhood). 

Unseco has designated Morocco's Argan forests.

The technology

• simple, broken, secndhand, counterfeit phones
• few smart phones
• relatively broad network coverage and available power

the goal of the project

• expand the use f available mobile phones for personal and instrubmental communicatoin
• explore the challenges of moving from oral communication (speaking and calling) to texting in a non-text based community
• avoid a  formal educational approach because of shame and fear

A complex language environment
2 spoken dialects
Darija: an amagamation of Arabic, French and Spanish words
Tachelhit: one of numerous Berber dialect

2 official written and spoken languages
Modern Standard Arabic and French

3 alphabets: Arabic, Latin script, Tifinagh script (Glyph-based, not widely used).

The texting utility gap
due to the complex literacy and language environment, women's mobile use is basic ("What is literacy when u have 2 spoken dialects?")
they are unable to benefit fro many phone features ("My phone only speaks #French but I dont speak French.")
they face socio-cultural and psycho-dynamic deterrents to learning
illiterate women are paying a tech tax because they cannot text
they are forgoing service benefits

• unable to take advantage of mobile bonuses
• cannot access development initiatives
• missing out on training opportunities

coping strategies: high visual literacy

• many users identify words and numbers as visual packets of information (Berber women in #Morocco use small pieces of paper to identify words/numbers on phones)
• they rely on pattern recognition to identify phone numbers
• they memorize keypad sequences
• they use paper to assist in phone use
• they identify contacts with icons, names and numbers
• they rely on scribes

personal communication: mobile support for literacy in the Coop

• informal education
• situated learning
• adult women get to choose the literacy they want
• highly motivated to learn latin alphabet
• the mobile provides the alphabet at their fingertips
• multimedia use ("Multimedia includes chalkboards, alongside other tools we use..." )

If you do not have common devices, it can be very hard to collaboratively learn. There was a lot of struggle with directions to enter letters, some mobiles have capital and small letters which felt like different alphabets to the women.

Get off your butt & create real #mLearning solutions #mlw2013

As this day progresses, I was blown of my chair by the passionate drive of Theo van Rensburg Lindzter from the Learning Academy Worldwide on the subject of Millennials as mobile educators: innovative youth workforce development solutions.

Theo is a driven, engaging, outspoken speaker.
He made a REAL point! Here are my live blogging notes and be sure to contact Theo if you really want to engage in a mLearning build solution.

In South Africa they realized that there is a real goldmine in young people ready to teach and support other youngsters.

you do not train people, you develop people
We need to finance and solve real problems, and restoring the impact that young people can make.
Millenials can be unemployed, non-actives, nags... BUT these young people can be activated, they want to be activated, mobilizing them to be actively involved.

But the problem into meaningfulness or what we see as work, is an unmarked field of landmines. 
That all part of getting into work and meaningfulness is difficult. So how do you know that you are extending the field of landmines? You promise work in a world that is changes. So we cannot create work like we used to create it. When corporates delete jobs, many of them vanish and are not even replaced.
So how can you counter the loss of meaning. There is nothing meaningful in work that is repetitive. there is a difference between meaningful work and drudgery. So if we talk about mobile educators, we are not talking about drudgery.

He shares that he was doubting why he was out here, paid for its own to come to UNESCO mLearning week.... there are too many mLearning adds, not enough pragmatic foci and outcomes that really change the world.
What needs to be changed: solve problems:
source youth assets - m-ubuntu,
source innovative solutions - sonlig (buying solar chargers to solve basic electricity challenges).

Instill meaning:
serve to imporove student performance
serve and sharpen skills

restore dignity
build networks of collaborations
prepare for new study-service or work opportunities

The students are hungry, they do not have future options, teachers do not have the necessary support they need.
Students are no problems, they initiate something when coming to class. But we must use it for real change.

so what next: lets focus on funding solutions, not projects
campaign for meaning, not just scale and impact
prioritize collaboration and partnership (make students aware of the fact that they are part of a community, of the global world).

And here is an interview with Theo (from a couple of years ago, but giving of m-ubuntu as it was running up for roll-out)

unesco: opportunities, threats & challenges of #mLearning #mlw2013

At the second day of the UNESCO's mLearning week, where Agnes Kukulska-Hulme from the Open University in the UK started the day with a very enlightening presentation bringing together the latest on mLearning pedagogies and focusing on a gender related project.

