My Mobile Learning Blog

Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.

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Week 9 post

As a parent, I read van der Mere's "Dad's plea to developers of iPad apps for children" -- and looked at the screenshops of the apps he singled out-- with some degree of sheepish trepidation. How quickly we have capitulated to the inevitability of these devices in our children's lives-- and how little we know of what the end result will be! Yet we have all giggled at the sight of our little ones assuming that all the world's an interactive touchscreen... And, some years later, their puzzlement when we explain that they can't watch something right now because it's scheduled to air later. Scheduled? The on-demand expectations run very deep, and will have consequences we cannot yet foresee. It is also somewhat amusing, though true, that design principles of apps for children are basically the same as design principles of good apps for adults (in what other "art form" is this true?) as outlined in Nielson's article. This may be because, in children, we have no choice but to design based on close observation of user behavior, since children cannot articulate their preferences and frustrations in other ways. App design must be based on close observation of its use-- a somewhat interesting circular proposition. This means designers must do ample research well before they attempt to launch; app users make decisions quickly and are very unforgiving. (I recently canceled Hulu after 5 minutes of frustration in trying to navigate its interface on a Roku.) I enjoyed Nielson's analysis of what works in app designs-- as others have pointed out, i still see many of these errors, even almost 3 years later. I compared what he described as problems with the USA Today app with what I consider perhaps the great app available: the New York Times app. This app, with its impeccable affordability, subtle yet easy pagination, great features for sharing and saving material, and low-data demands (I can update it during brief Internet-access respites in stations on my daily commute) -- and of course world-class content-- will in my opinion single handedly save journalism. The only thing currently missing is access to comments, and comment-aggregating services are said to the next great wave of life on the mobile Internet.

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App Review-- Good Reads

On Sunday„ the New York Times ran an editorial entitled "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Reader" discussing the mounting difficulties facing devotees of long-form fiction and other forms of book-length reading. The problem is not just our own ever-diminishing powers of concentration in a fractured world of "staccato communication" and "addictive entertainments," where reading a novel starts to appear as daunting as running a marathon. There is also the gradual but accelerating loss of the professionals who used to guide our readings choices— booksellers, librarians (whom the novelist Richard Powers described as "gas attendants of the mind), and the professional book reviewers who used to serve as cultural gatekeepers. These professionals have been largely replaced by the user-generated reviews on sites like Amazon and more community-oriented social networking/review apps (and sites) like Good Reads, which I have chosen to review.

Although lots of alarm bells have been ringing about what seems to be the eventual demise of brick and mortar book stores— we’ve watched Barnes and Noble morph from an evil behemoth that eats independent stores (remember You’ve Got Mail?) to a quaint holdover from times past— publishers themselves have remained relatively unconcerned. Book sales have dwindled alarmingly, but profits have remained pretty stable, partly because it’s cheaper to produce ebooks, but also because of increased emphasis on blockbuster releases and because of budget cuts that largely impact smaller, lesser-known works and writers— works that might be of enormous cultural value but are less and less likely to be “discovered.”

Enter an app like Good Reads, a combined reviewing/networking site/app where readings can submit reviews, create and share book lists, manage their reading, store ebooks, and perhaps most importantly get recommendations for new reading material. Some people (including, unsurprisingly, Amazon’s CEO) view this democratization of the gatekeeping process as a good thing— the shaking up of elitism which, in conjunction with the self-publication of ebooks will open up both reading and writing in new and exicting ways. 

Of course, it’s also true that earlier this year, Amazon bought Good Reads and also owns its major competitors, Librarything and Shelfari, creating a potentially dangerous monopoly that looks like a democratic community. Amazon can now target readers, for example, based on their Good Read reviews, and can do so because Good Read users (like Facebook users) are so seduced by the functions of the app that they voluntarily surrender privacy.

And it is a beautifully-designed app. As part of the process of registration, I was asked to rate 20 previously-read books from my selected genres (I chose classics and contemporary fiction). When I rated anything 4 or 5, the system’s algorithm generated similar titles, which was initially annoying and (with the classics) somewhat flattering. Once registration is complete, it generates recommendations (and will continue to generate recommendations, based on future networking and reviewing activity). The recommendations for the classics were very good, but the contemporary recommendations felt pretty random, perhaps because my tastes are so eclectic. The system also allows users to enter new titles through a built-in barcode scanner, which is kind of cool, although I’m not sure why you would do this rather than enter a title.

