iterativelearning

From a recent issue of Educause Quarterly:

“As an increasing number of states and educational institutions declare their commitment to moving to digital-only platforms for educational texts, it seems wise to consider a fundamental question about the future of educational materials, in terms of both content and delivery:

Why is a book the best metaphor for envisioning this future?”

I think Michael Mayrath, Priya Nihalani, and Scott Perkins nailed it here. This question comes out of a study they ran at Abilene Christian University in which they developed a mobile app for students in a general level Statistics class.

The whole article is worth reading, but I’ll just focus on one part that kind of lingers with me. For designers involved with this kind of work, approaching them as Apps rather than ebooks seems like it could also influence their thinking at a subconscious level, since when you think about it, the word ebook still has a whole lot of analog connotations and as a result, might still constrain their vision for designing something more genuinely innovative.

Spending most of the week at the annual AECT gathering and this morning saw a good session on mobile learning and game design. Chris Blakesley talked about the University of Wisconsin’s Aris project. As I understood it, it’s an open source authoring tool that taps the affordances of narrative – a universal tool for knowing as well as telling. The demo presents a case scenario of reporter covering a protest on the UW-Madison campus in the 60s. Beyond their demo, one other interesting deployment I liked was by some faculty at the University of New Mexico who use it to teach Spanish 101. Essentially students use it to explore the nearby Los Griegos neighborhood, and in doing that, hopefully move their understanding of the language beyond just memorizing verb tenses and vocabulary.

A relatively new journal, International Journal of Mobile Technologies, looks quite interesting. From the current issue, there’s one article on podcasting that really catches my eye (The Role of Podcasts in Students’ Learning).

credit: eLearning Watch.