Title of her presentation is: Aligning migration with mobility: female immigrants using smart technologies for informal learning show the way

What follows are my live blogging notes, based on the slides shared by Agnes.
But I do change the order, starting with the concluding remarks, for I think these are very relevant and as such, reading them first is a good thing. And I will try and get hold of the slides and add a link when possible.

smart city learning

• new configurations of human mobile assistance: friends, volunteers, mentors, online community
• cognitive challenge: challenge arising from ubiquitous interactions: multiple devices, points of interest, augmented reality (how will people cope with that much information coming at them)
• informal content and curricula: curricula built up from discovery of learner requirements (what do the learners need, that can then be translated into more formal curricula: enriching them or changing them completely?).

implications of mLearning

• teacher roles: need to evolve to encompass wide-ranging support for informal learning (teachers must get more experience with mobile learning)
• strong guidance on aspects of personal safety and security issues (trust, safe learning environment, what does it mean for female immigrants to dive into social media networks...)
• review of language and communications curricula - taking account of opportunities for mobile-supported, situated, social learning.
• new measures of learner progress and achievement (learner progress and achievement, how can we capture and measure this, what are new ways to award these achievements? Which formal and informal ways are there, badges, certificates, credits for learning overall ... bridging the gap between formal and informal learning) 

Mobile pedagogy breakthroughs (keypoints)

• flexible collaboration
• faster feedback (not necessarily based on tutor feedback)
• social or study support at point of need
• expended space for reflection and self-monitoring 
• context inspired authentic content and challenge
• location-based discoveries and memories
• connecting learning across settings (contexts)
• caters to learenr diversity
• a route to learner autonomy
• continuity across the life span
• friends and family drawn into learning

Threats to mobile pedagogy as a force for good

• disruption in classrooms and family life
• health hazards: physical, mental, social
• personal safety concerns
• issues of data privacy: data security, trust
• inadequate infrastructures, lack of support, high costs
• perpetates some inequalities
• subject to inpredicateble commercial forces
• increasingly sophisticated technology
• may trivialize or debase education
• confusion around who is guiding learners. As we move into more informal territory, and other people come into play supporting the learner, there is more confusion about who is guiding the learners. 

There are many paradoxes about new learning: mobile yet situated, individual yet social
some examples are shared: lingobee, milexicon, toponimo
In these application the individual and the social happen in a shared space.

At the same time these paradoxes push our thinking, we start really thinking more deeply about how learning is taking place, how it is changing. 
Agnes thinks we are at a cusp of a mobile language learning revolution: a lens on the world, a way to connect with others, immediate translation options...
it makes it easier to engage with the world and specifically those who live in it.

So what are the typical situations that learners find themselves in? So we need to tailor and look at specific situations. 

• The ability to study how learners are using their mobiles for learning, results in studies with learners, surveying how they use mobile devices for language learning. 
• Looking at the use of mobile devices by immigrants coming from Afghanistan. The immigrant population is making use of their mobile devices in specific ways than the general population: playing games, recording videos and photo's, using mobile banking, posting to social media ... so an overall lively use of mobile devices. This can be used in future mobile learning designs. 

Mobile pedagogy: achievements and challenges
MASELTOV project - information servics, incidental languagel earning, community building
smart city learning in the 'ubiquity era'

Maseltov project is a European FP7 project, at this point in time results are starting to come out. The idea of the project is to understand how new mobile technologies can be used for furthering social inclusion.

MASELTOV project looks at smartphones with access to a range of tools tailored to their needs, including language apps.
The target user groups are people that come into the EU from outside the EU, low education (less 8 years of scholing), speakers of Turkish, Arabic and Spanish.
Looking at the complete learning journey: when they connect, how they travel through the city, looking at when they share information or learn...

Different social networks are put into place and screened for their usability in terms of mobile learning:
mobile Q/A forum
geo-social radar: which will detect who is nearby and is willing and able to help you
busuu online community: informal language learning community, and get feedback on your learning and progress.

The short abstract of the project is shared on the UNESCO website: The specific needs of migrant people, along with those of mobile workers and students, call into question the appropriateness of educational provision which is largely centred on classroom-based teaching and learning.  Mobile technologies extend collective knowledge building across formal and informal settings and new models of learning have to be elaborated; however, these bring their own challenges in terms of learner preparedness, available infrastructures, systems of assessment and the changing role of teachers. Furthermore, increasingly smart technologies that can monitor activity patterns and behaviours, and imbue familiar surrounding objects with additional layers of data and meanings, set new cognitive and intellectual challenges. The European MASELTOV research project, which is developing smartphone-based community services for EU immigrants, and in particular for isolated women, is an early example of the next generation of mobile learning, which will combine context-aware technologies with social networks, situated and incidental learning, progress monitoring, and distributed learner support. This research brings to the fore issues of literacy, quality, cost, privacy and trust. Although mobile devices clearly support various forms of mobility, there is more work to be done to ensure that human migration and device-enabled mobility are suitably aligned.