The app was also particularly cool for the “classics” genre, since so many of the recommended titles are in the public domain (not restricted by copyright) and can be instantly uploaded onto my bookshelf. So now I’m ready to get started on Les Miserables during my commute tonight! Except that the contents of this app are not available without an active Internet connection— which is a major limitation.

The main learning theory that this app embodies is, quite obviously, communities of practice. The app seeks to create a community of like-minded readers to provide the scaffolding once provided by professionals who were integrated into our lives. And it succeeds. But, as we learned when we read about communities of practice earlier in this course, these are not uniformly positive entities. Communities of practice can reinforce bias very effectively, and online communities can be particularly insidious in the ways they reinforce a prevailing ethos.

And this was the main fear of the Times editorial: reliance on user-generated content and a good algorithm might appear to support diversity, but in reality these tools tend to effectively reinforce the cultural status quo (especially when they are owned by Amazon) and make it even harder for new voices to be heard in all the noise— just as the “viral video” phenomenon tends to yield “Harlem Shakes” and “Gangnam Style” mega-hits that turns success into a massive lottery. This is also the same mechanism that makes other apparently democraticizing technologies (like Twitter) into excellent tools for political control, as we learned in our unit on the political uses of mobile networking.

Good Reads is an excellent, dynamic app— especially when compared with a static app like ebrary— the platform Adelphi uses for all its academic ebooks. Professional librarians have continued to insist that users come to them, and learn to navigate their systems and catalogs, and the ebrary platform, though it has a good search engine, reflects that mentality. (And even the good search engine is lost when libraries integrate the titles into their own OPACS.) 

The “discovery” function of Good Reads is quite good, but something is still missing. Similarly, I love the discovery feature of Spotify, but if I really want to hear something great I usually ask my spouse, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of music and knows that after I listen to the Bangles I might be happiest with Johnny Cash. No computer will ever know that.

[bronxkristin]

Week 8 Reading Response

This week's two readings, both from 2007, explored the theoretical underpinnings of online educational applications. Mayer's chapter is a research synthesis of what appears at first to be a self-evident idea: that people learn better through words and images than through words alone. Words and images-- or more specifically the interplay between them-- are required for "mental model creation" which are in turn necessary to learn systems. And all "deep lesrning" must be understood as system learning. Mayer breaks the what's necessary for mental modeling into clear components: conciseness, contiguity (temporal or spatial), referencing, signaling, sociability (the need to ensure that learner a view computers as conversation partners and are guided by basic conversational expectations-- which reminded me of the themes explored in the current movie Her), and conserving (not succumbing to the myriad temptations for distractions. He also stresses the benefits of "pretraining." This reading prompted several questions for me. Is learning always systems learning? And can this approach toward understanding the learning process really serve all learners? For example do intellectually gifted learners really require this interplay between image-based and verbal information to grasp a system? As a parent, I have often become frustrated by the "new" approach to kids' nonfiction that overlayed too many types of information-- photos, charts, fun facts-- when I had a child who seemed to learn best processing strictly verbal information. For me, these books "dumb down" information for kids, often unnecessarily. "Deep learning" is measured by students' ability to apply knowledge in solving transfer problems. This concept of deep learning reminded me of Chomsky's "deep grammar" and made me wonder how mich this approach could help learners grasp truly complex systems, like foreign languages. So when I started the Anderson, Koedinger, and Corbett (2007) article, I was hopeful that I might get a more concrete description and analysis of a specific learning program rooted in cognitive theory. However, the authors very quickly dispelled this hope, saying that such a description was beyond the scope of the article-- which seemed mainly to assert repeatedly how well the program worked. (This didn't surprise me either, since the authors used the wording of NCLB legislation to point toward the need for scientifically-based learning programs, circular reasoning in my opinion. The most interesting and provocative image in the article is the description of the Cognitive Tutor as an "observer" of the learner. This again reminded me of the movie Her-- and our increasingly complicated relationships with our devices.

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This is an environmental justice issue I have been working on for years.

