Multilitteratus Incognitus

I've been a bit silent on mobiMOOC these past few days, mostly sitting back, reading and taking time to think about things. One of the ideas that has come to mind is using services like GoWalla and Foursquare to check-into locations and using this as some sort of mLearning platform. At UMass Boston the College of Management has a Management Achievement Program (MAP) . In this program undergraduates, in addition to their coursework in management, need to attend a series of lectures in order to graduate.  Students can mix and match the lectures that they attend (based on interests and availability) and accumulate enough "miles" in order to graduate. In the library we also have a self-guided tour of the library, and quite frequently I run into students who are doing scavenger hunts on campus as part of their  coursework.  It seems to me that these types of events could easily loan themselves to social-check ins.  For example If I am a management student and I elect t...

I have a feeling that this question falls into the category of " if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? "... but I will ask the question anyway :-) This question came to me by reading Sheena's comment in my Different Levels of m post a few days ago. Sheena wrote that she was thinking of an SMS based mLearning project, being inspired by text4baby . Having never heard of text4baby, I looked into it (big thanks to Sheena for bringing it to my attention :-) ) So how does text4baby work? According to the site Registration is easy and can be done online here or from your cell phone. Simply text the word BABY (or BEBE for Spanish) to 511411. You’ll be asked to enter your baby’s due date or your baby’s birthday and your zip code. Once you are registered you will start receiving free messages with tips for your pregnancy and caring for your baby. These messages are timed to your due date or your baby’s birth date. If your due ...

I just had quite an interesting realization - it's only the end of Week 2 on mobiMOOC (1/3 done with the course) and there are already a ton  of resources that have been contributed by participants; a lot of these resources are scholarly resources in the form of studies and published research articles on mLearning.  This is pretty cool!  There is also a delicious mobiMOOC repository  available which is pretty cool.  I've been thinking of starting a Zotero share so we can put all of these academic articles, with proper citations and bibliographic information, somewhere where people can have access to them in one place (instead of being inside many separate google group email postings).  Perhaps this is something that I might start undertaking over the weekend, or next week.  Truthfully I haven't had much chance to go through the citations already provided, so I want to create this bibliography for myself, for future use, but I think it would be worthwhi...

Today I am at my last Basic Library Techniques (BLT) course, after this I am certified to be a library director - in a town of 10,000 or fewer residents in Massachusetts. OK those are a lot of terms and conditions, but I've gone through workshops in Library Administration, Collection Development, Cataloguing and now I am finishing up with Reference. Prior to this workshop I read Reference and Information Services as well as Introduction to Reference Work vol I and vol II by Katz. A lot of the stuff from this workshop I am in right now is review, but they are also plugging holes in areas that I opted to not read up on (like Children's Librarianship and Young-Adult Librarianship - I have no interest in these fields). In any case, one thing is really perplexing about the homework. Among other things in this workshop we were given a set of questions that we needed to answer using ONLY print materials. Seriously? What is this 1959? Now granted, many small libraries do not have ...

Week 2 of mobiMOOC is underway - and there's been a ton of discussion during week 1! (much more than I expected actually).  It's amazing to me than mLearning has become synonymous (these days) with smartphones, apps on those smartphones and mobile data.  One doesn't have to go too far back in the research literature to find mLearning to be something that was based on regular phones, using regular SMS and MMS messages, and even voice communications! In the shuffle in the developed world we seem to have lost that simplicity of just voice and SMS/MMS and we've gone with things that require expensive handsets and expensive data plans.  Even if you get a sort of cheap Android phone (certainly cheaper and an iPhone ) you still have to pay for a data plan.  I don't know how data rates are in countries other than the US, but until recently (recent being 3 years of fewer) data on a phone cost a lot and you just didn't get that much of it! I know it's tempting...

Another interesting post by Jaap in this week's (final week) of CCK11 made me think. Jaap writes: As a connectivist (CCK11) I do not like the words “acquisition of knowledge”, I like to that to be “connecting to information”. This made me think of the philosophy behind knowledge, how one sees knowledge and information (and ultimately wisdom?), and the semantics behind the words we use. Take for instance this phrase: Acquisition of Knowledge What does Acquisition of Knowledge imply? Well, we acquire something that in concrete, something already pre-made, ready for us to pick up and consume, use, or put it on a mantle. This view of knowledge is very behaviorist in its connotation. I don't necessarily subscribe to this idea. I think information can be given (example: don't touch the stove, it's hot) but there is no necessary knowledge of what happens if you touch a hot stove. As a kid I was told this time and time again, and I never touched a hot stove. A few m...

This is it, last week of CCK11. I went through the materials, well...I mostly skimmed through them to be honest, but I really did have a blast going through them, especially Stephen's 1998 prognostications of technology and education in the future . In 1998 I graduated high school and started my undergraduate studies at the University. It's interesting that ideas, such as the PAD (or PADD if you are a star trek fan)are spot-on! Still not quite there with a few things, but we're getting there. If I could point at one thing that's great about ubiquitous technology it would be that it has the potential to open doors. Things like TED , online library catalogs, availability of library databases, and initiatives like OpenCourseWare and various MOOCs make it so that more knowledge, more education, and more access to subject matter specialists is available, for free, to many more people than before. This leaves it up the individual learner to take advantage of these sources...

Can we install one of these in each of our classrooms? Also, can we have dev-tools that are easy for students and faculty to use to create their learning content for these? ;-)