by Last week, Educause offered Mobile Sprint, 5 lunch time webinars over 5 days on mobile learning. I must admit, I liked the continuing discussion that the 5 days allowed – it was more than just a webinar and it wasn’t as draining as a conference, but it was engaging.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – I love back channels during conferences/webinars. It adds an extra layer of discussion and engagement that sitting quietly in a presentation can never offer. The webinars offered a well used chat for participants. Despite the chat, I took my discussion to twitter as I enjoy taking the discussion to a wider audience – can’t make it to the actual webinar, you can still get the highlights on twitter. Edusprint, the hashtag for the webinars, provided for interesting discussion and I believe I had conversations with interest people who were not participating in the audio portion of the talk.
I’m still not sure how mobile learning is going to evolve – many of the issues raised, such as security, are issues for online learning generally. As it stands now, mobile learning seems to be centred on value-added options. I had an interesting conversation about qr codes in the classroom with one twitterer. Purdue is doing some really neat things with apps like Hotseat – a twitter like application for commenting during class. I’d love to try something like that in an info lit session, allow students to make comments and ask questions, appointing one student to monitor and raise appropriate issues for the whole class. On a whole, I think the webinars raised more questions than answers for me but we are in early stages of mobile learning. I’m looking forward to further discussions on mobile learning and I hope Educause continues the ideas of sprints for other topics. You can check out the recorded mobile sprint sessions here.
