The result of my thesis project is a Mobile Learning Toolkit that is designed to empower trainers in Africa and other developing contexts to integrate mobile learning into their teaching.The 98-page toolkit contains 15 mobile learning methods divided into 4 categories that trainers can choose from depending on their needs – whether they’re looking deliver content; assign tasks; gather feedback; or provide support to their training participants.These methods have been designed to be as inclusive as possible, with most requiring only low end devices (basic mobile phones with voice calling and SMS capability), allowing interactive learning experiences to be delivered right to the Base of the Pyramid.In addition to the methods, an overview of mobile learning is included in the beginning of the guidebook and a set of practical tools that allow the methods to be immediately put into practice. As well as a general guide, the toolkit includes recommendations for customising the methods for the delivery of the “my.coop” training programme currently being launched by the International Labour Organization to teach the principles of managing agricultural cooperatives in developing regions worldwide. The toolkit offers my.coop participants the chance to experience the benefits of mobile learning themselves while also empowering them to use mobile learning methods to reach their own trainees, thus multiplying the impact throughout the entire my.coop training pyramid.However, the Mobile Learning Toolkit has been designed to have a value not only within the context of this training programme, but for use in the delivery of all kinds of training within any developing context. Anyone can pick up the toolkit and be inspired to use mobile learning.
The toolkit is an open source resource that is available for download below (please view in "Book" mode):
The format of the book is A5 portrait. To make it easier to print by users on the field, another version is included below with A4 spreads ready for printing. The graphic identity of the book aims to be clear and simple, with the goal that it will look good and be easily readable even after being printed in black and white and photocopied several times.
The toolkit is intended as an open source resource that can continue to be improved and added to with the feedback and collaboration of its users. As such, any feedback, comments and ideas are welcome and can be shared by email, Twitter or SMS:
I've had it in mind for a while now to write a post about one of the recurring themes throughout my project: storytelling.
Storytelling is something that is being talked about a lot in the design world lately; to the extent that it is in danger of becoming a generic buzzword. But the concept of storytelling is not generic, it can have many different meanings and purposes depending on the context.
In the realm of learning, storytelling contextualises theory, helping us to understand principles and subsequently put them into practice. This element of contextualisation is particularly pertinent in the context of the My.COOP project as there is an element of standardisation in the written training material, which is intended for eventual use in Africa, Asia and Latin America, across all the different kinds of agricultural cooperatives. The use of mobile phones during the training offers the possibility for tailored interaction with each and every My.COOP participant, and in the context of storytelling, could mean the delivery of stories that help frame the material within the individual's own context.
Storytelling is also a very important concept in the African context. In Africa stories are an important part of the culture, and have a strong influence in the instillment of values and beliefs.
Aside from contextualisation and value instillment, perhaps the most important factor of all is that as human beings we are drawn to stories, we enjoy them, and for this reason they capture our attention and imagination.
But how can storytelling have value via the medium of mobile phones? In particular, using the most low end technologies of voice calling and SMS?
These questions led me to the concept of microstorytelling.
Rather than a concept born from the character contraints of Twitter or SMS, this is based on the simple notion that you can say a lot with a few words. The forebear is assumed to be Ernest Hemingway who once wrote a miniature masterpiece: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."
This inspired the six-word movement (see Twitter #sixwords). Back in 2006, Smith Magazine built a bestselling six-word memoir series out of reader's submissions. That same year, Wired Magazine published six-word science fiction stories.
Inspiration can also be found in micropoetry, made famous by the traditional Japanese haiku, which in recent years has insipired the Twitter poetry or "twaiku" movement (see #twaiku, #haiku, #micropoetry, #micropoem, #poetweet).
Finally, going back to the African context, there is a strong tradition of proverbs and sayings that encapsulate profound principles in a few words. Metaphors and similes feature heavily in these proverbs, which can be a powerful medium of communicating the underlying values of cooperatives and even of education itself: "Knowledge is like a garden; if it is not cultivated, it cannot be harvested."
I hope to use these inspirations in the concept generation phase and I'm sure the theme of storytelling will be cropping up again on the blog soon!
EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology.
This week they're hosting a '5-Day Sprint': a free, weeklong online learning experience from 25-29 April focused on mobile computing.
Today the theme is 'Teaching and Learning', there is an online space for discussions and ideas sharing, plus a webinar that will be online later today.
It's mainly focussed on higher education rather than the kind of the training that My.COOP looks to offer, however some interesting points are raised in this intro video, for example the need for 2-way use of mobile devices in m-learning:
For anyone who wants to join in, it's happening over here:
An interesting discussion cropped up on the mobiMOOC forum today: Questioning the terms.
This is something that has been at the back of my mind for a while now, so finally I decided to find my own definition of mobile learning or m-learning.
Any sort of [technology enhanced] learning that happens when the learner is not at a fixed, predetermined location, or learning that happens when the learner takes advantage of the learning opportunities offered by mobile technologies. (Adapted from O'Malley et al., 2003)
However from my perspective (as a newcomer to this field), the integration of technology within this definition is not necessary (even if this seems a bit controversial!). For example, if a task is given to a mobile learner via sms, and they then go off to complete that task, they are not learning through their mobile phone but by their own experience. The phone is just a channel for communication between the learner and the teacher/facilitator.
I think the value of mobile learning is not in the devices themselves but the ability for people to access learning "on the go" as part of ever-more busy and geographically distributed lives. If I take a book to study on the bus while going to work, is this not also "mobile learning"?
Therefore I want to take a step back, to firstly break this term down into "mobile" and "learning" and look at the dictionary definitions of these two terms. The Oxford English Dictionary describes them as follows:
mobile
learning
Trying to merge these two concepts, I came up with:
The acquisition of knowledge or skills through study, experience or being taught while being free to move between different locations
Perhaps in the next weeks my interpretation of mobile learning will change, but for now this is the way I think of it.
At the end of the mobiMOOC course I'll look back at the post and decide whether or not to review my definition!
I have signed up to take part in mobiMOOC, a free online course on mLearning running from 2nd April - 14th May 2011, facilitated by 7 mobile experts. Interested? Join the online google group, the course wiki and enter the mLearning conversation with other peers.
The mobiMOOC course will start with an introduction to mLearning, getting everyone comfortable with some of its key features, and gradually moving into the more complex technical, project planning and philosophical topics. The course will feature mLearning examples from the academic, corporate and non-profit world, and look at both simple and on the edge projects from both the North and South, as the South has been an inspiration for mLearning.mobiMOOC is a fully online course, which follows the MOOC (Massive, Open, Online Course) format:This format uses a lot of social media to enable all the participants and the facilitators to stay connected, build a network, exchange experiences. Linkshttp://ignatiawebs.blogspot.com/2011/03/join-open-and-free-course-on-mobile.htmlhttp://groups.google.com/group/mobimoochttp://twitter.com/mobiMOOC
18 March 2011 // The University of Illinois is developing the Sustainable Development Virtual Knowledge Interface (SusDeViKI), which will put educational animations in the hands of people at every educational level. The animations are available on the SusDeViKI website, and can be accessed using mobile phones. This example explains how to create a natural insecticide from neem seeds.
The videos are available in different languages and accents (the above example is English with a Nigerian accent) and they come in the mobile phone ready 3gp format.
Employing farmers, aid workers and animators, the researchers are tweaking the existing practice of dispelling these lessons. Traditionally, this type of training required U.S.-based educators to visit developing nations, then put in weeks or months working with people there. At the end of the assignment, the educator would leave, and to some extent, fail to reach larger numbers of learners. With SusDeViKI being accessible to almost anyone with a mobile phone, the highly actionable lessons can reach large audiences and can be digested whenever it's convenient for the trainee. Another consideration is the fact that the lessons can be watched and re-watched as many times as needed by the students.
This approach to educating people in developing countries is very much on point when one considers that 70% of the world’s mobile phone subscriptions are found in those regions. The system is flexible enough that users with limited resources can one day not only consume information, but could potentially add to the collection of materials. In this way, a feedback loop could be closed, allowing the developers and researchers who initially constructed the system to learn from those who started out as students.
