When mobile makes a difference

Posted on June 10, 2017 by Mark under M-learning

DL4D/World Vision Project
Phnom Penh & Takéo, Cambodia
5-7 June, 2017

Provincial school, Takéo, Cambodia. Photo by Mark Pegrum, 2017. May be reused under CC BY 3.0 licence.

It was a great privilege to spend several days in Cambodia as part of the evaluation team for an early reading project entitled Total Reading Approach for Children Plus (TRAC+), a follow-up to the original Total Reading Approach for Children (TRAC) project which ran from 2012-2014. This project focuses primarily on improving the L1 Khmer literacy of struggling students in Grades 1-3.

In addition to meetings with World Vision and World Education staff, my visit involved travelling to schools in the Takéo province to meet with school directors, teachers, librarians and literacy coaches, and to observe primary students using the Aan Khmer app and engaging in benchmarking Interval Tests. In time, the evaluation team will produce a report, and subsequently discuss with the project team how best to disseminate what we have learned about using mobile technologies to support early literacy development in the Cambodian context.

Tablets in a provincial school library, Takéo, Cambodia. Photo by Mark Pegrum, 2017. May be reused under CC BY 3.0 licence.

While using digital technologies in developed locations can lead to certain improvements in teaching and learning, using digital technologies effectively in developing locations – with due attention to the local context and stakeholders’ needs and wishes – has the potential to really transform students’ learning opportunities and experiences. It is very inspiring to see the efforts being made by NGOs, ministries of education, and educators at all levels to open up the learning horizons of children in developing contexts.

A springtime of language learning & technology

Posted on May 12, 2017 by Mark under M-learning

IAFOR ACLL/ACTC Conference
Kobe, Japan
11-14 May, 2017

Kobe, Japan. Photo by Mark Pegrum, 2017. May be reused under CC BY 3.0 licence

The annual conferences, The Asian Conference on Language Learning and The Asian Conference on Technology in the Classroom, came together over several days in an IAFOR-organised event in Kobe in the midst of Japanese springtime this year. Along with keynotes that gave broad overviews of the conference theme of ‘Educating for Change’, there were numerous papers presenting different aspects of teaching and learning with digital technologies.

In his opening keynote, Change in Japanese tertiary education: Implementing content and language integrated learning (CLIL) in Japan, Ted O’Neill spoke of how the European concept of CLIL is beginning to make inroads into Japan, with content being taught through the target language, and the target language simultaneously being investigated through the content. In CLIL, there should be constant feedback, he suggested, between content and language. It is possible to have both soft and hard versions of CLIL, with educators at either end of this spectrum potentially being able to meet, over time, in the middle. Offering CLIL, he went on to say, helps prepare for globalisation; helps students access international certifications; and sends a strong message about plurilingual education. In preparing students for future studies, he mentioned, it is possible to offer modules focusing on ICTs incorporating international lexis.

In my own keynote, Beyond web 2.0: Designing authentic mobile learning for everyday contexts in Asia, I suggested that we need to move beyond web 2.0, while retaining the best of its elements of personalisation and collaboration in learning, but using mobile devices and especially mobile augmented reality to add in greater elements of authenticity, situatedness and contextualisation. I showcased mobile AR learning trails from Singapore, Indonesia and Hong Kong to demonstrate how educators are already establishing successful precedents in this area.

In her keynote, Instructional designers as agents for change: Facilitating the next generation of technology-enhanced learning, Barbara Lockee outlined the ADDIE Learning Design Model, involving stages of analysis, design, development, implementation and evaluation. The wider setting is now changing, she argued, leading to the need for instructional designers to address the advent of learning sciences, the rise of flexible opportunities through for-profit institutions, the emergence of a culture of innovation in universities, and the renewed interest in personalised learning opportunities. She went on to say that the field of instructional design and technology originated in the convergence of media and technology, and suggested that designers can leverage what is known about human learning in the systematic design of instructional solutions. Ultimately, instructional designers can function as change agents across a range of disciplines. Importantly, she also noted that technology doesn’t always have to be part of the solutions that instructional designers propose.

She finished by suggesting that the next generation of technology-enhanced learning can be sparked through collaborative, creative thinking about how to leverage the affordances of technological innovations and overcome barriers to the adoption of innovation for the advancement of learning – something that is possible at conferences like this one.

Among the many presentations on the use of digital technologies in education, the tools and techniques considered ranged from educational apps and platforms, digital storytelling and gaming through the flipped approach to mobile learning, including mobile augmented reality (AR) and robots.

In her presentation, An investigation of the integration of synchronous online tools into task-based language teaching: The example of SpeakApps, Nouf Aljohani reported on an initiative where female Saudi students, who normally have insufficient opportunities to practise spoken English outside the classroom, were asked to use SpeakApps to increase their amount of practice. The video chat function allowed up to six students at a time to engage in an online chat, with the recorded conversation being uploaded to a blog where it could be revisited to identify strengths and weaknesses. Students met online for an hour a week outside of class. Each speaking task had a communicative purpose, involved students in authentic tasks to develop critical thinking skills, and related to the Saudi context.

In their presentation, A case study of using Edmodo to enhance language learning for Japanese and British students at tertiary level, Shinji Okumura and Miho Inaba suggested that the term CALL is somewhat outdated, with TELL (Technology Enhanced Language Learning) and MALL (Mobile Assisted Language Learning) being more contemporary expressions. He described the Edmodo platform, indicating its similarities to Facebook. He went on to report on a project where Japanese and British students conversed on Edmodo, using a mixture of Japanese and English language. The Japanese students felt that they had improved their English skills, including in areas such as organising texts in English and learning native English expressions; the British students also felt that they had gained valuable Japanese language practice and learned more about Japanese society. Most Japanese students used their smartphones to participate, and did so in moments of downtime, such as when waiting for trains. However, more frequent opportunities for interaction would have been preferable, and the groups were a little too large to permit close interaction. For the British students, who were at a lower level in Japanese, it was very time-consuming to type posts and read replies, and they needed teachers’ help to complete the tasks.

Turning to the use of technology in an underdeveloped context in their presentation, Shifting the paradigm in higher education: Students’ progression towards ICT-supported learning in a resource-constrained context, Peshal Khanal, Prem Narayan Aryal and Ellen Carm outlined a blended learning project for continuous professional development of teachers in Nepal. Within the project, Moodle was used as a platform along with Classjump (though the latter is no longer available), and teachers were encouraged to interact on Facebook as well. Aside from access and opportunities, students’ progression towards the use of ICTs was found to depend on factors such as perceived benefits, prior knowledge, learning difficulty, and the role of change agents (teachers) in motivating them. Over time, many students came to appreciate the learning potential of the internet. Issues included: access and reliability of technology, the dominance of traditional pedagogy, and teacher favoritism of bright students over others. Gender issues also surfaced: girls were reluctant to take the lead voluntarily in group work, and there was a feeling of insecurity around girls working and learning in what was generally understood as an unusual time and environment.

In her talk, Digital storytelling as assessment for learning in mathematics education, Sylvia Taube spoke about addressing early childhood pre-service teachers’ fears of mathematics through digital storytelling. Drawing on the work of Helen Barrett, she suggested that digital storytelling facilitates the convergence of four student-centred learning strategies:

Student engagement
Reflection for deep learning
Project-based learning
Effective integration of technology in instruction

Drawing on the work of Robin (2006), she went on to say that there are seven key elements of digital storytelling. These help students to convey their messages and their associated emotions effectively:

Point of view
A dramatic question
Emotional content
The gift of voice
The power of the soundtrack
Economy
Pacing

Digital stories may be personal narratives; may examine historical events; and may inform or instruct.

She explained that she formerly asked her pre-service teachers to write about their own experiences of learning maths at school, but now she asks them to create multimedia digital stories. She showed an example of a story which was created in PowerPoint overlaid with other tools like Snapchat, including extensive use of AR effects to emphasise emotions in the video narration. Other students used Prezi, Animoto, PowToon, VoiceThread or Adobe Spark. Reflecting on past negative maths learning experiences helped many of them to realise what they need to do to help their own students in the future. She suggested that these digital storytelling skills will be very useful for these future teachers who can use the technology to help explain mathematics concepts to their students.

In her presentation, Digital games for English language learning: Students’ experiences, attitudes and recommendations, Louise Ohashi referred to the work of James Gee (2005), mentioning key learning principles of good games:

identity
interaction
production
risk-taking
customisation
agency
well-ordered problems
challenge and consolidation
just-in-time or on demand
situated meanings
pleasantly frustrating
system thinking
explore, think laterally, rethink goals
smart tools and distributed knowledge
cross-functional teams
performance before competence

She went on to report on a research project where she asked Japanese learners of English (n=102) about their experiences with digital games in English, and their attitudes towards games as a learning tool. Smartphones were the devices most commonly used by students to play games in English; in the previous 12 months, 31% had played an English game in class, and 50% out of class. There was a mixture of commercial games (Call of Duty, Battlefield, Grand Auto Theft, etc) and educational games (TOEIC Galaxy, Quizlet, Kahoot, etc). The majority of students thought it was valuable to play digital games in study time. Their comments suggested that they found games motivating and that in many cases they helped them to improve their English.

In her presentation, Flipping the classroom: Voices of teachers, Anna Ma reported on her research on the flipped approach in Hong Kong. She indicated that many teachers are already flipping their classes, though they may not be using video, and they may not be calling what they do a flipped approach. The flipped approach is in fact nothing new, though it may be becoming more popular. She outlined five key misconceptions about the flipped approach among teachers, as found in her research:

Video is a must (though it can be very effective, it’s not a requirement)
I have not done any flipping (teachers don’t realise they may already be doing this but without using video)
It’s very time-consuming because I have to redo everything
To flip or not to flip: there are no other options (it is possible to partly flip a class)
I am not a techie; I don’t know anything about video or creating a video

Challenges include motivating students to watch the videos or do the other preparation before class; the sense of competition among teachers to create flipped classes; parents who think a flipped approach is akin to a kind of home schooling; a lack of technological resources for teachers; and the time demands on busy teachers.

The key point about the flipped approach, she concluded, referring to the work of Bergmann and Sams, is not about the videos, but about what can be done with the additional time in class.

In a different take on the flipped approach focused at primary level in the Philippines, The flipped classroom: Teaching the basic science process skills to high-performing 2^nd grade students of Miriam College Lower School, Mark Camiling outlined some advantages of using a flipped approach: asynchronous quality; having class at home and doing homework in school; and more time for the teacher to detect students’ difficulties and needs. Challenges include internet connectivity; resource quality; student resistance; and deciding on curation versus creation of flipped content. Although some people might consider that primary students are not responsible enough or digitally literate enough, he found in his research that a flipped approach can be effective at primary level. It may also help to prepare younger students for future use of ICTs in school. It seems, however, that the flipped approach may work better for high-achieving than low-achieving students.

In their paper, Maximising the tablet learning experience: A study of MCHS Mathematics 7 teacher awareness and readiness in using tablet-based pedagogy, Lyle Espinosa, Mon Ritche Bacero and Lady Angela Rocena reported on a study of teachers’ attitudes to tablet use. It was found that teachers mainly used tablets as e-book readers in the classroom, and they used them in their lesson preparation to search for supplementary online resources and apps. Nevertheless, teachers agreed unanimously that tablets helped them explore new teaching techniques, and that they promoted student collaboration. The teachers viewed themselves as ‘engineers of lessons’ with the tablet as their tool. At the same time, teachers always prepared backups in case of technological problems. They were concerned that students were more knowledgeable than they were, and that there was an expectation that teachers should learn about new technologies without formal training.

In their paper, Using and developing educational applications for mobile devices as a tool for learning, Andrey Koptelov and James Hynes reported on a survey of teachers around Houston, USA, where they discovered that the three most commonly used educational apps were Kahoot, Plickers and Nearpod. While these are not pedagogically sophisticated, they can be engaging for students. The authors went on to suggest that students can be asked to create their own mobile apps, and that it is useful for pre-service teachers to have this design skillset. Their students created Android apps with MIT’s open source App Inventor, an example of a cloud-based IDE (Integrated Development Environment), which provides all the tools needed to develop a programme, in this case a mobile app. Other IDEs that can be used by students with no previous programming experience include Ionic Creator (iOS and Android) and Apple Swift Playground (iOS only).