#mlw2013 m4d report on Global Mobile on the Move

While attending UNESCO's mobile learning week in Paris, I will disseminate some of the information that comes up and might be off use. One of the publications linking to mobiles for development are two publications mentioned by Martine Koopman of IICD: Mobile on the Move and a publication focusing on a step-by-step ICT for social innovation publication.

The Mobile on the Move one shares some mobile projects from around the world, it is a short 12 page publication ranging from teacher-to-student projects to increasing farmer income via sms. The report can be downloaded for free here.
The step-by-step publication focuses on how to get a project going, embedding all the stakeholders and built upon regional needs. A nice, brief overview. That publication can be found here.

UNESCO presentation why a MOOC should be mobile #mooc #mlw2013

MOOCs are getting everyone excited. While most of the discussions focus on the impact of MOOCs on Higher Education, the focus of the presentation below will be on the effect of mobile accessibility on learner interactions, as well as overall description of the MobiMOOC case (a MOOC course on mobile learning).

The presentation will be shown and discussed during the upcoming UNESCO mobile learning week in Paris, France and a short description of the presentation can be found here. The mLearning week will get a lot of good people together to analyse mobile learning across the globe and see where we can be heading to ensure education for all (or at least increase educational access). If you want to follow what is happening during the mLearning week, you can also follow the #mlw2013 hashtag.

There will also be some online webinars that are open to all, so if you cannot make it to Paris, make sure you log on to the webinars (look at the right menubar once the link of the webinar opens for more information).

MobiMOOC Unesco mlearning week 2013 from Inge Ignatia de Waard

#MOOC disasters are human and part of educational innovation and why sandboxes are good

With the Coursera course on the Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application being temporarily shut down due to a mix of unfortunate events (human miscalculation, limitations of technology, chaos...), sceptics of MOOC's feel strengthened. But my heart really goes out to Fatimah Wirth, for she dared to test new approaches but ... fell into the trap that all of us tend to fall into at one time or another: dreaming and as a result wanting to go too far, too quickly. Fatimah, the way I see it you took a blow for all of us explorers. And ... you sure got all of our minds going, including mine. From all the talk on the Web I have read on the subject, I like this blogpost by Debbie Morrison the best, it focuses on the learner, linking it to learning theory and overall needs from a learner. I totally agree with her observation that institutions should stop thinking from what was (classroom teaching, teacher in front...) and focus on how to make optimal use of what is.

But overall, most of the reflections and issues raised focus on the technological side, while for me it is all about the human side: what do people expect, how do people react to chaos, how do learners interact in order to learn and how can virtual mass chaos come to order again?

Group dynamics and learner interactions
The learner dynamics are of course crucial in any type of learning, but in a MOOC they become exponentially important. As such group dynamics, mass dynamics, come into place and should indeed be researched in the light of MOOC's.
We need to dig into all the factors of learner interactions taking place in MOOC's: motivations, drivers, barriers... of course if technology fails people cannot work together, but the human factor is the reason for technology to be tailored or used. So what is at the basis? Having said that, it is much easier to focus on the technical side because of the much lower complexity.

Automated learner screening

There is a need for mass learning processing (social agents might help, or an approach like suggested in Tin Can), but also truly ubiquitous access, as this simple fact (well, not technically simple, but simple as a concept), immediately provides people a much easier self-regulated, self-tailored option: using the device of preference depending on the context, time of the day, location...
Semantic learning algorithms: like mini google search offerings based on keywords, or field interests that emerge from learner posts.

Trust the kindness and wisdom of strangers
Another option would be to trust the kindness and wisdom of strangers, even if a course design fails... pick it up from there while using what is known by others. Learner-centered also means: trust the learner. So if a certain design or approach does not work: ask for solutions. The teacher IS NOT the expert they used to be, only the wisdom of crowds can be seen as truly ... wise.
Asking for help can strengthen all, so an open request for ideas and a transparent gesture of: yes, this was not ideal, but ... let's work together to solve this, would really be a learner-centered approach to get the course on the rails again. This is for instance what MIT did in their Signals and Systems course when taking solutions provided by the students to come up with solutions (tech and non-tech) for the next roll out.

