John added a talk and changed an About section.
John examing another PhD thesis
John added talks and changed an About section.
John just back from LMLG mtg at Institute of Education - loads of to do, loads of possibilities
Talks
Forthcoming talks
The Mobile and Mobility, and Information, Organisations and Systems
Where: ISD 2010 - Information Systems Development, Charles University, Praha, Czech Republic Dates: 25th August 2010 - 27th August 2010
Invited Session
Information is the basis of our society, of our businesses and of our organisations.
Once, information was marginal to organisations and then gradually information became central. Consequently, information systems development methodology, “..recommended collection of philosophies, phases, procedures, rules, techniques, tools, documentation, management, and training for developers of Information Systems”, also became central. (Avison and Fitzgerald, 1988).
Over the last decade, the mobility and connectedness afforded by universal personal mobile technologies have meant that the production, transformation, transmission, consumption, ownership, control, nature and significance of information have changed rapidly. The consequences for information systems, for the development of information systems, and for the organisations that use them are still unfolding.
This talk outlines the impact of mobility and connectedness and asks about the effects on information systems and their development.
LikeMobile and Connected - the Challenges and the Implications
Where: Eduserv Symposium 2010: The Mobile University Royal College of Physicians, 11 St Andrew's Place, London NW1 4LE When: 13th May 2010, 10am - 5pm
We live in a society increasingly characterised by mobility and connectedness; our educational institutions are however still largely characterised by fixity and isolation, and perhaps by the risk of irrelevance.
Recent years have seen a growth and interest in mobile learning, in many countries of the world and in all sectors, universities included. At the same time, the acceptance and ownership of increasingly powerful mobile personal technologies has become widespread, nearly universal , in our societies. These two trends might seem supportive of each other and in some respects they are. In other respects, however, their relationship is more problematic.
This talk explores the impact of mobile technology on society and the phenomenon of mobile learning within our institutions, and the likely strategic implications and issues for UK universities.
Mobile Learning – Starting in the Right Place, Going in the Right Direction?”
Where: Oporto, Portugal, IADIS Mobile Learning Dates: 19th March 2010 - 21st March 2010 When: 20th March 2010
Conference Key Note
Mobile learning is perhaps nine or ten years old. This talk looks back at those years to ask if we started in the right place and went in the right direction. And have we gone as far as we can?
The achievements of the mobile learning community in this time are relatively easy to identify. The community globally has demonstrated, though probably not proved, that we can take learning to individuals, communities and countries that were previously too remote, socially, economically, infrastructurally or geographically, for other educational initiatives. We have also shown that we can enhance and enrich the concept and activity of learning, beyond earlier conceptions, with learning experiences that are more personalised, authentic, situated and context-aware than ever before. We have shown also that we can challenge and extend existing theories of learning.
There are now several substantial national programmes and initiatives, and last but not least, the community now supports an international professional association, several peer-reviewed academic journals and a range of national and international conferences, ranging from those for practitioners and policy-makers to those for researchers.
Each of these apparent achievements is however more complex than it at first seems and the mobile learning community still has major challenges to address. Some of these are internal or local to the mobile learning community itself but other more significant challenges are located in the wider external environment.
The development of mobile learning has often been driven by pedagogic necessity, technological innovation, funding opportunity; it has come out of particular regions, institutions and disciplines, and sometimes out of the perceived inadequacies of conventional e-learning. These historical factors have shaped mobile learning but they have limited it and now challenge it too.
There are still the significant challenges growing out of this history, those of scale, sustainability, inclusion and equity in all their different forms in the future, and of context and personalisation in all their possibilities, of blending with other established and emerging educational technologies, and of tracking the changes in technology.
There continues to be challenges in developing the substantial and credible evidence-base that will justify further research and development.
These challenges are however local to the immediate educational context of mobile learning. There are however wider contextual challenges, those of recognising the profound societal and philosophical changes catalysed by mobile devices, and of recognising their local echoes and implications within mobile learning.
Mobile learning can be characterised as a specific enterprise within education systems. Mobile devices are near-universal and their impact brings near-universal connectedness to people, data, content and media. There are subtle but pervasive transformations of jobs, work and the economy, of our sense of time, space and place, of ethics and politics, of knowing and learning, and of community and identity. Finally, the talk explores how these transformations challenge education systems and hence challenge mobile learning.
Past talks
The 'Learner Experience' of Mobiles, Mobility and Connectedness.
Where: University of Reading, ELESIG, the HEA 'learner experience' SIG When: 21st January 2010
This talk draws on a review of the literature of mobilities and looks at its significance for 'learners' and its capacity to help educators understand how mobility and connectedness are changing the expectations of learners.
The 'learner experience' of learning and technology whilst at university, and the learners' reactions to learning and technology, before, during and within their time at university, are, in part, a product of learners' changing experiences of learning and technology outside university and before university. We cannot just ask about the 'learner experience' without asking how the world outside is shaping learners.
These experiences are now changing dramatically as more and more of these learners have personal mobile devices. These devices include smart-phones, satnav, games consoles, digital cameras, media players, netbooks and handheld computers. Almost every learner owns one and uses one, often more than one. Not only do they own them and use them but they also invest considerable time, effort and money choosing them, buying them, customising them, enhancing them and exploiting them. These devices express part or much of their owners' values, affiliations, identity and individuality through their choice and their use. The devices are curiously both pervasive and ubiquitous, both conspicuous and unobtrusive, both noteworthy and taken-for-granted in the lives of most of the people in this country.