When the pre-service teachers were asked to design an app, they had to fill in a spreadsheet covering the following details:

Name of app/cost
Platform/need for internet connection
Detailed description of app
Subject/grade level where app could be used
Main use of app in the classroom (instruction, assessment, collaboration, etc)
Which students will benefit most (ESL, special education, gifted and talented, etc)
Blooms Taxonomy level or Vygotsky’s ZPD that could be targeted with app
Benefits of app for teacher/school or parents/community
Other comments

Only after undertaking this exercise were students asked to begin work with App Inventor to build the app itself. They got help from group members and guidance from the instructor. The next step then involved testing, feedback and reflection.

In their presentation, Augmented reality design principles for informal learning, Eric Hawkinson, Parisa Mehran, Mehrasa Alizadeh and Erin Noxon showcased a variety of case studies of AR, demonstrating how it can lead to real world connections and learner customisation. In one case, they showed the engagement of participants at TEDxKyoto. In another, they showed how students undertook an orientation activity to familiarise themselves with the university library, which involved students scanning AR markers placed around the library as they participated in an imaginary story where they had to search for clues to hunt a thief. Using the AR cards produced by the research team, students can also set up links to digital content they have created. Examples of these and other uses of AR can be seen in Eric Hawkinson’s ARientation Project YouTube channel.

In his presentation, Social robots as peer tutors for pre-travel study abroad preparation, Paul Wallace explained that when students are preparing to go abroad on study placements, they need greater familiarity with everyday norms of language use.

Social robotics focuses on developing machines capable of interacting with humans to assist and achieve progress in convalescence, rehabilitation, training and education. Robots are designed to be engaging but not threatening; embodiment in human form is engaging, and the non-threatening design aids belief that the robot is non-judgemental. The NAO V5 Robot “Max” has speakers, microphones, eyelids, cameras, sonars, prehensile hands with sensors, and a wifi connection to retrieve information from the web. It can have 19 different languages installed. It is programmable (using a software package called Choreographe) and is semi-autonomous, and it is possible to create scenarios and levels for its interactions.

The robot can be programmed as a language and cultural tutor for students who are going abroad. Programmes can be launched by showing the robot a NAO mark, which functions something like a QR code; it can then switch into a pre-programmed scenario. Levels can be set so that the robot recognises a range of pronunciations, or so that pronunciation must be very precise – this can be adjusted depending on the levels of the language learners. The robot is not meant to replace a human tutor, but it does offer advantages in terms of:

availability (e.g., languages not available locally)
access (24/7)
flexibility (it never gets tired or offended)
customisation
adaptability (threshholds, speaking speeds)
personalisation
feedback (visual or audio feedback, recording and repeating students’ responses)
interactive help
student anxiety (non-threatening design to counteract foreign language anxiety)

Kobe cable car, Japan. Photo by Mark Pegrum, 2017. May be reused under CC BY 3.0 licence

All in all, we spent several days in rich discussions about the theme of educating for change. On the technological side, a key overarching theme was that different technology types and levels are appropriate for different teachers and students in different contexts, but that bringing together a range of researchers and practitioners from varying backgrounds facilitates the emergence of new ideas and insights in intercultural, interdisciplinary conversations.

New hardware, new software, and new questions about learning

Posted on October 23, 2016 by Mark under M-learning

mLearn
Sydney, Australia
24-26 October, 2016

Hyde Park, Sydney, Australia. Photo by Mark Pegrum, 2016. May be reused under CC BY 3.0 licence

After an absence of three years, it was great to be back at mLearn, which took place this year at the University of Technology Sydney. As always, this conference brought together an international spread of expertise and contemporary research in mobile learning, focused in 2016 on the theme of Mobile Learning Futures: Sustaining Quality Research and Practice in Mobile Learning. Presentations covered new hardware (such as wearables), new software (such as AR and VR interfaces), new strategies (such as gaming), new questions about mobile teaching and learning, and the intersection points between all of these. Many of these presentations are written up in the conference proceedings.

New hardware – in connection with new software – was showcased in the presentation, The use of wearable technologies in Australian universities: Examples from environmental science, cognitive and brain sciences and teacher training, where Victor Alvarez, Matt Bower, Sara de Freitas, Sue Gregory and Bianca de Wit began by showcasing the Vandrico Wearables Database, which lists the main wearables available for different parts of the body (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Vandrico Wearables Database. Source: http://vandrico.com/wearables/

They went on to give some examples of the use of wearables at Australian universities. The first example was Murdoch University’s Conserv-AR mixed reality mobile game to promote awareness of wildlife conservation in Western Australia; there is an augmented reality field trip followed by a visit to a conservation island in virtual reality. The second was Macquarie University’s Portable Teaching Laboratory, involving a gaming headset to monitor brain activity in the cognitive and brain sciences. The third was the University of New England’s Virtual Teacher project involving student teachers engaging in classroom roleplays in the virtual world Second Life as part of their preparation for their first professional experience placements. As the authors pointed out, wearable technologies can thus be used in a wide variety of different ways in a wide variety of different areas; in some ways, wearables involve more research complexities than handheld mobiles because there are so many possible variations in the hardware, software, and pedagogical approaches.

In the presentation, Perceived utility and feasibility of wearable technologies in higher education, Matt Bower, Daniel Sturman and Victor Alvarez mentioned key areas where wearables are being used, from medical diagnosis through aged care to the social implications of facial recognition augmented with personal information. They gave an overview of the educational affordances of wearable technologies, as showcased in Bower and Sturman’s 2015 article ‘What are the educational affordances of wearable technologies?‘ They then went on to discuss eight use cases of wearables that were rated for utility and feasibility in an international survey, noting that there were significant differences in many cases between perceived utility and perceived feasibility. Key issues surrounding wearable use mentioned by respondents were cost; technological issues; lack of pedagogical benefits; distraction or disruption; resistance to change; and privacy and legal issues. This is an area where there is really a considerable gap between potential utility and current feasibility in education, notably in terms of cost.

Contemporary software was showcased in the presentation, WhatsApp in mLearning: The (learning) medium is the message(r), where Christopher Pang spoke of the phenomenal rise in popularity of the OTT (over the top) platform, WhatsApp. He asked how habitual use of a mobile platform like WhatsApp shapes a learner’s practices. M-learning offers an additional platform for e-learning, he suggested, and can be a motivational aid to e-learning. Beyond this, it can support collaborative learning and informal learning, and supports the blurring of boundaries and role distances.

In this study, he created weekly replacement, supplementary and complementary tasks for business students, given to trial and control groups, followed up by self-reported questionnaires, revisiting of conversation threads, and selected interviews. However, even in the control group which was not specifically asked to use WhatsApp, students were already using it extensively.

Overall, he found that the use of the mobile app drove online completion and led to higher completion rates. Students demonstrated self-directedness and elements of lifelong learning. They were very willing to receive formative feedback through WhatsApp, including students who normally would not ask questions in class. Students also used WhatsApp groups for group sourcing of answers; the dilemma for a tutor in a WhatsApp group is whether to intervene or allow students to work out the answers for themselves. In conclusion, he noted that active WhatsApp students were likely to show greater learner negotiation, greater agency, and greater learning effectiveness; and were more likely to show a drive towards self-directed learning, to seek personalised learning and co-creation of learning opportunities, and to connect data to generate new learning.

In my own paper, On the path to situated learning: Embedding academic integrity via mobile augmented reality learning trails, co-authored with Eva Wong and Theresa Kwong, my colleagues from Hong Kong Baptist University, I spoke about the outcomes experienced to date, at approximately the midway point of a 3-year Hong Kong-government-funded project where AR TIEs (Trails of Integrity and Ethics) have been developed to help students connect formal learning about integrity and ethics with the everyday situations they face on campus. The trails immerse students in collaborative problem-solving tasks centred on ethical dilemmas, addressed in real-world locations where such dilemmas might arise, with contextually appropriate digital advice and information available on hand. By allowing students to play out the consequences of their decisions, this approach is designed to complement classroom engagement and, in particular, to reinforce the links between theoretical learning and the practical application of such learning in everyday contexts. Results to date indicate the value of situated learning in helping students to integrate ethical understandings into their everyday study practices. At the same time, numerous challenges have arisen, leading to an ongoing reshaping of the trail designs as we seek to capitalise on the potential of mobile learning to turn academic integrity and ethics from a formal requirement into a set of considerations that inform students’ daily lives.

In another paper, Factors in designing an augmented reality m-learning trail with place-based pedagogy in residential education, my colleagues Kevin Yue, Lisa Law, Hiu Ling Chan, Jade Chan, Elaine Wong, Theresa Kwong and Eva Wong spoke about the Hall Tutors TIE (Trail of Integrity and Ethics), which is one of the subject-specific trails forming part of the same Hong Kong project outlined above. It was explained that ethical reasoning and judgement skills can be more effectively developed when linked with personal experiences. Therefore a learning trail was created in which student hall tutors explore a scenario-based story to help them develop a more personal understanding of their roles. The presenters used a visualiser to demonstrate the underpinning mobile app, giving the audience a sense of the digital screens, information and choices through which students move when taking the trail. Visualisations of keywords used by students in pre- and post-trail online discussions have revealed a shift from a focus on ‘rules’ to a focus on being a ‘role model’, suggesting a change of mindset among the student hall tutors, who seem to have developed a new sense of their roles.

In their presentation, Understanding the relationship between augmented reality games and educational pedagogies, Christine Redman and Joanne Blannin discussed the educational potential of the AR game Ingress (an older but more complex game from the same company, Niantic, that created Pokémon Go; see Figure 2) in terms of motivation, learning theories, pedagogical strategies, 21st century skills, and a STEM focus. They are using Positioning Theory to understand people’s motivation to play and continue playing. The game requires players to move between the real and the virtual and to connect with other people. In the game, players receive constant and instant feedback, and there is a complex, multifaceted reward system. There are 16 levels, with each level taking longer than the last, and more badges are needed to move on. There are two teams, Green and Blue, which need to remain in communication, with team members collaboratively planning major goals.

Figure 2. A comparison of Ingress and Pokémon Go player views. Source: https://goo.gl/7kTDgm

From an educational perspective, we can say that learners know where they are up to and can predict strategies to move on in the game; have clear intentions; have explicit success criteria; and have constant feedback on progress. Playing a game like this, the authors suggested, can lead to the development of enterprise skills, 21st century skills, and the 7C skills. In particular, the game rewards strategic thinking, problem solving, memory, spatial awareness, teamwork, communication, and leadership skills. Elements of geography and environmental awareness, history and architecture, mathematics and spatial skills, are also prominent in the game. It is played by people of all ages and there are numerous women in leading roles. Active participation in the game often involves learning, and sometimes also teaching others.

In the presentation, Location-based mobile learning games: Motivation for and engagement with the learning process, Roger Edmonds and Simon Smith suggested that GPS and maps can power up experiences with authentic location interaction, while storytelling and rich media deliver learning, personalisation and an emotional connection, and gameplay helps with retention and recollection of knowledge. They described location-based mobile learning games created using the Mobile Learning Academy platform, which does not require programming knowledge; some have been created by lecturers, but students are now also generating their own games. Typically, the design stage of a game involves identifying and scoping out the game and creating context with a story. The development stage involves using gaming software to link rich media to places, and adding location-interaction tasks and gameplay, before testing and publishing. The play stage involves walking to places, triggering the activation of content and tasks, performing challenges, answering quizzes, uploading photos and notes, and finally sharing experiences via Facebook and Twitter.

In a study of students’ responses to the four lecturer-created games, engagement did not vary much between the four different disciplines, but whether the students thought they understood more about the topic did vary – key considerations were design factors (e.g., content, duration, level of difficulty, location, tasks, and competencies) and implementation strategies (how the game is integrated with tutorials or excursions, and whether it is mandatory or voluntary). In conclusion, location-based mobile games do provide active, authentic, engaging educational experiences in higher education, but the pedagogical benefits are influenced by game design factors and implementation strategies. Further information is available on the project’s companion website, Pedagogy Go.

In their presentation, Using mobile serious games technology to enhance student engagement and learning in a postgraduate ethics classroom, Gillian McGregor and Emma Bartle explored the opportunity for technology to contribute to the teaching and learning of applied psychology skills in the form of a serious game called How Do You Feel (which can be downloaded for Android devices here or played in the Firefox or Internet Explorer web browsers here). Intended to supplement rather than replace teaching in a professional psychology programme, the game involves a series of scenarios where clients present a variety of issues, allowing students to safely build up their skills in dealing with clients. In preliminary findings, it has been established that student engagement is greater when using the serious game than when reading a static case study. Students liked the connection to real life, being able to see the theory in practice, seeing examples of what psychologists could say when encountering different scenarios, and discussing the scenarios with peers.