It is no longer the teacher expert, but the team of wise people
One person is no longer enough to organize a course, it should be a team effort, a big team effort, gathering on strengths of multiple people, daring to say that even then everyone needs to learn from one another. And not just the back-end team, it should be multiple instructors.

Clear self-regulated strategies (and digital skills) given to the learners pre-course
No matter how intelligent the learning platform is built, at the end it is up to the learner to self-regulate and structure all the content that is produced in and comes out of a MOOC. As learners we will have to relearn what can be done to optimize our learning and even then we will not be able to go through all that is exchanged... and to be honest, so what? That does not matter, we do not need to grasp everything, just what is of interest to keep doing a great job, learning what we need.

And if you want to try out something new, make it informal first... it is the formal part of the course that got people anxious. Formality puts a much bigger demand on any course: instructions, time, ... Informality keeps it  easier to adapt and be creative.

Overall trying something new is always a risk, and although all of us know you need to pilot every part of a new approach before implementing it, sometimes we just dive in.... or should I say, I sometimes just dive in... and while that is a good approach, at times that approach fails. But in the end, all the lessons coming from that strengthen you for life. Sandboxes are good to try out new stuff, but at times I just want to do it, warrior style. 

#Informal learning and the master deck of the guru

For years I have been following Jay Cross. He simply has the gift to come up with simple, yet essential knowledge insights that lift me up time after time. Yesterday he shared his 'master deck on informal learning'. It is a treasure of key ideas and at the same time such a great personal time saver, as well as a knowledge/management tailoring device. I can see how such a deck, build with my own set of slides and key pointers would enable me to draw up a meaningful presentation in no time, or I could even tailor a presentation on the go having such a master deck at my back hand draw. It can be used for both face-to-face, as well as virtual presentations, so you could even use it while teaching a subject ... great.

For those interested in informal learning, I gladly share the informal master deck of Jay Cross here:

Jay's informal learning research deck from Jay Cross

#Mobile instructional #design is getting a push, join in!

For those interested in adding to the creation of a mobile instructional design model.... this is your chance! The researchers working on this project intend to collaborate with and involve experts and stakeholders from academia, government, industry, and the international community ... I guess that is all of us. So, if you are interested in the research call for participation launched by Jason Haag , mail him at

jason.haag.ctr at adlnet.gov 

Here is what Jason distributed on the research participation call:

In February 2013, the Advanced Distributed Learning(ADL) Initiative will be conducting a thorough needs analysis in preparation for a new design-based research project named, the Mobile Training Implementation Framework (MoTIF). The focus of the project is on exploring the intersection of multiple design and research methods in order better understand, and potentially influence how education and training professionals determine how to best utilize and leverage mobile-based technology to develop and implement optimal training and performance support solutions.

 As a growing number of mobile innovations become available in the learning space, education and training technology thought leaders are now interested in how to effectively design for a variety of mobile learning scenarios. In a 2011 conference paper, ADL proposed research to investigate instructional design (ID) theories and models for mobile content as the development of training solutions are believed to require new approaches to address both the unique affordances and the design constraints exhibited by mobile devices. ADL’s 2012 whitepaper built upon the proposed research topic and focused on how learning theories and ID models can best support mobile learning. It concluded that:

“Very few actual ID models for mobile learning exist...Instead of creating a new ID model, we have presented a framework that can be used to incorporate mobile learning considerations into existing ID models (which theoretically are neutral).”

The framework proposed in the whitepaper was intentionally conveyed at a conceptual level. It was not optimized for instructional designers and content developers. Its purpose was to serve as a conceptual vehicle to direct designers to also focus on improving performance and augmenting skills, not just on knowledge transfer.

An innovative and comprehensive research approach (we have chosen the Integrative Learning Design Framework (ILDF), is needed to validate and expand upon the scope and detail of the framework proposed in the whitepaper leading to practical understanding and application to real-world design projects.

The Problem and Target Audience

The mobile platform presents both unique affordances and constraints for the design of learning content. These are not being accounted for in traditional ID models, as stated in the literature review from the 2012 whitepaper. ADL believes this knowledge gap may lead to less effective learning outcomes for the learners due to the following observations:

●      Learning content developers are creating new mobile content and converting existing elearning courses to a mobile format by simply repurposing and resizing them to account for the smaller screen and interface differences, without any consideration for the aspects of learning, pedagogy, performance support, and user experience design.

