1. Smartphones give you wings: Pedagogical affordances of mobile Web 2.0

Smartphones give you wings: Pedagogical affordances of mobile Web 2.0
Annotated:

Thomas Cochrane and Roger Bateman 2009, Smartphones give you wings: Pedagogical affordances of mobile Web 2.0 Australasian Journal of Educational Technology 2010, 26(1), 1-14

In this article Thomas and Roger have presented a summary of the pedagogical affordances of smart phones in tertiary education, illustrated by 4 years of research, resulting in an example m-learning implementation plan that is informing future projects, which may be useful as guidelines for other institutions seeking to investigate and implement m-learning.

The authors use data gained through a series of reflective action research projects (2007 to 2009) using wireless mobile devices (or WMDs) to harness the potential of current and emerging social constructivist e-learning tools. The research follows a journey of discovery for the key participants (including the researcher and the lecturers involved), that has been recorded in over thirty research outputs during the past four years.

This research project is interested in appropriating the benefits of Web 2.0 and pedagogy 2.0 anywhere anytime using mobile Web 2.0 and wireless mobile devices (or WMDs), in particular WiFi (wireless ethernet) and 3G (third generation mobile 'broadband') enabled smartphones,

Pre-trial surveys captured the participants previous mobile Web 2.0 experience. Lecturers and students then attended a weekly 'community of practice' (COP) throughout the duration of the project investigating and supporting the integration of mobile web 2.0 tools into their courses. Participant feedback was captured via their online Web 2.0 sites, including a blog/e-portfolio. A post-trial survey and focus group discussion were also used to capture participant feedback. Each project informed the design of subsequent projects.

The article used data mainly collected from the lecturers/students in the territory education setting and provided case studies from both a student and a lecturer’s perspectives. From both cases it is found that more communications integrated with mobile web 2.0 and both parties experienced significant flexibility and continued to utilize mobile web 2.0 technology with smartphones of their choices.


http://www.acu.edu/academics/orsp/Mobile_Learning_Fell/index.html
Located in Texas, Abilene Christian University has offered the Apple iPad Exploration Pilot Program

The goal of the Fellows position is to generate quality research that broadly or narrowly examines one of the following targeted areas of investigation:

• Comparing faculty and student perceptions of device usage and impact with actual use patterns.
• Conducting controlled experiments which compare mobile and non-mobile sections of a course.
• Conducting systematic investigations of learning efficiency and retention for information acquired on mobile devices vs. traditional methods of instruction.
• Collaborating with external partners to demonstrate the generalizability research findings from the ACU campus to other settings.


The smartphone market is set to exceed computer users by 2014 when the smartphone market is expected to reach 30% of the worldwide cellphone market (Hendery, 2009).

The current trends in mobile computing
are towards devices that are even more
embedded, ubiquitous and networked than
those available today. The capabilities of
mobile phones, PDAs, games consoles and
cameras will likely merge within the next
five to ten years to provide a networked,
multimedia device that is always with you.
Integrated context-aware capabilities will
transform everyday activities by providing
the ability to capture details about the
time, location, people around you and even
the weather. The entire internet will
become both personal and portable. (mobile review)

From the above example we can tell it is happening and iPhone is just the demonstration of what is possible, with more new functionality announced – iPhone applied for patent for the initial location/provide services functionality for new generation and special apps like iStandford program and standford provide the training course, we can safely say that the world is moving ‘mobile’ --- standford example here….

The article is useful to my research topic, as student feedback from the m-learning projects clearly showed that the choice of smartphone was critically important in the acceptance of its use. From a smartphone evaluation rubric developed for choosing an appropriate smartphone for each of the 2009 projects it is found that iPhone 3G/ 3GS scored most – Scored best in most categories including mobile web experience, ease of user interface and portability , only suffered slightly in image/video capture due to low cam resolution. This article will help me much in the argument for the future m-learning environment and help identify iPhone as the primary choice for the integration of pedagogical affordances of mobile web 2.0.

The main limitation of this article is that the result only based on New Zealand, the various m-learning trials takes significant time as same as the training students/lecturer receive proper mobile web 2.0 training and many of the identified m-learning scenarios were serendipitous rather than planned by the lecturers –Thus the authors suggested implementation requires planned staging and scaffolding to support student learning and some key requirements for student/lecturer to archive.