In their presentation, A mobile learning framework for developing educational games and its pilot study for secondary mathematics education, Yanguo Jing and Alastair Craig described how they structured a game around GCSE maths skills, with each level of the game focusing on different skills. Students enjoyed the game and thought it helped them learn key concepts and skills. Learning theory and game design principles are fundamentally important in creating successful educational games. The future plan is to employ more social and multiplayer elements to increase the level of student engagement.

In their presentation, Survive with the VUVU on the Vaal: Eyetracking findings of a user interface evaluation of a mobile serious game for statistics education, Seugnet Blignaut, Gordon Matthew and Lizanne Fitchat suggested that balancing fun and teaching in serious games can be challenging. They described a game for students at a rural South African university which teaches everyday life skills alongside basic statistics. Eyetracking software provided quantitative data revealing where students were and were not focusing on the screen. Qualitative data revealed students’ concerns over the user interface (including for some students who were familiar with mobile technologies but not with a mouse when the game was played on a PC), game instructions (including the need to have these available throughout the game), 3D graphics (which were limited compared to commercial games), and the game challenges (with a need to individualise the levels and adjust them to players’ competencies). Two key lessons learned were that eyetracking devices and usability interviews are not unobtrusive and reduce players into subjects; and that students should be continuously involved in the conceptualisation and production of the game.

Key teaching and learning themes were flagged up in the paper, Does the mobility of mobile learners across locations affect memory?, where Chrysanthi Tseloudi and Immaculada Arnedillo-Sánchez opened by stating that mobile learning research focuses on the flow of learning as learners move through physical, technological, conceptual, social and temporal dimensions. This paper focused on the physical contexts, and asked whether learners’ memory is challenged when they try to recall learning from one context in a different context. Environmental elements can become encoded in memory along with the learning that is taking place; it may be a struggle to remember what we have learned in a different context where the same environmental cues are not present. This is a major challenge for mobile learning. Possible strategies include mentally reinstating the original learning context, i.e., essentially remembering the place you were in when learning (though learners vary in their ability to do this), or suppressing the surrounding context when learning (which may be difficult to do in an environment rich with stimuli, some of which might be relevant to the learning). Decontextualisation of learning may be a preferable approach; in other words, it may be more promising to learn in multiple contexts, and make the learning available in many different places.

In sum, should we really be trying to learn “anywhere” – and should we be learning in the exact place in which we need the information, or in many different places? This is currently unanswered. We need to research how much mobility is needed to facilitate decontextualisation, how artificial and real contexts interact, and what elements learners can manipulate to reinstate or vary their own contexts. In mobile learning research, they suggested, we should be investigating contextualisation in parallel with decontextualisation.

In an interesting follow-up discussion, Jocelyn Wishart raised the idea that a key advantage of mobile devices is allowing users to recreate contextualisation of learning through the multimodal records we make at the time when learning occurs. It was suggested by others that the context may sometimes but not always be relevant to learning, and that different strategies might be needed depending on the case. Kevin Burden commented that another advantage of mobile devices in learning is reducing the cognitive load because information can be partly offloaded to the device and carried with the learner.

In the presentation, Choosing between a student-generated animation or written assignment: Students know what they want, Hardy Ernst and Laurel Dyson talked about introducing a video-based assignment instead of a written assignment in a course, but although the quality of learning was similar, the videos were disruptive, time-consuming and not appreciated by all students. The following year students were given the choice between a video or written assignment, and it was found that students employed very individual learning strategies. It depended on students’ visual and digital literacy skills, time management, group work preferences, and engagement, with having a choice being more engaging for students. When asked in 2016 about the main reason for their choice of a video or written assignment, it was found that those who didn’t like group work chose the written assignment; other factors influencing the choice either way were students’ perceptions of their ability to manage time, interest, better learning opportunities, and leniency of marking (with many students thinking the videos would be more leniently marked). In a thematic analysis of students’ responses about why they chose the video option, key factors mentioned by students were interest and fun, as well as a belief that the visual mode is a good way to present knowledge, a wish to share ideas, and novelty; these are generally positive factors. Among the students who chose the written assignment, the key factors were working at their own pace and independent learning, as well as the time-consuming nature of making a video and past negative experiences with group work; here there are more negative factors mentioned. In sum, students demonstrated a solid understanding of their own abilities, allowing them to adopt deliberate individual learning strategies.

In his plenary which opened the final day, The role of education in identity transformation and acculturation, John Traxler raised some concerns around mobile learning. He spoke of two ‘elephants in the room’: the notion that mobile technologies are value-free conduits which are morally neutral and serve no-one’s particular interests; and the linked notion of the completion of the European project of modernity.

He spoke of the only partially successful inclusion agenda in Western higher education, which led to a massification process as non-traditional students were brought into education, accompanied by the introduction of computer laboratories as industralised workshops; in this context, mobile devices might represent a more flexible, user-friendly kind of industrialisation. He asked whether the process of acculturation into education adds to or replaces one’s sense of identity, in a process of ‘them’ becoming ‘us’. However, he speculated that with mobile technologies, there is more pressure from the outside world where mobile technologies are widely used, which is beginning to transform education from without – with ‘them’ perhaps starting to transform ‘us’.

Technology, he suggested, distorts the relationship between people and language because of the encoding of characters and the available input mechanisms. Moreover, computing is arguably underpinned by a programming paradigm which does not map well to many natural languages. Technology also has the effect of changing pedagogy, notably as international aid agencies have sought to make their educational missions scalable and sustainable through mobile devices, pushing them towards transmissive pedagogies rather than more constructivist pedagogies, and without taking into account locally relevant pedagogies. Furthermore, much of the education takes place in English. In a sense, technology is a Trojan horse for education, but education itself is a Trojan horse.

The hegemony of US technology, the English language, and European models of pedagogy may be especially challenging for cultures and languages which differ substantially from these; but is the hegemony of middle class values equally challenging for working class, non-traditional students? He spoke of the work of Richard Heeks on ICT4D 2.0, and the need to distinguish between:

pro-poor innovation (outside of but on behalf of poor communities)
para-poor innovation (working alongside poor communities)
per-poor innovation (within and by poor communities).

He went on to discuss the concept of epistemicide, where whole ways of looking at the world are killed off, starting with examples from the European 16th century. This is linked to the hegemony of the European university system around the world, with the University of Cape Town resembling the University of Florence, he suggested. In a different way, it is linked to the growing hegemony of mobile technologies, though the latter may also be producing a kind of postmodernity where knowledge can be generated outside the academy and everyone can discuss and share ideas. As Traxler commented in response to an audience question, the fundamental question may be whether the technology is hegemonic or enabling; and this may depend at least in part on whose hands it is in.

In her workshop, Debating the future for mobile learning in schools, Jocelyn Wishart mentioned that the use of mobile devices in schools varies enormously across the world, ranging from outright bans to an expectation that students will bring and use mobile devices. Mobile phones are also being used in a wide range of different ways, from ways that support learning to ways that distract students from it. She showcased a series of mobile phone policies from schools around the globe to demonstrate just how different the approaches taken by schools are. This was followed by a group discussion about how to balance up the benefits and drawbacks of using mobile devices in education.

In their workshop, The Handbook of Mobile Teaching and Learning, Aimee Zhang and Dean Cristol described the 2015 publication of this book through Springer, as well as outlining plans for a second edition. Given the number of new possibilities emerging in the field, as showcased in the papers at this conference, there will be no shortage of material to include in the new version! Some key emerging focus areas are likely to include wearables and AR/VR.

Jacarandas in blossom, Sydney, Australia. Photo by Mark Pegrum, 2016. May be reused under CC BY 3.0 licence

As always, then, this year’s mLearn Conference highlighted currently emerging themes around mobile learning, providing a snapshot of where we’re at, where we’re heading, and what our most pressing questions are.

The CALL of the beach

Posted on August 25, 2016 by Mark under M-learning

EUROCALL Conference
Limassol, Cyprus
24-27 August, 2016

St Raphael Resort, Limassol, Cyprus. Photo by Mark Pegrum, 2016. May be reused under CC BY 3.0 licence.

This year’s annual EUROCALL Conference, focused on the theme of CALL Communities and Culture, took place at the St Raphael Resort in Limassol, Cyprus. With daily temperatures in the mid-30s, delegates made good use of the beaches and swimming pools before and after the conference sessions. In the conference sessions themselves, meanwhile, key themes emerged around the potential for using digital technologies to support learning in areas which to date have in some ways fallen outside of mainstream conversations about language teaching: in the teaching of less widely spoken languages, in the development of digital literacies and 21st century skills, and in the promotion of multiculturalism and even multilingualism. Running through many of the presentations was a strong sense that it’s time for educators to help students make greater use of digital technologies to shape their own learning environments and experiences.

In my opening keynote, Why mobile devices aren’t enough: Learning languages, building communities and exploring cultures, I spoke about the role to be played by educators in drawing our students’ attention explicitly to the potential inherent in their everyday mobile devices, used in their everyday contexts, to support language learning, community building, and cultural and intercultural exploration. While there is clearly a place for social justice projects which make use of basic technologies and traditional pedagogies in under-resourced contexts, it’s interesting to note that many of the most creative of today’s mobile learning initiatives, at least those located in better-resourced settings, combine the learning of languages with the development of digital literacies and 21st century skills, often in multicultural contexts, and sometimes in multilingual contexts. In such initiatives, students produce their own user-generated content which not only supports their own learning, but can support the learning of peers and even wider communities.

In his keynote on the second day, Let’s play with constructionism, Panayiotis Zaphiris from Cyprus University of Technology began by introducing Seymour Paper’s theory of constructionism which, unlike constructivism, is not so much about learning by discussing, but learning by creating and building artefacts. He then went on to outline the newer idea of social constructionism, which adds social components to the original concept of constructionism. Artefacts, he explained, can be physical or digital constructions. Through a series of case studies based in the Cyprus Interaction Lab, he went on to indicate six key elements of implementing social constructionism:

developing physical learning spaces for constructionist learning
learners constructing shared/common understanding
learners playing and having fun
constructing learners’ communities of interest/practice
giving learners tools for constructing their knowledge
involving learners in designing their learning

The last of these elements, he suggested, is the most innovative. He reported on a study entitled Constructionism, Participatory Design and CALL focusing on a course called Learn Greek Online, where people can learn the Greek language without a teacher necessarily being online. The site was developed using participatory design and distributed social constructionism. A set of old audio lessons were posted online without further guiding materials, but the learning community then began to support each other and to create materials: transcribing audio files, correcting each other’s transcriptions, and so on. By 2002, there were 50,000 students; this was a kind of MOOC before MOOCs.

In her keynote on the third day, Deconstructing digital literacy practices: Identity narratives from the South, Leila Kajee explained that digital technologies provide children with alternative platforms to engage in social interaction, and multiple identities are the norm. The South African Cyber Lives project maps digital practices across generations, contexts and communities, looking at how users construct their identities digitally and what the implications are for teaching and learning English. Often children’s out-of-school digital literacy practices are not recognised inside the classroom, but in fact these out-of-school practices have important implications for the classroom. The New Literacy Studies movement focuses our attention on the shifting landscape of home, community, work and schools, and gives us a set of theoretical lenses to examine the interconnection between these. Digital literacies, she went on to say, have many components from access through information analysis to sharing and safety. Drawing on the work of Stuart Hall and Chris Weedon, she explained the postmodern perspective that a person has no single fixed identity, and that history, language and identity are intertwined. She gave a range of examples of how ordinary individuals are using social media platforms to construct identities, to engage socially, and to develop a voice under sometimes difficult circumstances.

She then looked at three examples of young learners’ use of digital technologies. Firstly, she talked about the use of the children’s game Moshi Monsters by a young girl, Eva, who created a story around her reality and cyberreality, embodying her chosen persona through an avatar, while also creating a second, male avatar. Secondly, she showed a digital video narrative by Khutso, a second language speaker of English, explaining his journey to becoming a teacher; he constructed an identity as poverty-stricken and wearing a mask to school, before reaching a turning point – inspirational teachers – who made him want to become a change agent himself. In another digital video narrative by Watkins, who also chose to become a teacher, the narrator began by characterising himself as a rebel before reaching a Eureka moment when he realised that he himself could be the change he wanted to see in wider society. Thirdly, she discussed a girl, Cassie, who used Facebook as a way of establishing her diasporic identity, having moved from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to South Africa, through mechanisms such as selfies and wall posts, where she sought to establish her own voice.

Exploring digital literacies with students in school, she said, can be a way of reimagining opportunities for connections across institutional and community contexts, and providing permeable boundaries between home and school. In the process, students can develop voice and identity. It is important, she concluded, to reimagine opportunities for identity construction across contexts.

