-
Dear LMS companies (and other ed tech sales people),
Thank you for getting in touch with me, and for not bothering our VP and President and CIO after I didn’t initially respond to you voice mail or email request to talk about the latest features that your LMS has to offer. In the six years I’ve been in this job, I’ve had the opportunity to speak with many of you, both in person and via other means. I admire the enthusiasm and patience you have in a role where I personally would struggle, especially when trying to get people like me excited about your latest offerings. I suspect it must be very deflating to talk to people like me, and I…
-
Mobile Learning at an Applied Institution
We’ve been asked on numerous occasions about our mobile strategy–how we got there and where we are going next. Oddly, we are rarely asked the why question, but for me that is really where it starts. The Context When I first came to JIBC 4 years ago, mobile was on my radar as the latest thing but I was already at that stage of ed tech dis-illusionism where everything sounded like a buzzword. But the more I learned about this peculiar institution– which boasts a relatively unusual range of course offerings, course formats, and professions and pathways–the more mobile became interesting. When a particularly savvy program area pitched the idea of an app, explaining…
-
Creating a mobile app – a year later
It’s been a year since I shared our experience at the JI of creating our first mobile app. Since then there’s been some great uptake on this, and an increasing demand from our users to develop for Android. BCcampus has published 2 recent articles on our efforts: the first one talks about our developments including a HazAware app and an Emergency Social Services app, both of which will be paid iOS apps. These apps are complete, but our Finance department is still figuring out the necessary financial steps that have to be worked out in conjunction with the app store, US taxes, etc. The second article mentions our approach to mobile learning…
-
Creating a mobile learning app–what we learned, what’s left to learn
Today the JIBC’s first mobile learning iOS app got the Apple App store blessing and is now available for downloading. The app is a multimedia glossary for Emergency Managers (more info that kind of training here and here ).You can grab it via this page (it’s FREE) if you are interested. The iPad version is a couple days away. We used this project as a way of gently introducing ourselves to the world of mobile learning, having recognized that for our students–who need just-in-time information and tools while working in the field–it really couldn’t ignored. We called this project a ‘proof of concept’ to give ourselves the space to fail or succeed,…
-
IADIS 2011 mobile learning: the meta takeaways
This conference wasn’t big, nor full of headlining Big Names In The Field. It’s been a while since I’ve haven’t been to a conference where Big Names filled the rooms and where presenters, having travelled from afar, were feasted on like leftovers. I have to say that this is one of the things I appreciated the most about this conference, where every session I attended drew equal amounts of participants and everybody seemed to be on a level playing field in terms of what they had to offer. The attendance was incredibly globally diverse, and I couldn’t get enough of the diversity of contexts that we work in ranging from “our…
-
IADIS 2011 mobile learning: a pedagogical model
One of the most relevant presentations for my institution was presented by a Finnish team describing a pedagogical m-learning model for decentralized tourism education. Tourism students resided in their place of learning for classes etc at a ski resort approx 50 km from the institution, but extended their learning within the environs of the ski resort. The institution was important to the model in providing ICT support, language teacher support, and school services, but the resort and the communities in the Lapland area were the real place of learning and made heavy use of mobile devices to gather information from the various locations. Again, in an applied learning context this…
-
IADIS 2011 mobile learning: the quest for a device neutral platform
Ok, there were no less than 2 presentations that I attended that presented projects that attempted to create device neutral m-learning platforms. Some of these were pretty technical and challenged me, but the takeaway for me is that we are all facing the problem the incredible number of device options and how we address m-learning in that landscape. The Poznan University of Economics (Poland) presented their work on something called the MILES interfaces, which even with my limited technical knowledge, appeared to be nothing short of brilliant. Basically, of some sort of backend interface (SOIL, service oriented interface language based on XML) it allows the appropriate “template” to be pulled…
-
IADIS 2011 mobile learning conference: the keynote
I attended the IADIS M-learning conference in Avila, Spain, and after leaving a comment over on Miami Learning’s blog, who captures his impressions on the sessions, I feel like I need to expand on my own. This was actually the first hotel-based conference I’ve been too where I had consistent access to the wifi (surprise!) and the first European conference where I was fed more than adequately in relation to the cost. Bottles of wine flowed at full- course sit down conference lunches, and conference dinner wasn’t chicken, but was nonetheless outshined by an unforgettably wonderful tapas dinner the night before. It was also the first conference where I closed…