●      Mobile learning best practices have not been identified within the overall context of following an ID model or learning theory. Learning content developers are not sure how to design for the different attentional, motivational, contextual, pedagogical, and social/communication aspects of the mobile platform.

So the goal of MoTIF is to support education and training professionals transitioning from eLearning to mLearning by providing a framework and catalog of microstrategy examples for thinking more deeply about their systematic design processes and mobile-specific affordances (e.g. using GPS for location-based and contextual learning, using the camera for augmented reality, etc).

The target audiences for this needs analysis are instructors, instructional designers, learning content developers, training professionals, and human performance improvement experts with an interest in implementing mobile learning solutions. The target audience is not required to have any prior experience with mobile development. However, the target audience should at least own one mobile device, and have an understanding of using mobile applications for learning. 

@LucidChart for #collaborative work and organizing

As I am following (read this as occasionally reading and even more infrequently reacting) in OldsMOOC (the  free open online course on learning design), I got hold of LucidChart. A wonderful way of working with a team on both mindmaps, flowchart or organizational charts.
What struck me was the ease of use to start with it and the really quick way to get everyone involved in a team effort. There are ample tutorials and I could easily register with my Google account so with one click I was on it. Nice stuff. I have added it to my working tools.
For anyone wanting to pick up with OldsMOOC, feel free to join and simply relax while getting on top of the  material (one word of warning, if you do not have a lot of time, relax, do not go through all the threads simply look at the new one's that catch your interest).

A quick overview of the options of LucidChart can be found here:

Free #mLearning papers from IJIM, an open access journal

Great news! There is a new free edition of the International Journal of Interactive Mobile Technologies (iJIM). iJIM  has just published its latest issue at --> http://www.i-jim.org. In order to view the papers and articles, you only need to register (which is for free) and once you are registered you can access any article you want. 

*International Journal of Interactive Mobile Technologies (iJIM)*
Volume 7, Issue 1 (2013)

*Table of Contents*
-------------------

*Papers*

***Extended UTAUT to Examine the Acceptance of Web Based Training System by
Public Sector
(Thamer A Alrawashdeh, Bassam M Al-Mahadeen)
 http://online-journals.org/i-jim/article/view/2044
 http://dx.doi.org/10.3991/ijim.v7i1.2044

***Agent Based Framework Architecture for Supporting Content Adaptation for
Mobile Government
(Hasan Omar Al-Sakran, Qasem Kharma, Irina Serguievskaia)
 http://online-journals.org/i-jim/article/view/2131
 http://dx.doi.org/10.3991/ijim.v7i1.2131

***Persuasive Mobile Device Sound Sensing in a Classroom Setting
(Arttu Perttula, Jari Multisilta, Pauliina Tuomi)
 http://online-journals.org/i-jim/article/view/2262
 http://dx.doi.org/10.3991/ijim.v7i1.2262

***Improving Educational Outcomes by Providing Educational Services through
Mobile Technology
(Hosam Farouk El-Sofany)
 http://online-journals.org/i-jim/article/view/2287
 http://dx.doi.org/10.3991/ijim.v7i1.2287

***A Mobile Remote Lab System to Monitor in Situ Thermal Solar Installations
(Gastón Saez de Arregui, Miguel Plano, Federico Lerro, Lucía Petrocelli,
Susana Marchisio, Sonia Concari, Virginia Scotta)
 http://online-journals.org/i-jim/article/view/2292
 http://dx.doi.org/10.3991/ijim.v7i1.2292

***Development of eStudent iOS mobile application
(Mladjan Antic, Slobodan Jovanovic, Svetlana Cvetanovic)
 http://online-journals.org/i-jim/article/view/2295
 http://dx.doi.org/10.3991/ijim.v7i1.2295

***A Mobile Portal for Pharmaceutical Services
(Mohammed Otair, Aiman Al-Refaei, Bashar Sarayreh)
 http://online-journals.org/i-jim/article/view/2352
 http://dx.doi.org/10.3991/ijim.v7i1.2352

***A Proposed Pedagogical Mobile Application for Learning Sign Language
(Samir Abou El-Seoud, Islam Taj-Eddin, Ann Nosseir, Hosam El-Sofany, Nadine
Abu Rumman)
 http://online-journals.org/i-jim/article/view/2387
 http://dx.doi.org/10.3991/ijim.v7i1.2387

***New Learning Spaces? M-learning's, in Particular the iPad’s Potentials
in Education
(György Molnár Dr.)
 http://online-journals.org/i-jim/article/view/2398
 http://dx.doi.org/10.3991/ijim.v7i1.2398