In the first series of parallel sessions, I chaired a strand in which presenters outlined the use of digital technologies in teaching a variety of less commonly taught languages. It was intriguing and inspiring to hear about the uses of new technologies to support languages which, because of smaller numbers of speakers and/or learners, are much less well-resourced than more widely spoken languages.

In her paper, CALL and less commonly taught languages – Still a way to go, Monica Ward spoke about the fact that there is still a distance to go before new technologies become normalised in the practice of teachers of less commonly taught languages (some of which may be quite widely spoken, but not so commonly taught in some geographical areas). Using the examples of Arabic, Irish and Nawat (from El Salvador), she outlined issues with the kinds of access pathways students may have into potential language learning materials. Teachers should learn from others’ practices, and can pick and choose among the options, starting with the ‘low-hanging fruit’, that is, widely available and relatively simple tools that we know to work well.

In their paper, Teaching Turkish in low-tech contexts: Opportunities and challenges, Katerina Antoniou and Antigoni Parmaxi spoke about teaching Turkish in Cyprus, where they introduced Kahoot, with students using internet-connected computers and answers displayed via a projector (since mobile devices could not be used due to a lack of wifi). This allowed all students, who were of different ages, to participate. Students were motivated and involved, and were willing to discuss their answers with the group. At the beginning, however, the adult students thought Kahoot was just a game which was a waste of their time, but over time they came to see its benefits. While older students could help younger students with language, the roles were reversed when it came to helping with technology. Challenges, the presenters suggested, can be opportunities when diverse skills, interests, motivations, goals and abilities complement each other. Despite the challenges, they concluded, a low-tech context can still offer more opportunities than a no-tech context.

In his presentation, A platform and customization toolkit for error-tolerant search of language resources, Anton Rytting described the need for a platform that allows language learners to search for words they have heard in an error-tolerant context so that they can find what they are looking for, even if they have misheard sounds or if they miswrite words. He showcased a ‘Did You Mean’ (DYM) system for a language called Dhivehi, spoken in the Maldives, where possible dictionary entries can be displayed based on their closeness of fit with the word typed by the student. To make such a system, you need a dictionary, a query alphabet, an error model (based on the mistakes you think learners are likely to make), and a way of testing it based on likely queries. There is a DYM Toolkit available, created by researchers at the University of Maryland, that teachers and others can use to create such error-tolerant platforms for different language learners.

In his presentation, An audio-lexicon Spanish-Nahuatl: Using technology to promote and disseminate a native Mexican language, Aurelio López-López described the ALEN application that allows users to enter a word in Nahuatl or Spanish to hear the pronunciation of the word, and to see an illustrative image. The overall goal is to safeguard engendered languages, including by taking advantage of mobile devices which are widely used by young people.

Dealing in some ways with the opposite end of the spectrum, Jack Burston gave a paper entitled The contribution of CALL to advanced level foreign/second language instruction, in which he showed that there have been remarkably few publications in CALL journals about advanced-level instruction using technology. It is notable that advanced-level language barely rates a mention in the published CALL literature, and this research is very limited in terms of the L2 studied, with English the centre of attention followed distantly by German and French. There are four times as many studies about written language as about speaking/listening skills. Above all, these studies are vague about what an advanced level is, and the difficulty of the tasks students are required to undertake. To date, he concluded, CALL has contributed very little to our understanding or practice of advanced foreign/second language instruction. On the positive side, there is great scope for SLA research at the advanced level, with more methodological rigour needed where ‘advanced’ is defined and substantiated; there is a need for a focus on oral as well as written language; and there is room for considering innovative CALL applications such as mobile and/or cloud-based projects.

Another conference theme was digital literacies and 21st century skills seen as an accompaniment to language learning. In their presentation, Preparing Japanese students’ digital literacy for study abroad: How much CALL training is needed?, Travis Cote and Brett Milliner noted that previous research suggests Japanese first year university students lack core computer literacy skills. In surveys, they found that Japanese students assessed their own computer literacy skills as low. Ultimately, the presenters suggested, the students’ lack of ability to use productivity tools is preventing them from using computers effectively for critical thinking and problem solving, since students need to spend time focusing on using the technology itself rather than what the technology should enable them to do. Although smartphone ownership is at 100%, students tend to use these devices only for social and entertainment functions. In the future the presenters plan to encourage blogging to help students develop a range of skills including typing, composition and manipulation of images; provide opportunities to participate in online discussions; provide opportunities that incorporate presentation software; and introduce students to cloud computing as a way to expose them to collaboration.

In their follow-up paper, Tertiary EFL teachers’ digital literacy: Is CALL training still needed?, Brett Milliner, Travis Cote and Ethel Ogane reported on a study of 42 faculty members teaching English at Tamagawa University in Japan, conducted in order to determine their digital literacy levels, whether they could benefit from extra training, and whether they could lead students in using computers for CALL purposes. Teachers were relatively modest in their self-assessment of digital knowledge and skills. Most teachers said they enjoyed using computers and felt comfortable doing so, but also wanted to learn more about computers. Teachers thus believe in the use of digital technologies in the classroom and are open to further professional development in this area. Interestingly, they had often acquired their knowledge and skills independently or through peer-to-peer learning.

In her presentation, Digital literacies for language learning and teaching: Developing a national framework, Françoise Blin reported on a six-institution, nationally funded Irish project, led by the University of Limerick, with two major aims: to develop a national framework for digital literacies for language learning and teaching, and to curate and create a wide range of OERs accessible via an online portal. The first aim focuses on the intertwined strands of language skills and practice; digital literacies; and transitions and contexts. In time, all language courses in Ireland should contain learning outcomes for digital literacies within their descriptors. It is important that there is sustainability of e-learning – it has to meet the needs of present and future teachers and learners – as well as sustainability and normalisation of CALL. Surveys to date have revealed that students feel the need to acquire more digital literacies than are currently covered in their courses, while teachers feel that they are lacking in some digital literacies that their students might need them to teach.

Another strong theme of the conference focused on multilingualism and multiculturalism. In her talk, Multilingual CALL – The good, the bad, and the ugly, from the perspective of teacher training students, Judith Buendgens-Kostens suggested that multilingual CALL could involve participants using all the languages to which they have access, ranging from their native languages through to languages in which they might know only a few words. She spoke about the Erasmus project MElang-E, which takes the form of a serious game where players follow the progress of a young musician across Europe as he seeks to convince former bandmates to join in a music competition. Players are faced with a series of communicative situations in which they can make choices about what languages, or combinations of languages, to use in response to interlocutors. There are also many codeswitching situations presented to players, where they can see similarities and differences between languages. In reporting on students’ reactions to this game, she noted that there is much greater acceptance of widely spoken and taught languages, while there is little appreciation of languages that do not have an obvious market value, though they might in fact have other kinds of value in terms of identity or simply enjoyment. The question is whether stakeholders can be convinced that there is a role for this kind of multilingual game in education.

In their talk, Promoting multilingual communicative competence through multimodal academic learning situations, Anna Kyppö and Teija Natri reported on an interdisciplinary course of multilingual interaction piloted at the University of Jyväskylä Language Centre, focusing on the students’ effective use of their own linguistic repertoires and the enhancement of their agency in multilingual and multicultural settings. The learning environment was a combination of a face-to-face classroom, a web-based platform called Optima, and an educational mobile platform called REAL, all used within a task-based framework where language was the instrument for completing tasks (and students were free to use any languages at their disposal). Students’ multilingual and multicultural awareness grew, they were able to adopt skills for their future working lives, and they came to see their peers as learning resources. In the future, the presenters plan to introduce more multilingual and multimodal courses into subject study, to enhance students’ focus on successful communication rather than accurate language use, to more efficiently employ social media and multimodal interactive online resources, and to employ PLEs (personal learning environments).

In her paper, Preparing students’ mobility through telecollaboration: The I-Tell project, Catherine Jeanneau explained that the better prepared students are for experiences abroad, the more they will gain from the experiences. Students need practical advice, linguistic development, intercultural competence, self-awareness and learner autonomy; and there has been a suggestion that the preparation should be more formative than informative (Gutierrez, Duran & Beltran, 2015). The I-Tell project aimed to develop participants’ intercultural, linguistic and digital skills. Volunteer Irish and Spanish students were paired the semester before they went abroad. Over 8 weeks they completed one task per fortnight, using asynchronous and synchronous modes, multimodal communication, and 50% Spanish and 50% English; for example, they were asked to co-design a document giving advice to students going abroad for study. Students were generally positive about the project, but found that time was an issue. The technological platforms were not dictated to students, who chose to use a mixture of tools including email, VoiceThread, Skype, Facebook, Google+, WhatsApp, Instagram and FaceTime; social media in general were seen as authentic channels of communication. Students identified both similarities and differences between the cultures, and generally obtained a broader perspective on the other culture. They reported developing different language skills with the help of peer learning and peer correction. Students engaged in an exchange of practical information, but there was also a lot of psychological preparation involving emotional support. Lessons learnt include the importance of facilitators who can keep the project moving, getting the timing right, setting collaborative tasks, and considering the developmental needs of students.

A whole range of tool types, platforms, and approaches were mentioned in the presentations. Covering a popular tool in his talk, Quizlet: What the students think – A qualitative data analysis, Bruce Lander mentioned that the use of Quizlet has grown dramatically in recent years, with a number of well-known competitors now also on the market, including the recently popular Kahoot. He reported on a study involving text mining of Japanese students’ comments about Quizlet, showing that they were generally very positive about the vocabulary learning possible through Quizlet. He concluded by mentioning Mark Warschauer’s three main reasons for using technology in education – improving academic achievement, facilitating new kinds of learning, and promoting social equity – and linking these to Puentedura’s SAMR model. He wrapped up with a demonstration of Quizlet Live, suggesting that it can be a great tool to engage students in team competitions in the classroom.

In his presentation, Podcasting in a mobile world: Power, potential and pitfalls, Jaime Selwood, the producer of the English News Weekly and the lower-level English News Monthly podcasts, mentioned that there are now 130,000 English language podcasts available in iTunes, with the Chinese language in second place. Beyond the release of the iPod itself, he said, major game changers for podcasting have been the release of smartphones and the expansion of the mobile internet. He mentioned two key ways in which he uses podcasts with his university level English learners in Japan: as out-of-class assignments 4-6 times a semester where students complete podcast activities and later report back to the class; and as part of a podcast creation course where students make and publish 4 podcasts a semester, having recorded, written and edited all the materials themselves. In a student survey, 83% said they liked using podcasts in the first way, mainly because they had choices about which podcasts to listen to; and 77% liked the second way, again mentioning the freedom to choose their own topics.

In his talk, Enhanced tools for CLIL and Clil4U, Kent Andersen outlined an EU project which has developed a pool of resources to support CLIL, now publicly available on the Clil4U website. He then went on to describe another project, Improved Safety for Electricians, where there is an inbuilt CLIL element, allowing users to quickly and easily click on words in the English instructions for automated translations into many other languages. Teachers are able to make use of the Clilstore resource to develop their own materials of this kind. He suggested that to develop the CLIL element more fully, it is important to also build in exercises for students, and this functionality should eventually be added into Clilstore.

In her presentation, Urban explorations for language learning: A gamified approach to teaching Italian in a university context, Koula Charitonos outlined a pervasive and gamified approach to language teaching and learning. She described an Italian language learning game called ImparApp, created with the TaleBlazer authoring tool from MIT, and developed at Coventry University. There are gamified fictional narratives which involve participants in mixed reality, location-based quests using mobile devices in real-world settings. Players can interact with virtual characters, objects and data. In a pilot study, it was found that students thought this was a good orientation activity, permitting incidental learning and helping them learn about history. There were also challenges, such as students focusing mainly on finding the next location and not interacting with each other, with risks to health and safety as students focused on devices rather than their environment. Students also suggested incorporating more visuals, zoomable maps, and Italian background music, as well as ways of facilitating social interaction.