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Reading and learning on screens

This week's reading were of particular interest to me, both personally and professionally. Winnie Hu, the author of the tablets-in-schools article, subsequently became the NYTimes reporter on most Bronx issues, and in that co text I know her well. All of the incipient tablet programs she profiled were using iPads, and my initial thought was that Apple's propaganda mission has been very successful (several of us have noted how many studies of educational mobile computing applications have been sponsored by Apple)-- as several experts quoted in this article pointed out, there are other devices that can do the same thing and cost far less, yet Apple is still viewed as worth the premium. And they don't even have to offer significant educational discounts anymore! Several of our earlier readings discussed the great leap in outcomes when computer programs are one-to-one. These devices are practically useless if they have to be shared: they are personal devices. Therefore, unsurprisingly, the school districts mentioned were all relatively affluent-- with the exception of a high school in Kingsbridge (Bronx) where a major grant still only yielded a iPad for every two students. I also wondered about several other issues that hint at a digital divide: how were families who could not afford or obtain home Wireless service accommodated? What about children who live in truly chaotic situation? I have a sixth grade boy, and his school (Horace Mann) this year launched a program that gave an iPad to each student. In talking to teachers, results have been mixed. Younger teachers have (by my observation) adapted more seamlessly, posted and receiving all assignments through google drive. However, many teachers are reporting massive levels of distraction, especially with the boys. It's always the boys.... As a parent, I love the iPad because its much easier for me track my child's work, and since he is very forgetful, it's reassuring to see the item turned in electronically before he leaves for school. I don't feel that schools like Horace Mann see iPads are revolutionary; they are more a logical next step. However. This attitude requires massive resources. Hillesund's article was very interesting to me as a librarian. Libraries did an excellent job of transitioning its search features (indexes) to an online environment (databases); but we have done arch poorer job of transitioning to e-books. In e-books, libraries (especially academic) seem about 10 years behind the consumer market. This is partially because of complications of copyright, but also in large part because of base technologies. Library models are still largely "stuck" on desktop mode, where sustained reading borders on impossible. I liked Hillesund's acknowledgement that a certain type of reading (sustained, continuous) is on the decline; and also how he puts this in context with other historical revolutions in reading technology and social periods of reading. Reading and technology have always been intimately related, and reading has always been a physical act. I think it's interesting that we have not seen more studies like this one, about how our approaches to "text" are changing-- especially after all the intense analysis we placed on "meaning" in semiotics and deconstructionist movements in the 1980s. Certainly, our idea of meaning is radically changing in an environment of multitudinous "attention switching possibilities" and the feeling that something exciting is always going to happen. Even the academics tracked in this study-- viewing digital journals through a library database-- were "bouncing" through information-- looking at articles for about a minute to determine their potential usefulness later. To be fair, the author never looked at the "later" part to determine if the reading was sustained: and I wondered if their "bouncing" behavior differed drastically from when they had to grapple with older search technologies like print indices.

[bronxkristin]

What playing looks like at my house.

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You have died of dysentery

This phrase has entered our cultural lexicon as the unintentionally comic catchphrase of the legendary "Oregon Trail" game, developed at Cartlton College in the early 1970s. To harness engagement and self-motivation: this has always been both the Achilles heel and the promise of mobile learning and games, which simulataneiusly offer new ways to engage children and to lose them. Offer children the opportunity to learn using an interactive game and see their faces light up. But how much do they learn, compared to traditional methods? Facer et. al (2004) explore this question in their study of ten 11 and 12 year old girls and boys and their use of a complicated, integrated game meant to teach them about life on the African Savannah. The designers of them game seem to intuit that, as teaching tools, they cannot stand on their own. The game is integrated into classrooms features like the whiteboard (used when students "return to the den" and, perhaps more importantly, it incorporates lots of structured interaction with the teacher, though in the discussion this was described as one of the least successful aspects of the game. (The potential loss of face-to-face time is seen as the primary danger of mobile education, in particular how this can play out across different economic classes with different levels of resources.) It also incorporates movement as part of the game. In the end, The children made and tested hypotheses and were highly engaged; but would they have learned more about life on the African savannah from an intelligently guided trip to the Natural History museum? Or from a David Attenborough documentary? The authors allude several times to a difference in engagement between boys and girls, which reminded me of the work I'd like to bring in this week: Leonard Sax's 2007 study do the "boy crisis" called Boys adrift. http://xa.yimg.com/kq/groups/23408271/1559907072/name/Boys-Adrift.pdf Sax identifies all the usual suspects-- changes in schools that are hostile to boys' learning styles; overuse of ADHD medications; environmental hormones and endocrine disrupters; but he also identifies a mysterious factor he calls "the revenge of the forsaken gods." He ties a male impulse toward control of the environment to Nietzsche's "Will to power" (perhaps explaining why this concept never much resonated with me) and describes how this real and important impulse has been first vilified and then unhealthily redirected into video games. In short, boys find video games particularly addicting because only in these artificial environments can a real psychological need be met. It's a fascinating argument about the psychological power of gaming. Squire and Jan (2007) describe a program that uses augmented rather than virtual reality to "help students think like scientists." By using games to scaffold (rather than replace) the thinking process, I think they are working toward a more productive model of game-based learning to create a situation where students "do" science rather than talk about it.

