Categories
Digital

Mobile Technology and African Education

Image by @drbexl
Image by @drbexl

Definitely a post that I want to read fully, as after my week in Uganda with Tearfund earlier this year, I still have plans for an article about the changes that mobile technology has made to everyday life and living conditions for those in the villages that we see – and here’s some research into mobile education:

Lesego is 18 and lives in an isolated village in western Botswana. She is smart and wants to study for a degree, but the nearest universities are several hundred miles away in the east of the country, and she cannot afford to relocate.

Instead, she is learning remotely. She does not use a computer, because her family cannot afford one and the electricity supply is prone to frequent outages, but her newly purchased smartphone allows her access to the internet and a suite of online courses – offered by some of the most respected universities in the world – as well as the most up-to-date literature, all at very little cost.

This scenario is imaginary, but it is one that policymakers and educators hope might become a reality for many living in similar conditions in the world’s poorest continent in the not-too-distant future.

Read full article.

Categories
Academic Digital

Tablets in the Classroom

Having seen the results of the University of Winchester’s tablet survey, and the knowledge that one module has been trailing encouraging students to use their phones/tablets in class, it’s interesting to see this story:

Image from Wikipedia

Teaching with the aid of notebook PCs is given a cautious thumbs up by lecturers. Jack Grove writes

The pros and cons of teaching students with a tablet PC have been assessed in a new study.

The tablet computer is the latest electronic device to be used in lectures, with market-leader Apple selling almost 40 million iPads since its launch just 18 months ago.

The merits of teaching with tablets have been evaluated in a paper by Kyu Yon Lim, assistant professor at Ajou University, in South Korea, in the journal Innovations in Education and Teaching International.

She observed the introduction of tablet PCs at an engineering faculty at a large US university, in which 28 staff volunteered to take part.

The new technology was not universally popular with academics. While some revelled in the ability to transmit information, graphs and equations using the touch-screen technology, others found it cumbersome and time-consuming.

Read full story.

Categories
Digital

The Research Lab in Your Pocket @timeshighered

When George MacKerron set out to investigate how people’s happiness is affected by their environment, he hit upon the idea of using mobile phones. What if an application could be developed to ask study participants – at regular intervals – how they were feeling, where they were and who they were with?

The research project Mappiness does just that via an app that beeps phone owners once or more a day to enquire about their state of mind while simultaneously taking a noise measurement and tracking the participant’s location with global positioning system technology. Richard Layard, the British economist and Labour peer known for his research on well-being, has described the project as “a revolutionary research idea”, but for MacKerron, the concept was obvious.

“The technology was there: it seemed a no-brainer,” says the PhD researcher at the London School of Economics.

What took MacKerron by surprise was the scale of the response. At the start of the project, he and his supervisor Susana Mourato had a “crazy pipe dream” that it might be possible to get as many as 3,000 people to volunteer to participate in the project. Instead, to date nearly 43,000 people have experienced “the warm glow of helping increase the sum of human knowledge”, in the words of the Mappiness website.

Read full story (to find out more about other possible apps). I used to use the Mappiness app, but turned all the reminders off, as after about 2 months I kept not being able to respond at the time sent…

See more about ‘Happiness’/Mappiness (not the same project!):

Categories
Digital

Only 2% iPhones… wow!

Information courtesy of BillShrink.

Categories
Digital

Augmented Reality Magazine

Can start to see the potential of it, how it changes the meaning of what is seen – fascinating!