In his paper, Mobile-assisted language learning and language learner autonomy, Paul Lyddon spoke about the importance of learner autonomy – that is, the right to self-determination, or the “capacity to take control of one’s own learning” (Benson, 2011) – to support lifelong learning. He suggested that there are potential areas of interface between mobile technologies and autonomy: mobile devices allow learning anytime and anywhere; are conduits to rich, multimodal content; and are extensions of our mental and physical faculties in areas like observation, recall, research and communication. He went on to note that there is an incongruence between learner training courses which help students to develop independent goal setting, and to apply that know-how in informal learning contexts and, on the other hand, traditional formal learning contexts with course and programme standards, where times and places are administratively decided, and where there are classroom policies to prevent off-task behaviour. This dramatically constrains the versatility of the devices. In formal settings, students may have the ability and the possibility, but often not the permission, to use their devices as they wish to support their learning. He suggested that we could consider moving towards a model of socially responsible learner autonomy, where students fulfil the requirements of a course in terms of enrolment and assignment completion, with different degrees of autonomy being possible in the process of carrying out course tasks. To remediate the current situation, he concluded, we should explicitly acknowledge the limited nature of autonomy in formal learning contexts; inculcate expectations of learner characteristics aimed at helping students to fulfil assignment requirements in personally meaningful ways; and foster new forms of self-awareness and self-discipline to enable mobile devices to be deployed effectively to support greater autonomy.

The Mediterranean, Limassol, Cyprus. Photo by Mark Pegrum, 2016. May be reused under CC BY 3.0 licence.

The last day of the conference wrapped up with a roundtable hosted by Mirjam Hauck, where a number of presenters were asked our opinions on the takeaway messages of the conference. For me, the first takeaway message concerns a changing sense of CALL, which is now extending into areas like lesser-taught languages, digital literacies and 21st century skills, and multilingualism and multiculturalism. This makes CALL as a concept somewhat more amorphous and diffuse, but simultaneously richer, as teachers and researchers who may not traditionally have been part of CALL conversations are drawn into our discussions.

My second takeaway message concerns differences between the CALL conversations (and more general educational technology conversations) in Asia and Europe. Much of the time, I attend and present at conferences in the Asian region, and it is striking to see how different the tone of the conversation is in the European region. In the latter case, there would generally seem to be a more widespread acceptance of the benefits of multilingualism and codeswitching as opposed to immersive target language learning, of communicative competence as opposed to linguistic accuracy, and of student input into learning designs as opposed to the mandating of learning content by ministries of education, institutions or teachers. At the same time, there are important pedagogical and technological developments taking place in Asia, perhaps most notably in the area of contextualisation of learning as a way of dealing with issues around transfer distance, as seen in the development of large, often state- or ministry-backed mobile augmented reality learning projects – but most of these projects seem to be almost unheard-of in Europe. There is clearly much to be gained from more conversation between European and Asian teachers and researchers about the most promising directions for future technology-enhanced language learning.

Technology meets language and literacy

Posted on July 15, 2016 by Mark under M-learning

CLESOL Conference
Hamilton, New Zealand
14-17 July, 2016

Victoria Street, Hamilton, New Zealand. Photo by Mark Pegrum, 2016. May be reused under CC BY 3.0 licence.

The biannual CLESOL (Community Languages and ESOL) Conference took place this year in the university town of Hamilton, south of Auckland. It addressed the theme of Learners in Context: Bridging the Gaps.

In my keynote on the first main day of the conference, I addressed the conference theme with respect to mobile learning in a presentation entitled Learners in context: Bridging everyday language learning gaps with mobile devices. I focused on the way that mobile devices can be used to help bridge many language learning gaps: between the haves and have-nots, between traditional and contemporary pedagogies, between episodic and extended learning, between formal and informal learning, and between classroom and situated learning. I suggested that in addition to asking our students to use their mobile devices to support their formal language courses, we should also draw their attention to the opportunities for informal education, where they can use their everyday devices in their everyday contexts to support their everyday language learning.

In their workshop, Many rivers to cross: Engaging learners using computer tools and mobile apps, Patrick Coleman and Daryl Streat from Lincoln University spoke about the inevitability of ongoing technological development, suggesting that educators need to keep up with it because of the implications for learning and work. They took workshop participants through a series of interactive activities accessed on the Many Rivers to Cross Blendspace website. Along the way, they strongly advocated that there must be pedagogical reasons for using new technologies, rather than using them for their own sake. For example, social media tools can be used to extend learning outside the classroom space. They mentioned several models which can be employed to frame our understanding of how we’re using new technologies pedagogically:

Ruben Puentedura’s well-known SAMR model;
Joan Hughes et al’s alternative RAT model (referring to Replacement, Amplification, Transformation);
Chris Hesselbein’s modified RAT model which becomes the RATL model (where L refers to Leadership).

They noted, too, that generic technological training may not always be appropriate; it is important to consider what technological uses are appropriate for any given context.

In her paper, Online activity that works, Jill Hadfield from Unitec mentioned that there has been a considerable rise in the use of the terms interaction and interactivity in the area of educational technologies. While some people use the former to mean human-human interaction and the latter to mean human-machine interaction, most use the terms interchangeably.

Referring to her new book Interaction Online with Lindsay Clandfield, she went on to suggest that interaction between humans and machines could be called weak interaction, and that between humans and humans could be called strong interaction. Much of the former involves tasks that are very behaviourist in nature, while the latter is not only motivating but vital for learning. There are many platforms, ranging from Moodle through Edmodo to Facebook, where students can communicate with others as individuals and groups. She suggested that there are 5 main types of interactive language learning tasks:

factual (finding and sharing information on a factual topic)
personal (exchanging personal information)
fanciful (entering into an imaginary situation)
critical (exchanging opinions on a topic, as in a typical discussion forum)
creative (where students create something together)

She went on to give examples of interactive tasks pertaining to each of these categories, and showed how they can generate very different types of interaction patterns, such as:

Confetti (students all ‘throw in’ their responses to a teacher prompt)
Poker (students have numbers and respond in a set sequence)
Creative Commons (students are given rules for a collaborative task)

In her presentation, A blended collaborative approach to academic writing: Preliminary findings, Anita Pu outlined early findings from an action research study on an approach to ESL academic writing which blended face-to-face activities and online tasks using Google Docs and Google Hangouts. All participants reported that they liked face-to-face collaborative writing. Six out of 11 liked network-based collaborative writing using Google Docs and Google Hangouts; three commented negatively on passive group members, and difficulties in expressing or understanding opinions. Ten out of 11 liked the overall blended collaborative writing approach. All participants were positive about the convenience of using Google Docs. They were partly positive about Google Hangouts; however, it was found that it couldn’t be used on a phone with a Chinese ID, and they felt it was one more messaging app on top of those they were already using. Pu concluded that while using only network-based collaborative writing might not be a good idea in an ESL context, an overall blended collaborative writing approach is appropriate because it makes learning more fun, makes it easier to pool ideas and knowledge from different people, and provides more opportunities for interaction.

In her talk, Getting it write: Using technology (Google Slides and Blogger) to help engage reluctant writers, Navjot McCormack from Linwood College, Christchurch, spoke about the use of technology to help English language learners overcome barriers to writing. She reported on a research study of students using Google Slides collaboratively to create group presentations, followed by reflecting individually on the process on personal blogs. Despite initial hesitation, students generally demonstrated a high level of interactivity, negotiation, problem-solving and interdependence. Students reacted very positively and collaborated well in the slide creation task, and even during the personal blogging task they were seen helping each other. One important facet of this project was the co-construction of knowledge: students enjoyed playing the role of technology experts and helping the teacher and other. There were a number of challenges: students were less keen on editing the slides once they had been created; although they enjoyed sharing their presentations, they gave little constructive feedback, which is an area that needs to be trained; and technology issues and slow internet speeds were frustrating. Overall, this was an empowering exercise for students.

In his talk, Reflections of a late adopter: Language learning principles and MALL, John Macalister from Victoria University in Wellington suggested that we need to ask how new technologies add value to our teaching. Discussing language learning apps, he suggested that while they have some advantages, some of them also have key limitations: they do not always use language in meaningful ways; they do not necessarily present the most frequent language; and they may cause interference by presenting similar words and phrases simultaneously. He pointed out that these apps can play a useful supporting role for motivated language learners who already have some experience of the language, and suggested that they could be used in a targeted way by teachers to complement language learning in the classroom, especially if teachers exploit the gamification elements typical of these apps.

In his presentation, The future of language learning: AI and CALL, Wolfgang Sperlich from NorthTec asked whether we might see robotic language teachers in the future. He spoke about the trend towards automation of language assessment, where all components including writing and speaking are assessed by software using statistical matching. There are various dangers here, including that teachers will increasingly teach towards these automated tests, using the restricted conceptions of language that may underpin them, and the limited tasks that may compose them. He concluded that AI and CALL have positive potential but that we need to guard against their limitations.

In her presentation, Mapping the spaces between learners and teachers: A guide for critical pedagogy, Margaret Franken spoke about the interplay of complex epistemological and pedagogical space. In her discussion of pedagogical space, as a space within which there is a particular configuration and alignment of learning resources, she suggested that in addition to the well-known social constructivist concept of the ZPD (Zone of Proximal Development), we should also consider the subconcepts of the ZAA (Zone of Available Assistance; that is, the resources available to provide assistance to a learner) and ZPA (Zone of Proximal Adjustment; that is, the subset of the ZAA which is appropriate for a learner at a given moment). These are concepts drawn from the work of Rosemary Luckin in particular. She went on to mention that we need to take into consideration spaces which are beyond our educational gaze, such as those social media forums where students exchange academic support with other online community members, who thus come to function as brokers of literacy practices and knowledge.

It was very informative to attend a language and literacy conference where presenters approached educational technologies from a specifically language-oriented viewpoint, thus bringing different perspectives to bear on the technology compared to those commonly heard at dedicated educational technology events.

New devices, new spaces, and new games

Posted on June 18, 2016 by Mark under M-learning

eLearning Forum Asia
Shanghai, China
13-15 June, 2016

Zhujiajiao Old Town (朱家角), Shanghai, China. Photo by Mark Pegrum, 2016. May be reused under CC BY 3.0 licence.

The annual eLFA conference moved this year to Shanghai, where as usual it brought together a mixed group of educators and technologists, especially from the Asian region but also from further afield. There was a strong emphasis this year on the need to make room for students’ use of multiple devices, especially mobile devices, for learning. There was considerable discussion of online learning platforms or spaces where students’ learning experiences can be gathered together; these ranged from traditional LMSs through online platforms like Google Classroom to the cutting-edge developments around MOOCs, learning analytics, and the use of xAPI to track, collate and derive insights from students’ various learning devices and platforms. Another key theme to emerge was gamification, including how it can be applied to platforms ranging from apps through to MOOCs.

In his presentation, Reimagining education, Yves Dehouck, the Vice President of Blackboard, listed six key educational trends of the future as identified by Blackboard:

Learner-centric education
Non-traditional learners
Big data
Consumer preferences
Education is truly global
Online and mobile everywhere

He went on to pick up on the last two points. By 2020, four in 10 of the world’s young graduates in higher education will be coming from China and India. This means a need to further develop the educational infrastructure in those countries, as well as opening up opportunities for the educational systems of the surrounding countries. These students will want to learn anytime, anywhere, on any device.

In her presentation, Pedagogical intelligence: A student lens for inquiry into informal digital learning practices, Caroline Steel, also from Blackboard, argued that it is critical for students to understand the impact that their informal digital learning can have on their formal learning. Digital literacies are now essential for students, along with soft skills like critical thinking and creativity. She explained that we need help our students develop pedagogical intelligence, so that they:

gain an understanding of learning and teaching theories
gain insights into how they learn and how others learn
are aware that teaching styles are as diverse as learning styles (and some may not suit them)
are empowered to navigate learning and teaching, by developing the capacity to self-teach and self-regulate their learning
are better informed as co-partners in education

She gave an example of a Learning Challenge class where she helped students to develop their understanding in this area. Students benefited in terms of making better use of informal learning and setting their own goals, and they appreciated the inbuilt gaming aspects. Looking towards the future, she suggested that elements of pedagogical intelligence could be foregrounded through some kind of wearable mobile device which offers learning analytics, with gamification and social aspects included.

In my keynote, Developing mobile literacy, which tied in with the theme of the move towards multiple mobile devices in education, I outlined a range of ways that we can deepen students’ learning and engagement as we help them to develop the mobile literacy (and the constituent digital literacies which feed into it) that is so crucial in a digitally enabled mobile world.

In her talk, Seeding learning innovations in continuing education and training in Singapore, Zan Chen spoke about the current context of more global demand for innovation, as product life cycles become shorter and shorter, while we are simultaneously seeing a convergence of technologies, and a need for multidisciplinary research. In this context, there is considerable scope for open innovation. She went on to describe iN.LAB, part of the Institute for Adult Learning in Singapore, which focuses on providing a space to foster collaboration around innovation. She described the half-yearly InnovPlus event, a funded competition designed to catalyse innovation by bringing together organisations facing training/learning challenges and potential solution providers, or teams of solution providers.

