Dr. Marco Kalz » mobile learning

iPad pilot launch OUNL

Marco Kalz — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 09:14:38 +0000

Yesterday was the kick-off for the iPad pilot of the Law faculty of the Open University of the Netherlands. Before the pilot several course modules, additional study material and several law digests have been transfered into an electronic format. Beforehand, negotioations with several publishes have happened to be able to use the material on the iPad.

The added value of using digital version of the course material became very obvious due to the large pile of books and texts which were presented on the speaker desk. Students who have opted for the iPad will use it for study purposes within the next 14 months - a very good opportunity for a longitudinal study about real use and individual attitude towards tablet computers and ebooks for learning.

I have contributed a presentation about the potential of tablet computers and ebooks to increase accessibility and flexibility for lifelong learners.

Lifelong mobile learning: Increasing accessibility and flexibility with tablet computers and ebooks

View more presentations from Marco Kalz

We are supporting the pilot with an evaluation and we are very curious about the experiences and effects on learning practice.

Feedback loops and the new behaviourism

Marco Kalz — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 18:00:18 +0000

The recent Wired article about feedback loops by Thomas Goetze has helped me to understand the phenomenon of sensors, feedback, learning and behaviour change better. Or better to say, after the article I was aware how pervasive these loops are already part of our lifes.

New sensors and feedback via personal devices have inspired many developers and companies to use live data measures for intelligent information distribution in many parts of our lives (energy consumption, sports activities, health awareness etc.). What surprised me about the obvious success of these feedback loops is their simplicity. In its core they often realize a behavioristic stimulus-response model and to some extent also conditioning effects. Dan Lockton (via Stephen Downes) has written an interesting article on his blog where he discusses the implications of behaviourism for designers. He discusses the different conditioning types and he presents an example of a simple feedback loop:

"Pryor (2002) gives the example of a car seatbelt warning buzzer as negative reinforcement—a device designed to be irritating or unpleasant enough to cause the user to take action to avoid it. We might consider that a recorded voice saying “Thank you” after the seatbelt is fastened could be a positive reinforcement alternative. Positive and negative punishment are essentially the inverse of each of these—a fine for not wearing a seatbelt while driving is a form of positive punishment, and taking away someone’s driving licence would be a form of negative punishment" (Lockton, 2011).

On the other hand, many feedback loops (and this is what Goetze has neglected to some extent) also seem to work because of social control or social competition effects. Let's take the famous example of running trackers and sensors. People use individual sensor to control their speed and perseverance and after their running session they share their efforts with a specific audience (the family, facebook friends or the world). This again seems to have positive effects on motivation and in the end healthiness. But there can also be a negative effect of the social embeddedness which Lockton calls social fences or social traps. A social trap is a situation where reward and negative consequences are given but they overlap each other. Lockton points to a social trap taxonomy by Cross and Guyer (1980) which discusses 5 classes of traps:

time-delay traps (delay between behaviour and reinforcement is too long to be effective)
ignorance traps (knowledge about negative effects is not used because the rewards establishes a habit)
externality traps (negative effects are not on the individual but on other people)
collective traps (similar to the tragedy of commons)
hybrid traps (a mixture of some of these traps)

For the design of ambient displays and feedback loops it would be very interesting if we could break these traps and connect behaviour and consequences directly, especially with a focus on the grand challenges of our time (e.g. sustainability, security etc.).

Nielsen on mobile content

Marco Kalz — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 09:01:49 +0000

Nielsen has published a new piece about mobile content and readability of text. I was surprised that that they still define reading on a mobile device with a "peephole" metaphor. In contrast, my experiences with reading mobile content on the Nook Color and the iPad for some weeks were completely different and I did not have the feeling that my reading experience is influenced by a missing keyboard or mouse. Since I could not access the article mentioned I could not see which type of content was exposed to the participants of the study. I assume that the participants were accessing websites or other content where a lot of navigation is needed to see the content. I guess that the results of such a study are completely different when content specifically designed for mobile devices (in particular tablet computers) is used (like ebooks in ePub format).

Contextualized Learning and the fireplace

Marco Kalz — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 14:16:35 +0000

photo credit: The Lightwor

David Wiley once coined the sentence that content is only the fireplace that we use to gather around. One could continue that learning does not happen via the burning wood alone but learning is always happening in a given (social) context that influences the learning process. For mobile learning the topic of “contextualized learning” is a very important one since the context of learners has to be taken into account for the design of innovative mobile learning scenarios. But how can we approach the complex topic of the context of a learner?

Figueiredo & Alfonso (2006) develop a philosophical framework to describe the relation between context and learning. In this framework positivist and constructivist perspectives on context are compared and discussed. According to the authors context is viewed from a positivist perspective as being part of a realist world and therefore it is an entity external to the learner. It is often defined as the environment around a learning event. This leads to the assumption that context is a predictable variable that can be controlled in advance. From a constructivist perspective “context cannot be located and delimited…[and] context is only perceived through its interaction with the learner”. Most of the papers about mobile learning follow a positivist view of context. In this view context variables can be changed, controlled and compared in (quasi-)experimental setups and the influence of contextual variables can be compared. Due to the high usage rates of mobile devices and the increase of mobile internet flatrates the context of learners is more and more an authentic one that cannot be easily controlled through lab experiments. Therefore the constructivist view of context will get more attention. At the same time intelligent research designs are needed to conduct research about the influence of context to learning and the development of context aware learning support services.

[Disclaimer: This posting is part of a series of the current hot topic "mobile learning" of the Learning & Technology Community]