“Socialight - the best way to create, share and discover cool things in the real world with Sticky Notes. Using the web or your mobile phone, you can find, create and tag location-based Stickies about nearly everything from great restaurants to secret sales to awesome parties.”
Add comment May 30th, 2007
“Telling stories, the location-based digital way” is an article written for iCommons by Steve Vosloo. In it he briefly introduces location-based digital storytelling and some of the many interesting, educational and fun projects that make use of free and easy-to-use tools to pin a story to a map, string a narrative along a physical path or feed stories directly to users as they move around a neighbourhood.
Location-based digital storytelling has relevance for digital hero booking because the project gets youth to describe, photograph or draw the communities in which they live.
Add comment May 15th, 2007
Nokia has announced the launch of seven new, low-end phones specifically aimed at consumers in emerging markets. Features include having multiple phone books on a phone (to allow for easy sharing of the phone between family members or friends), cost monitoring and flashlight. The phones will be available later this year.
What has all this got to do with projects like Digital Hero Book, you might wonder. Well, because our project is mostly based in developing countries, where mobile phones are usually more prevalent than PCs, we need to consider the roll of mobile phones in recording, accessing and sharing digital stories. As pervasive and increasingly powerful devices — with photo and video capabilities — mobile phones potentially compliment the project very well. Watch this space.
Add comment May 4th, 2007
The MobilED platform innovatively combines a MediaWiki server with mobile technologies to create an audiowiki, which enables users to access and author content with basic mobile phones using SMS or advanced handsets with MMS capability. Watch one of the short usage scenario videos to see how MobilED can work.
The widespread uptake of mobile technologies has created many opportunities for collaborative and mobile learning (mlearning). The MobilED (Mobile EDucation) project, led by the Media Lab at the University of Art and Design, Helsinki, and the Meraka Institute in South Africa, aims to explore these opportunities within the field of youth education, in and out of schools. The project is aimed at designing formal and informal learning and teaching environments that are meaningfully enhanced with mobile technologies and services, and is based on principles of social constructivist pedagogy, including group-centered learning, project-based learning, problem solving and inquiry learning. It is an open-source and open content initiative that creates the ability for all to access and, more importantly, contribute their knowledge to shared online information repositories. There has been keen interest in the project from the educational sector: other MobilED pilots are happening in Brazil and India, with plans underway for Colombia, Mexico and New Zealand.
The project includes the design, development and piloting of prototype applications where multimedia and language technologies (text, images, audio) are used via mobile phones as tools in the learning process. Two working prototypes have been developed: the MobilED Kit – a box with mobile tools, software and guidebook for use in a classroom or youth club to carry out collaborative mobile learning projects, and the MobilED Server – a technology platform to support the kit. The MobilED server has been used with a MediaWiki – to create an audiowiki – as follows:
The system has been successfully piloted three times in South African schools: the first two involving basic mobile phones and the audiowiki, which was first seeded with content relevant to the pilots. The students assessed the effects of HIV/AIDS on the different levels of society (person, family, community, etc.), and collectively pointed out different strategies that are, or can be, employed at each of these levels. They first conducted research by accessing the audiowiki, then they recorded their strategy message as an audio piece via MobilED. The message was communicated to the school community as an audiocasting show. To access the audiowiki and the audiocasting service, the students shared Nokia 3230 phones with speakers. They did not use a PCs at all.
Whereas the first two pilots focused on the mobile technology most accessible in South Africa – basic phones capable of SMS and making and receiving voice calls – the third pilot looked at the use of more advanced mobile phones with multimedia capabilities. It consisted of a joint project between a low-income public school and affluent, private school, based on MMS (text, image, audio) content. The collaborative task for the students was to create a presentation about a field trip to the Meraka Institute. They used the phones to take photos, add text, compile a slide presentation and MMS it to the server. The students worked together in pairs.
Overall, the results show that students learned to use mobile phones very fast in the small groups, even when not at all ICT literate. Students were engaged and energized throughout the learning experience; during the contextual interviews, the students told that they found the field tests very interesting and empowering. Recording their own audio was the most exciting part of the pilot.
The real potential of the MobilED solution in developing countries is that anyone with a mobile phone is able to be an active participant in the information society by being a contributor and not just a passive recipient of information. It also facilitates that elusive goal of the creation of more (digital) local content in local languages.
Molotech and MobilED are currently exploring the possibility of a cross-cultural collaboration between youth in the US and South Africa using the MobilED platform.
Add comment May 30th, 2007
The presentation tonight at Stanford University titled Rigorous Research on the Effects of Learning Technology: Are We Learning Anything? was summarized by the eLearning Forum as follows:
“Barbara Means and Jeremy Roschelle, co-directors of SRI International’s Center for Technology in Learning were involved in two major studies of technology effectiveness at scale that released reports this spring. The two reports seem to support very different conclusions about technology’s potential to improve student learning.
Steve Vosloo attended the presentation. The key issues for him were:
More information:
Add comment May 23rd, 2007
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Molotech is a section 21 company (Reg No: 2003/030919/08)
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