In his talk, Using Google Classroom and Google Apps for Education (GAFE) as a learning environment to deliver blended learning for a large cohort of students, Yik Sheng Lee reported on a Malaysian action research project involving a study of teachers’ use of Google Classroom and Apps. Despite teachers’ intentions, it was found that the technology was being used overwhelmingly for content delivery rather than to facilitate student collaboration. Drawing on Garrison & Anderson’s Community of Inquiry (CoI) model for online learning, Lee indicated that the affordances of the learning environment – to foster cognitive presence, teaching presence, and social presence – were thus not being fully utilised, with the current focus being on cognitive presence and students learning individually. This led to two types of interventions: more training, and sharing of teachers’ experiences. This has in turn led to greater adoption of the technology, and the next stage of the research will focus on whether the teachers are using the environment more fully and promoting interactivity.

In her talk, Self-paced learning through co-construction in MOOCs, Betty Hui from CUHK suggested that MOOCs offer a different learning opportunity from traditional classroom learning, with students choosing educators and what courses to take. MOOCs offer flexibility of learning in both self-paced and weekly content. Learning no longer happens in a set or individual context. The possibility for learning in tandem with other learners around the globe is unprecedented. There can be a real opportunity for co-constructing meaning through interactions with global peers.

In his plenary, Developing MOOC-enabled flipped learning courses, Jin-Hyouk Im from UNIST in South Korea suggested that to deal with falling income but higher demands in education, MOOCs and flipped learning are possible strategies worth adopting. He went on to discuss the nature of MOOCs (see figure below). One of the possible limitations of MOOCs is that students may learn passively; the pros include automation and instant feedback. MOOCs can also be used as SPOCs (small private online courses) for one class at a time; this would generally be a paid model, like paying for a textbook.

Nature of MOOCs (Jin-Hyouk Im, 2016)

Traditionally, we have handled the lower levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy in class, and the higher levels in after-class activities; but flipped learning allows us to reverse this. Indeed, MOOCs could be used for the lower levels, and flipped learning for the higher levels, with the highest levels being addressed in class as part of an overall flipped approach; this is a kind of MOOC-enabled flipped learning. He gave the example of the Residential MITx programme as a way of realising this. A partly MOOC-based teaching approach can also offer students the advantage of being able to take some components of their courses from a range of international institutions.

In his presentation, An analysis model and framework design for a MOOC platform, Nien-Lin Hsueh from Feng Chia University, Taiwan, spoke about the information that an instructor can gain from learning analytics regarding learners’ engagement, where difficulties have arisen, and learners’ performance. Researchers, for their part, can learn about behaviour in MOOCs, what is good video design, and behaviour vs performance. He concluded by emphasising the importance of a goal-driven approach to analysis, and a flexible architecture to tailor the analysis. However, data analysis alone, he said, is not enough.

In his talk, Using xAPI and learning analytics in education, Kin Chew Lim from SIM University, Singapore, spoke about the difficulties of the LMS-centric model: the LMS must always be connected to the internet; it can’t consolidate learning from different devices and social media; the teacher is still the knowledge dispenser and content organiser; the content is mostly text-based and linear; and the widely used multiple-choice questions always have single answers. He asked how, when students use many different types of devices and apps – from mobile devices to AR apps – it is possible to capture their learning.

xAPI has been developed to deal with this; the x stands for ‘experience’. SCORM, which is about packaging interoperable content and linking it into an LMS, is now 15 years old. People these days communicate and collaborate more with mobile devices, but they do not necessarily connect their devices to the internet 24 hours a day. People learn differently through texting, desktop learning, iPads or Android phones. Rustici Software was commissioned to come up with a new e-learning platform; this is xAPI, also commonly referred to as Tin Can API. It is a set of open specifications to track learning experiences, and is still evolving. It is commonly regarded as the next generation after SCORM. xAPI comes down to a noun-verb-object statement, e.g., ‘I watch a video on YouTube’, or ‘I practise yoga’, which can capture a learning experience. It uses JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) to specify the API statements. These records go into an LRS, or Learning Record Store; whether you play a game, do a simulation, write a blog, or watch a YouTube video, this can all be stored in the LRS.

In his plenary, Flipped class and xAPI learning data analysis, Lijie Chin from the Chinese e-Learning Association of Taiwan showed how xAPI has been used in the Taiwanese context. He emphasised the importance of problem-solving approaches and creativity. He spoke about using Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy in the context of a flipped approach in such a way as to change the emphasis of learning in the classroom (see figure below).

Bloom’s Taxonomy (Lijie Chin, 2016)

He then went on to discuss the value of gathering big data from students’ online learning experiences. He outlined the Taipei CooC-Cloud (Taipei CooC-Learning) system, which allows students to use multiple kinds of hardware to access software from diverse companies, all of which conforms to the same technological standard (xAPI) so that students’ learning data can be captured and analysed in a multi-platform database. Insights can be drawn together from all of a student’s learning activities, ranging from their actions in a MOOC to their interactions with an e-book.

Teachers can better understand students’ learning behaviour, allowing them to better support students and modify their teaching as appropriate. Students can also access their own records to gain insight into their learning strengths and weaknesses. More insight is thus available into students’ learning processes, not just the final results. He demonstrated some of the wide range of visualisations of student learning which are available. Students will be able to develop a cloud résumé that they can take away with them at the end of their studies.

In his keynote on Gamification for education, Ping-Cheng (Benson) Yeh from the National Taiwan University spoke about the value of gamification, which should have elements of competition, peer acknowledgement, and smart rules. He gave the example of a probability course where, rather than setting problems for the students, he had students create problems for each other; this meant the students had to understand the content well, and they were able to set complex, creative problems for each other. Students were highly engaged in setting and solving these problems. Gamification, he suggested, pushes students to their limit.

He went on to explain about a second gaming approach he developed, PaGamO, on the Coursera MOOC platform. Students had to complete problems in order to occupy land in a gaming environment, and could purchase monsters from a store to help safeguard the land they had taken over. A worldwide ranking board encouraged students to remain engaged in the game. It was found that there was a high correlation between students’ PaGamO scores and their Coursera grades. When surveyed, students agreed that they could now finish more challenging tasks. PaGamO is currently being used for K12 students in all subjects, for corporate training, and in higher education courses. A variation was also developed for students who, instead of engaging in competition, prefer to develop the land they have occupied in the game.

When it comes to flipped teaching, he suggested it is naïve to simply ask students to start watching lecture videos at home without preparation for this learning style. It is better to have them watch videos together in class to get them used to this kind of approach. When students are asked to watch videos at home, one possibility is to have a poll, for example on Facebook, so students can see that others are watching the videos; another possibility is to have a chat group on WeChat or a similar app where students can post messages as they finish watching the videos. It was found that this peer-to-peer approach increased the percentage of students viewing videos from around 60% to 90%. Those students who have not watched a video can be asked to watch the video at the back of the face-to-face class, while other students participate in the follow-up activities. With the majority of students carrying out these in-class activities, it becomes easy for the teacher to identify learning problems in the group.

MOOCs and gamification, he concluded, are here to stay. Gamification will soon be a must-have for education, and students may find it difficult to concentrate on anything that doesn’t have gaming elements. His ideas are outlined in his book Teach for the Future.

In his presentation, Gamified pedagogy: Examining how gamified educational apps coupled with effective pedagogy support learning, Ronnie Shroff talked about the importance of designing gaming apps in such a way that students can engage with them in a state of flow. Instructional design is important here: gamification should not be an excuse for simplistic learning designs. Points, levels, rewards, leaderboards, quests and customisation are good gamification elements to include. Feedback, including through elements like points and leaderboards, is also critical, and good game design builds in freedom to fail along the way.

In his bilingual presentation on the final day, Smarter education in China: Theoretical efforts and pedagogical practices, Zhiting Zhu from East China Normal University began by outlining international developments in smart learning environments in South Korea, Australia, and around the world. He went on to say that the Chinese translation of ‘smart’ is close to the idea of ‘wisdom’. He indicated that according to Confucius, wisdom can be gained in three ways: reflection (the noblest), imitation (the easiest), and experience (the bitterest). Zhu then gave his own definition of smarter education, which he said involves constructing technology-infused environments and creating a finer ecology of pedagogies, so that higher achievements of teaching, better experiences of learning, and personalised learning services can be enabled. Students should emerge with greater wisdom, including a better value orientation, higher thinking quality, stronger doing ability, and deeper potential for creativity. By contrast, ‘stupid education’ involves: not tailoring teaching strategies individually, solely emphasising book-based knowledge, severing history and culture instead of seeing them as a bridge connecting the past with the future, and countenancing higher costs but lower performance in developing educational informatisation in schools.

We need a technologically enabled smart environment combined with smarter pedagogy to lead to smarter talents. He suggested that the move we have seen from e-learning to m-learning to u-learning needs to proceed now to s-learning (‘smart learning’). He spoke about the importance of students having personal online learning spaces, and the role learning analytics might play in these, and he suggested that flipped classrooms can be a trigger for class-based smart learning. In smart classrooms, it should be possible to provide students with precise feedback based on their learning performance. He mentioned a range of ongoing initiatives, from multimodal e-books to physical makerspaces, and showed examples of school-based projects, from problem-based learning approaches to students acting as micro-learning designers.

Challenges include the need for more research on big data; teacher competency requirements; and the need for systemic changes and innovations to build smart schools. Smart education needs to promote whole person development.

eLFA Banner, Shanghai, China. Photo by Mark Pegrum, 2016. May be reused under CC BY 3.0 licence.

Participants would certainly have come away from this conference with a clear sense of key directions of development in contemporary educational technologies, notably including MOOCs, xAPI-enabled learning analytics drawing together insights from students’ learning on multiple devices and platforms, and the growing role of gamification. It will be interesting to see how these themes have developed further when the conference reconvenes in Hong Kong in 2017.

The brain, language and technology

Posted on June 4, 2016 by Mark under M-learning

JALTCALL
Tokyo, Japan
5-6 June, 2016

Street scene, Machida, Tokyo, Japan. Photo by Mark Pegrum, 2016. May be reused under CC BY 3.0 licence.

The JALTCALL Conference this year brought together a sizeable audience at Tamagawa University in Tokyo. For this conference, JALTCALL partnered with the BRAIN SIG (whose full name is the Mind, Brain and Education SIG) to focus on the theme of CALL and the Brain, with various presentations addressing the intersection of knowledge about the brain, language, literacy and educational technologies.

In her virtual plenary, Neuroconstructivism in the modern classroom, Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa began with a warning that, although we know more than ever about the human brain, we still know relatively little. She pointed out that no two human brains are the same, because they are shaped by our past experiences, and that prior knowledge influences new learning. Therefore individuals need different amounts of exposure to new knowledge before they ‘know’ it, because it depends on prior experience with similar information. Neuroconstructivism is a framework focusing on the construction of representations of knowledge in the brain. People will interpret information subjectively depending on their past experiences, and it is important how they connect new knowledge with those experiences.

Language processing as a whole is very complex. To be able to read effectively requires the activation of at least 16 neural pathways in the brain. Writing is even more complex. It is easier to say what parts of the brain are not used in language processing, rather than trying to list all the parts that are. However, recent studies suggest that bilingualism and multilingualism lead to functional, rather than structural, changes in the brain. Neurolinguistics shows many benefits of bilingualism, and no disadvantages.

Three key ideas for teachers are:

Teachers need to attend to the multiple neutral networks needed to achieve a task, such as speaking a foreign language. More basic pathways must be laid down before more complex pathways can be laid down.
The individual brain constructs knowledge based on a combination of genetics and environment (nature vs nurture), so different people have different levels of potential.
Each brain will need different amounts of exposure before it learns, leading to the question of how teachers can respond to all learners.

One way of using technology to do this is through virtual bundles of information which can be presented in mini-libraries online. Each bundle for a weekly topic could, for example, consist of a video and slides introducing a topic and priming students to learn things they don’t already know, and a collection of instructor-recommended resources which allow students to gain further and deeper understanding. These virtual bundles allow learners to each approach the topic from their own starting point, thus providing different levels of entry to the topic; creating the opportunity for learners to fill personal gaps as well as to shine in later face-to-face classes; and enhancing the motivation level of learners due the Goldilocks Effect, where nothing is too easy or too hard. This flipped approach also has the benefit of allowing the teacher to work from a common starting point in face-to-face classes. She wrapped up by referencing the TPACK framework as presenting key considerations for teachers, who need subject knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, and technological knowledge to support the first two of these and to help individual students to learn.