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Here is my video interview, in which I asked the attendants at a Thanksgiving dinner celebration "how is mobile computing affecting society?"

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Visit Original Link

My podcast explores the question of whether ubiquitous mobile computing has increased human freedom in the world.  Enjoy!

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Mobile Learning Tech Report: Introduction to Augmented Reality

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Augmented Reality: An Introduction by Stan Bogdanov, Chris Grunert, and Kristin Hart

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Reading response week 4

In “Uses of mobile technology for teacher training” Wishart describes teacher training initiative using PDAs (remember those) that was only partially successful. The devices became deeply personal—making them ideal for fostering “reflective practice”— rather than fostering “communities of practices.” Very few participants used the devices to foster community. Google searches were more popular than curricular work. One benefit to giving PDAs to trainees (student teachers) was that they tended to see the technological infrastructure as belonginging to the school’s permanent population and Internet-equipped handheld technology solved this problem. I tried to address a similar problem by starting a program to give MSW students 4g equipped tablet computers to take to their internships, where they tend to lack access to computers and Internet access. However, I ran into bureaucratic problems launching the program. Wishart’s student seemed to follow the innovation bell curve proposed by Rogers (1995) that breaks users into innovators, early adopters, late adopter, and laggards. It also demonstrated socially and culturally complicated settings in which new technologies are trialled— as participants come to the trials with different biases, levels of competency, and mindsets.

"The iPod in education" (Pasnick) is yet another educational technology study commissioned by Apple, and therefore perhaps too uncritical of potential downsides to the widespread (now unstoppable) proliferation of handheld mulitmedia devices. Though focussing largely on the iPod’s portability and affordability, the article the launches into an interesting discussion of the impact media-rich audio and video content can have on teaching. The iTunes presented in the article has been largely superseded by steaming services like YouTube, Spotify and Netflix which have fundamentally altered our notions of content ownerships— but the idealist notion of using widely and easily available primary documents and oral histories to enhance "information literacy" and "media literacy" is still very valid. Handheld devices can promote creative, personalized, and independent learning

"Designing mobile communications" (2011) sees the mobile revolution through a more critical lens, highlighting the loneliness and high dropout level that seem endemic to online learning, but also pointing out the many benefits, which include the powerful factor of convenience and affordability. This article deals, at first, less with the nuts and bolts of technological innovations in education, and more with a theoretical framework for achieving practical success— then gives a detailed roadmap for getting there— down to the optimal number of texts from the professor and the necessary systems architecture. The authors see motivation as key to success in online learning, and identify the four essential components for maintaining motivation in today’s changing learning environments: attention (strategies for gaining and keeping it), relevance (tying class goals to individual goals), confidence (a sense of basic control), and satisfaction (the positive experience of learning). Of all the articles we have read so far for this class, this was one of my favorites.

[bronxkristin]

Where

I am the girl

in the hump of dirt by the railroad tracks

in the dry white air without sky

brushing away tiny, floating bugs and

bits of her own cracked hair. A woman,

my mother, stands on the steps to call after me;

but the warm, fleeced air stops in her throat

and changes her voice to whistles.

I scare her.

She runs one hand down her belly and leaves it to rest

Over the taut place on her skirt, between her thighs.

She smooths the hair behind her ear, lets the breath out

slowly, and goes inside, carefully closing the latch

of the screen door.

On clean days I am

the cold of your feet

when you swim too early in the springtime

in the pool of a Midwestern hotel,

near a buckling gray road full of campers,

wheels and dented seamed-up silver.

