Mobile learning – a bliss or a mess?

When an innovation turns into your regular cup of tea, wouldn't you want to know what you are actually committing to and how it affects your business?

Be it smartboards, flipped classroom, or gamification, learning styles or neurolinguistic programming, there is a variety of educational fads that we might put to use in the classroom – without having any clue whether they are a solution or just another mess in the learning process.

How is it with mobile learning?


We've drawn up a roadmap to facilitate the active application of mobile learning and particularly the BYOD model in our TVET powerhouse Omnia. (slideshow below, in Finnish).

In order to achieve major changes in the working and teaching culture, there is a need for the personnel to be instructed in taking advantage of educational technology and teaching practices that support learning in the digital world.

We've done a lot of piloting in mobile learning already, and the digital world learning culture is gaining foothold rapidly.

What do we know about the effects, and the benefit-cost ratio? How do we measure various direct and indirect consequences?

We've already taken various measures to gather information, like carried out surveys on campuses, given questionnaires to those who've borrowed iPads from the library etc. Our approach hasn't been very comprehensive or thorough, though.

Surely there are qualitative questions in our surveys meant to evaluate the advantages of mobile learning. And definitely we gather quantitative data as well. But now we want to move forward.

Trawling the net for research on the subject yielded only small fish. I started reading Salman Khan's The One World School House this morning, as I expected him to be the one who knows about analysizing educational data, but so far the first forty pages have been a disappointment. So, proper research papers might be a better option.


Have you found useful resources on evaluating and measuring the effects of mobile learning? Has your school come up with practices to share? Do me – and many of the blog readers, I guess – a favour and leave a comment!

BYOD case Omnia (in Finnish) from Esko Lius

You don't need Prezi to prezify

I'll discuss the benefits of social media with students interested in entrepreneurship tomorrow afternoon.

I started to plan the presentation in Notability today, and thought "Why not also presenting from that app, too?"

So, I fetched a few logos and pictures from the web, saved them to the iPad's Camera roll, and opened them in Notability. Drew and doodled some more points on the topic, and finally made a word cloud with WordPack.

Presenting it will be very much like with Prezi. Everything is on one canvas, and my fingers steer and zoom around it. Similar but a more impromptu way of dealing with the material.

What is your favourite way of "misusing" an app? Drop a comment and share it with us.

What's the recipe for a community of practice?

Last week's Friday afternoon at InnoOmnia, Espoo. Small groups of adult students wandering around the vocational institute. They had gotten keys to access almost any space to watch and observe, to ask and interview, to learn and to get a grip on the community.

These teacher trainees were on Edutech bootcamp, a part of their vocational teachers' pedagogical studies. They had been learning education technology and pedagogy for two days, and this was their concluding task.


The trainees formed groups of three, got a key and an iPad, and started by consulting the course blog about what does "community of practice" mean, how can it be used as a support in learning, and what they are exactly expected to dig out in their own task.

There were two questions the students had to find answers for:

• How do CoP principles show up in InnoOmnia? 
• How does technology support the CoP in InnoOmnia? 

By letting the students do their learning in an authentic context, by letting them decide over their task management themselves we wanted to get them engaged, and to take the ownership of their own learning. By making them to analyze and evaluate InnoOmnia's practices and to create an unconventional learning outcome, we wanted them to use also their higher-level thinking skills (as they are classified in Bloom's taxonomy).

As their just-started studies are mainly carried out as distance learning, by such a procedure we wanted to support the creation of their own common practices, and their own community of practice.

Three groups interviewed students, entrepreneurs and teachers in InnoOmnia on video (above and eg. this and this). One group took pictures and made blog entries, another a Facebook page, and yet another a comic strip.

Further reading on communities of practice in education and on using technology to support them: 

• Barab, S. A., & Duffy, T. (2012). From Practice Fields to Communities of Practice. In D. Jonassen & S. M. Land (Eds.), Theoretical Foundations of Learning Environments (2nd ed., pp. 29–65). 
• Hoadley, C. (2012). What is a Community of Practice and How Can We Support It? In Theoretical Foundations of Learning Environments, see above (pp. 286–299). 
• Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2011). New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Social Learning (3rd ed.). See example pp. 232-245.
• Lloyd, A. (2010). Lessons from the workplace: Understanding information literacy as practice. In Practising Information Literacy: Bringing Theories of Learning, Practice and Information Literacy Together (pp. 29–50).