In his virtual plenary, Can neuroimaging inform the principles of learning technology?, Paul Howard-Jones discussed the value of uncertain, rather than certain, rewards in education. He outlined a current study entitled Does ‘gamification’ boost engagement and educational learning? which involves uncertain, escalating rewards, as well as competition with a peer. In another study entitled ‘Brain School’, a comparison was made between a study-only condition, a self-quizzing condition, and a game-based condition (with uncertain, escalating rewards and competing with a peer). In self-reported behavioural results, game-based learning was found to be more engaging than self-quizzing, which in turn was more engaging than study-only. In brain scans, there was found to be some default mode network (DMN) deactivation, which may be a useful neural marker for educational engagement. In other words, gamification increased self-reported engagement and learning, and deactivated DMN. More study is needed on various aspects of these experiments, including on how uncertainty, escalation and peer competition in gaming contribute to the brain’s reward response and learning.

In my keynote, Beyond traditional language and literacy: The rise of mobile literacy, which closed the first day of the conference, I gave an overview of key digital literacies which feed into mobile literacy, as well as making some comments on the need to balance up the advantages of mobile devices (for deepening students’ learning and engagement) with the challenges they present (in areas such as culture, socioeconomics, privacy and surveillance, health, and the environment). Facing up to the challenges of mobile learning, I suggested, will best allow us to capitalise on its possible benefits.

In their presentation, Digital literacy: A case of Japanese EFL students, Jeong-Bae Son and Moonyoung Park spoke about the fact that while young people may use technologies in many aspects of their lives, they often need training on how to do so for learning purposes. After considering various definitions, Jeong-Bae Son defined digital literacy as the ability to use digital technologies at an adequate level for creation, communication, and information search and evaluation, in a digital society. It involves the development of knowledge and skills for using technologies for different purposes. He indicated that there are 5 main elements:

information search and evaluation
creation
communication
collaboration
online safety

Moonyoung Park reported on a study of 70 EFL students at a Japanese university. Even though these were computer science majors, many said they were limited in their ability to create with digital technologies – for example, building webpages or recording digital videos. A considerable percentage did not know virtual worlds like Second Life, or key podcasting or photosharing sites. Students generally perceived their level of digital literacy as moderate to high, but recognised the importance of improving their digital fluency.

In his presentation, Gamification: The future of learning?, Guy Cihi suggested that the lower levels of Bloom’s taxonomy – remembering and understanding – lend themselves to memorisation through a gaming format. A good game is characterised by successive eustresses (positive stresses) experienced in your brain. Most good games use an element of uncertain reward, which produces consistently higher levels of dopamine than do unexpected rewards or certain rewards. This can be seen for example in the use of dice, and the point was illustrated with reference to the Candy Crush game. Almost any game you play with students can be modified so that certain rewards are treated as uncertain rewards. An app like Zondle, which has paired associate tasks, makes use of user-uploaded content, and allows for certain and uncertain game rewards, is an example of a learning game which applies uncertain rewards. The forthcoming Lexxica app Words & Monsters will work on similar principles.

In their presentation, Smartphones and homework, Douglas Jarrell and Emily Mindog pointed out that smartphones have both receptive and productive capabilities, and can be used for ubiquitous access as well as accommodating different learning styles. They discussed Schoology as a platform that can be used both on computers and on mobile phones, though the iPhone and Android apps are a little different. Speaking of childhood education majors, they emphasised the importance of the students improving their speaking and listening skills. They gave examples of activities where students made an audio recording of their speaking; where students had to draw a picture while listening to an audio recording of instructions by the teacher; and where students had to turn a sequence of activities described by the teacher in a video into written instructions. While most students said that using mobile phones for learning was good, convenient and modern, a number ran into data limit problems, and several Android users had problems.

Dangers of sitting all day, every day. Source: Fearless, J.H. (2015). DIY Desk. Made. www.custommade.com/blog/diy-desk/

In his presentation, Killing Them Softly with Phone Love, Brian Gallagher spoke about healthy and unhealthy approaches to our use of digital devices. He highlighted issues like bad posture and poor ergonomics (see figure above), and eye strain, including computer vision syndrome, or CVS (see figure below). He spoke about an annual survey conducted with Japanese students over 4 years, where students, over time, reported greater degrees of agreement with statements that they were using computers too much, felt their eyes were tired after using small screens, and felt dizziness or neck pain after using technology. The danger is that we may be harming our students by using too much technology too much of the time. We should employ good practice and teach this to students, with a key message being to use everything in moderation. We should also consider asking students for their opinions after informing them of good practice.

The 20-20-20 rule. Source: Butler, T. (2015). How to avoid computer eye strain. Lenstore Vision Hub. eyecare.lenstore.co.uk/how-avoid-computer-eye-strain

On the second afternoon of the conference, an unconference session took place where participants were invited to wander between rooms and dip into the various topics being discussed in each room. I dropped in on a series of discussions on topics ranging from voice recognition to physiological responses to screens, as well as an app exchange session which included a whiteboard sharing of useful apps and websites (see figure below). There is a full list of all the apps and websites mentioned, in alphabetical order, on Paul Raine’s blog.

App exchange, JALTCALL Unconference. Photo by Mark Pegrum, 2016. May be reused under CC BY 3.0 licence.

It’s always interesting to come back to Japan – a country with an astonishingly, but unevenly, high-tech landscape – to see how the educational technology sector is continuing to evolve. There are always plenty of lessons here for the rest of the world.

Regional roundup in Thailand

Posted on May 26, 2016 by Mark under M-learning

International Mobile Learning Festival
Bangkok, Thailand
27-28 May, 2016

Sukhumvit Skyline, Bangkok, Thailand. Photo by Mark Pegrum, 2016. May be reused under CC BY 3.0 licence.

It was great to have a chance to attend the International Mobile Learning Festival for the second year in a row. It was transplanted this year from its original Hong Kong base to Bangkok, where it drew together global perspectives on the conceptualisation of mobile learning, interwoven with regional perspectives on the implementation of mobile learning. It was particularly interesting to note the importance of open resources and platforms in developing world contexts which are beginning to explore the possibilities of mobile learning. Fortunately, the proceedings are available online.

In his opening keynote, Empathic technologies and virtual, contextual and mobile learning, Pedro Isaías explained that researchers have concluded that emotional responses play a pivotal role in learning processes. It may be that an intelligent computer which can learn needs to have emotional responses. He gave an overview of recent generations of social robots, from Nexi to the Dragonbots at MIT. He went on to talk about the differences between affective technologies, which are typically robots responding to human emotions within the context of human-machine interaction, and empathic information systems, like online learning platforms which use emotional data in applications to provide a more personalised learner experience. He spoke about the EU Empathic Products research project, now concluded, which set up numerous trial scenarios involving empathic technologies.

Forums are empathic by nature, Pedro suggested, but we can increase the empathic elements. In particular, he demonstrated the Umniverse massive collaboration platform, an empathic online learning environment. Users have to add empathic data to posts and can tag existing posts with such data, in order to make them easier to sort and find later. Users also have access to system statistics allowing data mining on forum activities. Such approaches can help address the absence of face-to-face communication in distance learning, and can transpose interaction into an online context. They can have a positive effect on interest and motivation. He went on to outline the current, ongoing evolution from Umniverse to the 3D immersive environment TAT, and invited interested educators to contact him about possible collaboration in investigating this new platform.

In her keynote which opened the second day, Moving towards a mobile learning landscape: Effective device integration, Helen Crompton suggested that we should be asking what we can do with mobile technologies that we couldn’t do with tethered learning. She cited John Traxler’s list of five key aspects of this learning, which can be:

contingent
situated
authentic
personalised
context-aware

However, research shows that educators are not currently integrating mobile devices effectively into the curriculum. Educational leaders have many fears around mobile devices. Many educators stick to methods that they are familiar with, thereby using 21st century technologies with 20th century teaching methods. She commented that the TPACK and SAMR frameworks can provide useful supports for educators in incorporating new technologies effectively into their teaching.

Leveraging the insights of TPACK and SAMR, she then went on to describe an m-learning integration framework covering 4 elements as seen from the point of view of the teacher:

Beliefs (about the role of the teacher; socio-cultural influences; self-efficacy; past experience as a learner)
Resources (including training; technical support; access to technology)
Methods (online or face-to-face teaching; teaching philosophy)
Purpose (time-filler or meeting objectives; substituting or redefining learning)

M-learning integration framework. Source: Crompton (2016).

She further suggested that there is a nested social and ecological framework for mobile learning integration, with concentric circles leading from the educator (individual) through the microsystem (school), mesosystem and exosystem (school district) to the macrosystem (national scale).

M-learning integration ecological framework. Source: Crompton (2016).

In my own presentation, Mobile literacy: What it is, why it matters, and how it can be developed, I argued that in order for our students to get the most out of their mobile learning experiences, we need to help them develop their mobile literacy, building on existing literacies like information literacy, multimodal literacy, network literacy and code literacy. I then wrapped up with some comments on critical mobile literacy.

In their talk, Mobilizing the troops: A review of the contested terrain of app-enabled learning, Michael Stevenson and John Hedberg outlined the progression through web 1.0 and web 2.0 and towards cloud computing. Apps, they suggested, have emerged as the key mode of learning with mobile devices. They outlined three key metaphors reflecting the issues that educators have had to face in recent years:

Sending the Troops “Over the Top” Before They’re Ready?
Equipping the Troops with an AAA: Atomized Arsenal of Apps
“Smashing” the Arsenal for More Pedagogical Firepower

When teachers and students are literate enough in the use of apps, they can choose to combine a variety of apps to expand learning possibilities; this approach is known as “app smashing“, as demonstrated in the YouTube App Smash Tutorial by mrshahnscience:

In their presentation, A snapshot of teacher educators’ mobile learning practices, Kevin Burden and Matthew Kearney spoke about the mobile pedagogical practices of teacher educators. They referred to their Mobile Pedagogy Framework, as seen below, where word clouds offer some detail about the three constructs of personalisation, collaboration and authenticity:

‘Word clouds’ relating to the 3 constructs of the Mobile Pedagogy Framework. Source: Burden & Kearney (2016)

They reported on a study which showed that teacher educators have a high focus on authenticity but less of a focus on networking and personalisation in their current use of mobile pedagogies. Teachers reported that the above framework is a useful tool in conceptualising mobile pedagogies, and a toolkit is now being developed to support the professional development needs of teacher educators. This involves a tool to help teachers and students evaluate task design with reference to the above framework, as well as multimedia case scenarios to illustrate best practices. There will also be a dynamic poster showing how certain apps might support the three constructs of personalisation, collaboration and authenticity. A course is being set up, and the presenters invited interested educators to contact them to become involved in shaping or participating in the course.

In his workshop, Do mobile devices have a central role in e-learning?, Spencer Benson focused on the changing landscape, with the move from teacher-centred to learner-centred education, and a parallel move from laptops to mobile devices. To a large extent, he suggested, students don’t discriminate between academic and non-academic uses of mobile devices; all uses are integrated on the same devices. Using Poll Everywhere, he surveyed the audience on numerous topics connected with the use of mobile devices in education.

In his talk, e-Seminar apps: Technology-enhanced learning interventions through “real-time” online interactive experiences, Kumaran Rajaram discussed the creation of the prototype iSeminar e-learning app developed at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He explained that the app is designed to promote student interactivity and engagement, which is particularly important in a cultural context where students may be reticent to interact verbally. The app also facilitates group work and peer evaluation. A learning analytics component is valuable in giving the instructor an overview of students’ thoughts and understandings. Records of the discussion contents can also be kept for future review. In sum, the question that is really being asked here, he suggested, is how the technology can be of optimal use, so that online interaction can become an organic part of a routine class.

In his presentation, Mobile learning design and computational thinking, Thomas Chiu spoke about Jeannette Wing‘s (2006) claim that computational thinking will be a fundamental skill used worldwide; he suggested that, to obtain good employment in the Hong Kong context, it will soon be as necessary as an ability to speak English. Computational thinking has three main components: problem formulation; solution expression; and solution execution and evaluation. In K-12 education, he went on to say, computational thinking is not just about technical details for using software, or thinking like a computer, or even necessarily programming. It does not always have to involve a computer. He presented three case studies which showed that problem formulation is fundamentally about collaboration and communication; solution expression is about visualising, modelling and presenting ideas; and solution execution is about implementation, sharing ideas for revisiting, and real-time experiencing of ideas. Mobile devices, he suggested, could have a role to play in supporting all of these.