It’s a chipped blue, synthetic blue, a plastic lining

and an unnatural cold like a dentist’s filling.

I am the mute sun on numb thighs dripping water.

I am the faces you turn to the pool,

white towels spread wide as a fake welcome:

stupid faces.

Get out of the pool. Are you trying to kill yourself?

You must be drunk.

I am the one who won’t get out, preferring stillness.

I am this:

I will carry you back to your room

when your feet have stopped dead. Those excuses

to carry, to be carried,

to wrap white towels around a cold orange sun

and pretend to nurture.

  On murkier days, I am

a warm metal smell on your hands

between the creases of your fingers, across the slick palm.

A dying tree whose skin’s unwrapping

over pale, crumbling wood. So ugly. I am the mud,

a splash, a step forward, a dead farm town,

the aloneness you feel when you keep walking only

because the wind on your neck is so steady, it aches.

I am this: only being able to remember

The heat of dry white air without sky,

women on porches,

and nights that fall without horizons. 

[bronxkristin]

Reading response week 3, part 2 (one to one initiatives)

This week’s second scholarly article (Penuel 2006) demonstrates, for me, both the importance and the danger of research and the emphasis on “evidence based practices” when it comes to innovation. Yes, we need to know what works, and the past always guides the future. But at some point these scholarly practices seem to stifle innovation. I have a feeling none of the real innovators who have impacted mobile learning have been bound by these practices (or the institutional politics portrayed in this article, with which I am intimately familiar). Using past experience as a guide for creating something new becomes problematic.)

Several times, the author points to the close and uneasy relationship between these technology initiatives and funding sources. (Also interesting: The study was funded by Apple right before it started its major push into educational technology.)

The article points out the major leap in effectiveness that occurs in 1-1 programs versus programs where students shared computers. The personal is everything. This is also demonstrated by the fact that teachers found peer-to-peer collaboration and informal help from colleagues to be most effective, even more than professional development.

These programs also become deeply democratizing, giving “everyone the ability to use up-to-date learning resources.” The democratizing promises comes closest to realization in the “One Laptop” program, which attempts to implement a one-to-one program in a global scale.

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Reading response: week 3 part one (constructionism)

This week's scholarly readings included a seminal work by Papert and Harel (1991) on the learning theory "constructionism" -- in short, learning by building. What interested me about the article is that the authors situate this building firmly in the virtual realm, pointing put how "trends in the computer culture" lead toward "forms of knowledge based on working with concrete materials rather than abstract propositions" when the uninitiated would assume the opposite-- that computer-based constructionism would lead toward more abstraction. The article first makes a "playful" distinction between constructionism and constructivism that I found hard to follow. For me this demonstrated how the struggle to define everything remains a notable aspect of educational theory. Papert, it turns out, is trying to recreate an idealized learning experience of his own youth: the brave decision of a middle school principal to allow the entire 7th grade to learn LOGOs instead of Following an instructionalist math curriculum. He learned firsthand how these types of constructionist projects can tap deep into childrens' learning by harnessing their desire. "And if they did want to learn it they did, even if teaching were poor or nonexistent." And thus could the synthesis of technology and desire revolutionize education. But did he understand the addictive qualities of Minecraft

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Tech project

I want to claim GIS/GPS for me and Stan. Does that work for you, Stan?

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Clifford Nass, Who Warned of a Data Deluge, Dies at 55

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Dr. Nass, a professor a Stanford, studied the effects of technology and in one pioneering study showed the deleterious effects of multitasking.

Testing comments

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John Lennon’s school detention sheets go up for sale

  He wasn’t the messiah, he was just a very naughty boy. John Lennon’s school detention sheets, detailing the Beatle’s bad behavior in class, will go up for auction, where they are expected to sell for between $3000 and $4000. The reports list a series of incidents from Lennon’s time at Liverpool’s Quarry Bank School between 1955 and 1956, when he was in Class 3B and Class 4C. Lennon’s crimes include “fighting in class,” “talking,” “silliness,” “shouting,” “shoving,” having “just no interest whatsoever,” and (most interestingly) “sabotage.” On one occasion Lennon received three punishments in a single day. The detention sheets were rescued by a teacher, who had been requested to burn the reports in the 1970s, but when he spotted the name “Lennon,” he kept them thinking…

Why does this cheer me up? Perhaps we overemphasize "good behavior" in our schools.