15 February 2011 // The winners of the 16th Annual Global Mobile Awards were announced at GSMA Mobile World Congress, the world's largest exhibition for the mobile industry, this year held from 14-17 February in Barcelona with 50,000 participants from 200 countries.
There were 2 interesting m-learning winners, both related to learning English:
Best Mobile Learning Innovation Urban English
The Urban English Language Learning Program developed by Urban Planet Mobile allows each subscriber to receive detailed English lessons daily to their mobile phones via SMS with an attached English Learning ring tone. It is the largest, most comprehensive library of English Language learning for mobile education and because of smart product design, the daily lessons are available to 95% of handsets and reaches 85% of the English learning population worldwide. The Urban English line is being expanded using the current audio as the building block for an animated library to exploit the growing web enabled, smartphone market, while retaining design simplicity to still reach the greatest percentage of the worldwide market.
Judges' comments: A simple, genial yet exciting innovation; based on sound business models to reach the underserved markets.
Best Product, Initiative or Service for Underserved Segments BBC Janala
Two years in the making, BBC Janala ('Window') offers a new way of learning English in Banglasesh using mobile phones, the internet and television. There are over 50 million mobile phone users in Bangladesh today – and the number is growing. By dialling "3000" any of these users can access hundreds of English language audio lessons and quizzes. Content is updated weekly and caters to all levels of experience with 'Essential English' for beginners, 'Pronunciation' for intermediaries and 'Vocabulary in the News' for those more advanced. To make the lessons affordable, BBC Janala has teamed up with all six of Bangladesh's mobile operators who have agreed to cut the cost of calls to the service by up to 75%. Each lesson lasts three minutes and costs less than the price of a cup of tea from a Dhaka tea stall (or 3 pence). At the end of December 2009 – a month after launching – over 750,000 calls had been made to the mobile phone service.
Judges' comments: A mobile education programme (teaching English) integrated with content online, on TV and in print, focused on those living on less than $2 a day. Lessons are downloadable, or provided on demand (at a quarter of the standard charge). A truly great product.
Finally all my hard work searching for collaborators paid off, and I am pleased to make a big announcement:
My thesis will be a real project developed for the UNITED NATIONS!
I got an internship position at the International Training Centre of the International Labour Organization (ITC-ILO), and I already started last week.
So, what is the ITC-ILO? The ILO is the oldest UN agency, working towards the goal of decent work for all. The unique tripartite structure of the ILO gives an equal voice to workers, employers and governments to ensure that the views of the social partners are closely reflected in labour standards and in shaping policies and programmes. In 1965 the ILO realised there was a need to train people on how to put its values into practice in a real world context, and so it created the International Training Centre in Turin, Italy as its vocational training institute, the only one of its kind in the world. With 14,000 participants each year from 192 countries, around half of the Centre's work takes place at its large Turin campus, while courses are also held in developing regions.
What's next?
The Centre is looking to offer more distance learning opportunities, for example for geographically isolated participants. And that's where I come in! My internship project is to develop a mobile learning programme with the DELTA (Distance Education and Learning Technology Applications) department. As part of this, mobile phone technology will be utilised to reach more people and improve participant experience. This supports my original goal of using mobile phones in new ways for social progress in developing contexts.
Text to Change (TTC) offers an interactive Mobile SMS Quiz with knowledge questions linked with a rewarding system (incentive). By means of this edutainment and this interactive way of communicating, the SMS Quiz is designed to raise and help resolve key issues around local development programs.
TTC is a non-profit organization that uses mobile phone technology to collect and disseminate health information. TTC has been one of the pioneers in using mobile phones for health monitoring and advocacy in Uganda reaching out to the general public at a large scale. TTC works demand driven and sets up complete programs with local and international partners. The aim of TTC is to make life saving knowledge easily available to the general public and especially to community and family level caregivers. TTC is specialized in interactive and incentive based SMS programs addressing a wide range of health issues such as HIV/AIDS, Malaria and Reproductive Health.