In his presentation, Using wearable technology to improve the acquisition of new literacies: A new pedagogical approach of situated individual feedback coming from the activity trackers and reflected upon in the ePortfolio, Michele Notari discussed the intersection of new wearable devices with new digital literacies. He then went on to focus on eHealth literacy, which he defined as the ability to seek, find, understand, and appraise health information from electronic sources and to apply the knowledge to address or solve a health issue; it simultaneously draws on other literacies ranging from information to scientific literacy. He reported on a study involving undergraduate students at the University of Hong Kong who wore Xiaomi MiBand fitness trackers over a period of 5 months. Students’ reflections revealed the considerable changes some of them made to their exercise and sleeping behaviour during this time, while a number did further online research to improve their understanding of the statistics being generated, especially in regard to sleep.

A broad regional perspective was offered by Jonghwi Park in her presentation, UNESCO and mobile learning, where she explained that the UNESCO Bangkok office serves a whole range of countries in the Asia Pacific region. She spoke about the successes of the UNESCO Education for All (EfA) goals in the Asia Pacific region, particularly in regard to more children attending school, but she mentioned some unanticipated side effects: these include a shortage of teachers; a global learning crisis centred on the quality of learning; and growing demand for higher education. Following the end of EfA in 2015, new United Nations Sustainable Development goals were set up for the 2015-2030 period. The fourth of these refers to universal quality education. ICTs, she suggested, will be crucial in making this a reality. She mentioned that there will shortly be a new UNESCO report released which examines member countries’ national education policy orientations, and compares the extent to which government policy emphasises opportunity vs risk mitigation and safety. She spoke about UNESCO initiatives to promote teacher training, and to foster gender equality in learning through mobile technologies; in connection with the latter point, she highlighted the 2015 UNESCO report Mobile phones and literacy: Empowerment in women’s hands.

A number of presenters spoke about individual country contexts. In his presentation, Thailand OER, OCW and MOOC: Strategy toward lifelong learning of Thai people, Anuchai Theeraroungchaisri highlighted the open element in all of these platforms: OERs, OCW, and MOOCs. He spoke about the role of the Thailand Cyber University (TCU) in creating an e-learning consortium of all Thai universities, providing online distance education, and engaging in research and development in e-learning including establishing quality assurance guidelines. There are now 9 universities in Thailand serving as e-learning hubs. The TCU open courseware project has led to the TCU-Globe initiative, designed to facilitate the sharing of open resources within and outside Thailand. The latest development is the Thai-MOOC project, which will be launched in 2016 and will tie into the goals of the larger Digital Thailand project, which involves creating a digitally driven knowledge economy.

In her presentation, The growing tendency of mobile-assisted language learning development in Kazakhstan, Damira Jantassova spoke about a whole range of MALL practices employed in Kazakhstan. Reporting on an interview-based research project with 500 EFL learners at Karaganda State Technical University, she noted that the vast majority of interviewees placed most emphasis on learner mobility (focusing on the anytime/anywhere aspects of learning), a smaller number placed emphasis on device mobility, and a very small number placed emphasis on mobility of learning experiences. Mobile phones were primarily used for vocabulary development, according to students. She suggested that it is important to help students develop an understanding of the potential contextual benefits of mobile learning.

In his talk, Mobile solution for synchronized and offline version of audio-based open educational resources, Reinald Adrian Pugoy spoke about the recent dramatic increase in mobile phone ownership in the Philippines, with many students now preferring to use mobile devices rather than desktop or laptop computers to access educational materials. This is against a background of limited infrastructure and slow internet connections, with many educational institutions located in remote areas with little or no internet access. Offline OERs do not provide a viable solution because materials may quickly become out of date. He reported on a study at the University of the Philippines Open University (UPOP) exploring a mechanism to allow offline use of OERs, with an internet connection only needed to download the most recent updates. It was decided to explore audio OERs, to be stored in a WordPress repository. Offline accessing and syncing of OERs has been successfully achieved in this project, with the next stage being to conduct a usability evaluation among end users.

All in all, this was a conference which offered rich insights both into local contexts as well as into their connection with global themes and trends. It will be interesting to revisit some of these themes when IMLF takes place back in Hong Kong in mid-2017.

From code literacy to robotics

Posted on April 18, 2016 by Mark under M-learning

KLCC, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Photo by Mark Pegrum, 2016. May be reused under CC BY 3.0 licence.

Digital Education Show Asia
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
18-19 April, 2016

It was good to be back at the Digital Education Show Asia in KL for the second year running, especially given the heavy focus of this year’s event, the fourth in the series, on 21st century skills and digital literacies, including computational thinking and coding. Robotics, perhaps unsurprisingly, was also high on the agenda.

In my own paper on the first morning, Mapping the pathway from m-learning to digital literacies for ASEAN educators, I argued that in order for our students to get the most out of mobile learning, it is important for educators to help them develop their mobile literacy, and the individual literacies of which it is composed, including code literacy.

In his paper, Learning beyond boundaries – How coding shapes systematic problem solvers, Felix Lee suggested that coding and robotics have a role to play within the current context where we have to break down boundaries between subjects, develop creativity through problem-based learning, and let the students determine their learning paths through an interactive technology-enhanced curriculum.

In her talk, Advocacy of STEM education – Introducing computational thinking as the new literacy of the 21st century, Ng Puay San emphasised the importance of applied STEM education to support innovation in a global conceptual economy. She stressed the need for an integrated curriculum where different subjects like science, technology, engineering and maths connect with each other. She talked about computational thinking – which she described as a new literacy – as a framework within which students learn to reason about systems and problems, and which goes well beyond issues of hardware and software. She showcased the 3-year initiative Code for Change under Singapore’s Smart Nation Vision, designed to improve students’ skills in this area, and gave the example of a 4-year-old girl coding with Scratch. She wrapped up with an overview of the need for a quality and integrated curriculum, authentic assessment, leveraging of educational technology, continuous professional development for teachers, and partnership with the community, industries and home.

In a talk focusing on the Malaysian context, Digital.Tech@Schools: Empowering students to become digital innovators, Sumitra Nair opened by noting that 90% of all future jobs will require digital competencies, according to the EU Skills Report 2013. She indicated that there are currently initiatives to encourage digital innovation in Malaysia, but that these exist at the fringes of the formal curriculum; young people, she suggested, need to move from being consumers to creators of technology. The Digital.Tech@Schools initiative, piloted in 24 schools in December 2015, involves revising the ICT curriculum and training teachers; introducing co-curricular clubs; and running national-level competitions. The new curriculum focus is to be on algorithms, decomposition and debugging; coding and sequencing; and digital literacy – searching, analysing and curating content. The approach will involve thematic, activity- and project-based learning (combining unplugged and device-based learning). Co-curricular activities in the pilot included app development, Arduino and Scratch programming, and 3D printing. The initiative has now been endorsed by key decision makers. The focus in 2016 is on educator readiness for the curriculum roll-out.

In the follow-up panel, How do education leaders need to adapt according to a new technology-driven education system?, chaired by Eric Lam, a number of key points were raised, notably about the need to place pedagogy before technology; the centrality of the teacher’s role even within technology-enhanced education; the need to remember the human dimension of education; the importance of teachers employing creativity and design thinking to repurpose technological tools appropriately for learning; the advantages of having students sharing through online platforms; the need to have students use technology for communication and creation rather than just consumption, but to use more traditional tools when appropriate; and the key role played by the surrounding culture and context.

In his presentation, Visual learning and emerging technologies – Rethinking 21st century literacy for a visual world, Emory Craig indicated, following Ron Bleed, that being visually literate is a must in the contemporary era. He noted the enormous potential of augmented reality (AR) in education, as well as of virtual reality (VR); at 90 frames per second, as in current high-end VR displays, he says, you cannot tell the difference between reality and visual media. He also described Facebook’s experiments in social VR, as well as Microsoft’s Hololens, which allows holographic teleportation. He concluded with some questions:

What new tools/vocabulary do we need to analyse visual media?
Can new media and VR create new ways of knowing? Can it create empathy? (And is this the final form of media, now that it has become immersive?)
What happens when media becomes as ‘real’ as the real world? (And how do we keep our critical distance?)
Will it foster new forms of collaborative learning?
How should current educational practices and institutions change in a highly visual and virtual world?

He also referred participants to the Digital Bodies site where he and his colleagues write about these kinds of new developments.

The roundtable discussion, Understanding how mobile and ubiquitous access technology can help to enable blended learning in your schools, led by Ian Pittman, began with a discussion of the wide range of possible definitions and interpretations of blended learning. The topic of learning design arose quickly, as did the issue of the socioeconomic context and how the available technology impacts on learning designs, which always need to be customised to particular groups of learners in particular contexts.

Reflecting on less well-provisioned contexts in his paper, The burden of technology in education: Is there a more painless way?, Eric Lam mentioned that a key infrastructure challenge is how to achieve e-learning with only short periods of stable internet access. He talked about the importance of downloading materials from the cloud when there is an internet connection, so they can later be used without a connection. E-learning should be afforded, he suggested, without the constant presence of the internet. While this problem may cease to exist in the future, it is a very real problem now. He showed a platform called PageWerkz designed to work under these conditions.

In his presentation, Outlining best practices on how to develop MOOC content, David Asirvatham suggested that the advantage of MOOCs is that they allow for on-demand and networked learning. It is important to begin by deciding whether to set up a cognitive-behaviourist xMOOC or a connectivist cMOOC, or to try to combine the two. MOOCs can be fully online, or used to support blended and/or flipped approaches. Creating a MOOC is a chance to explore new pedagogical approaches as well as new business models. He suggested that it would take 6-12 months to develop a MOOC from scratch, and that the cost might be around US $50,000. Ultimately it is a team effort involving the following roles: subject matter expert, instructional designer, script editor, graphic designer, camera operator, audio/video editor, and reviewer. He noted that learning objects, in the form of videos within a MOOC, should ideally be under 5 minutes long. It’s also important to consider how you will address the typical drop-out rate from MOOCs, which may be up to 80-90%.

In between the many papers, it was interesting to see how many companies are offering robotics hardware and associated programming software for education. Providers included Arduino Robotics (Malaysia), rero (Malaysia) and Pitsco Tetrix (USA), whose products can for example be used in robotics lessons and clubs in schools. There is also a push for the integration of robotics with STEM, such as by Abilix (China) and in the STEM with Robotics programme by CM Asia (Singapore). Meanwhile, the company Robotics Learning (Malaysia) was showcasing its programmes to help children learn to create robots in a problem-solving environment, combining elements of STEM and coding in an integrated learning context (see Figure 1). It was also interesting to learn about Malaysia’s annual National Robotics Competition for school students.

Figure 1: Robots from Robotics Learning, Malaysia (2016)

My strongest impression of this conference is that, within a broader recognition of the importance of 21st century skills and digital literacies, there is a growing appreciation of the need to foreground computational thinking and code literacy, and to understand the role that can be played by robotics and programming in an integrated, STEM-oriented, problem-based approach to the curriculum. It will be interesting to see how these intersecting trends continue to evolve over coming years.

Mobile at home

Posted on April 9, 2016 by Mark under M-learning

ACTA/ACAL International Conference
Perth, Australia
7-11 April, 2016

Normally when I present at a conference, there is some combination of planes, trains, busses and taxis involved in getting there. So it’s a rare pleasure to be able to walk to a conference venue from my apartment, as was the case when I presented a keynote session, Yet another literacy? Mobile devices, mobile learning, and mobile literacy, at the well-attended ACTA/ACAL Conference in my hometown of Perth.

The theme of the conference was Diversity: Exchanging Ways of Being. Mobile devices are of course a technology that is opening up increasing diversity in educational approaches, content, and settings. In my keynote, I argued that, in order to help our students gain the most from learning experiences with mobile devices, and at the same time to prepare them for their future lives in a mobile, digitally mediated world, we need to support the development of their mobile literacy. In one way, it’s a newly emerging literacy. But in another way, as a macroliteracy composed of existing literacies – like information literacy, multimodal literacy, network literacy, and code literacy – it is not as new as it seems. It is, however, crucial to ensure that there is a level of critical awareness embedded in students’ mobile literacy, so that they learn to ask critical questions about about our mobile devices and their political, economic, social, health and environmental implications.

One of the disadvantages of attending a conference in your hometown is that, unfortunately, other commitments and obligations continue, so I was only able to participate in the conference for a couple of hours. That was enough, though, to have some interesting conversations with delegates, who were clearly inspired by the whole conference. It was great to see such a successful event taking place in Australia’s most isolated capital city.

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