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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