The review and talk are intended to give the 'learner experience' community some insight into the literature that currently describes and analyses the relationships and dynamics between the mobility and the connectedness afforded by personal mobile devices, systems and technologies on the one hand and changes in people, culture and society on the other. Much of this picture is one of fragmentation; attitudes and usage of mobile technologies facilitate the creation of transient or volatile communities and thus fragment more stable, monolithic and traditional communities. One obvious possible difference between these communities is age; the uptake of these technologies is often, rightly or wrongly, characterised as age-dependent, as generational. If this is even partly true, it means that the impact on universities will be different across the sector. Those universities with a student profile that peaks sharply at 18- 19yrs will at some point see sudden changes. Those universities taking students from across the decades will see gradual and apparently haphazard changes perhaps masked by more local factors.
The talk looks at changes to identity as well as community; to jobs, work, economy and employment; to disadvantage and 'digital divides', personal, local and global; to knowing, finding out and learning; to manners, expectations, standards and ethics; time, space and place and how all of these changes and transformations change and shape the expectations that underpin the 'learner experience'.
Finally the talk touches on the possibility or rather certainty that learners may bring not only their attitudes and expectations with them but also the devices themselves and attempts to describe some of the situations that this might engender. There is however a very specific situation on the horizon in which institutions might decide to deliver and support learning using these learners' own devices. This changes the default from a situation where institutions procure and provide learning technologies to one where learners bring their and institutions support this. It shifts the locus of control from institution to learner. This is going to prove challenging.
Mobiles for Development - Current Key Challenges for the Research Community
Where: Mobile phones and development workshop, London International Development Centre Dates: 9th October 2009 - When: 9th October 2009, 9am - 10am
There is an emergent community of researchers, developers and activists under the banner of ‘mobiles for development’ that believes the widespread ownership, accessibility and use of mobiles in the ‘developing’ world, unlike any other ICT, represents a significant and timely opportunity to address deprivation and poverty. There have already been many initiatives and gatherings but progress has not been straightforward. Much work for mobiles, for example mobile learning, and much work in ‘development’, for example in Africa, has been characterised by failure to scale up and to endure; there has been a confusion about the role and meaning of ‘development’ alongside capacity-building, aid and research, and about the activities of ‘development’ alongside the global activities of corporates, donors, tourists and universities.
There are also philosophical problems relating research activities to the processes of evidence-based policy formulation, sometimes in the tensions between ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’, sometimes in contexts of ‘small’ government or just bad government, and the predispositions of different cultures to ideas of participation, risk, control and innovation, and to understanding the trustworthiness of our notions of generalisability, transferability and abstraction. The expectations of the ‘grand narratives’ of ‘development’ have seldom been fulfilled and the mechanics of making stuff happen largely stays a mystery. There are several other challenges!
IWB4D – Interactive Whiteboards for Development
Where: ICTD2009, Carnegie-Mellon University Doha Qatar Dates: 17th April 2009 - 19th April 2009
The work presented here describes the concept of ubiquitous interactive classrooms by demonstrating emerging, low-cost presentation technologies including the Nintendo Wii and palm-sized projectors. The authors also discuss how they can be used to promote better learning through ad-hoc digital interaction in traditional classrooms and the field.
Index Terms — active white boards, mobile learning, whole class teaching
Where: Uppsala, Workshop on Ethics, Roles and Relationships in Interaction-Design in Developing Regions
see also http://ict4d.at/2009/08/25/notes-from-the-workshop-on-ethics-roles-and-relationships-in-interaction-design-in-developing-regions/
Ethics embraces everything from the legally allowable as set out in laws, statutes and regulations through the institutionally and professionally advisable or preferable as set out in regulations, codes, frameworks and procedures all the way to the socially or culturally expected or acceptable as manifest in such concepts as fashion, taste, behaviour, etiquette and language. All aspects of ethics, especially the last, are important to individuals as expressions of identity, affinity and community.
They are important to researchers because research must be seen as proper and moral, that is within laws and regulations and within the consensus of research community but also as moral and acceptable within the communities within which researchers work. It must also I suspect be aligned to the ethical expectations of communities if it is be methodologically sound.
In looking at the ethics of conducting design research, every researcher is facing in two directions, has two different sets of discourses and responsibilities.
Firstly, each researcher works with and within the ethical expectations and formulations of their profession, their institute and their funder. Secondly, each works with individuals and communities using novel, complex and powerful technologies, individuals and communities that comprise a society increasingly transformed by these technologies, particularly mobile ones and web-based ones.
The first discourse is easy to understand: technological change is rapid and widespread, and drives social changes - sorry, not meant to sound like technological determinism, whilst ICTD research is often multidisciplinary and multi-partner. Institutional ethics procedures are relatively static and perhaps falling behind this change and complexity but this first discourse is compounded by the second.
The literature of development describes how societies are changing as increasingly powerful technology systems become widespread and integrated into everyday life; inter-related notions of identity and community, conversation and discourse, space and time, knowledge and ideas are evolving; local physical and virtual worlds are intermingling; virtual groups are forming and dissolving; knowledge, ideas, images and issues are being generated and valorised by these fragmented and transient groups. For the design researcher seeking to work ethically and rigorously in developing regions this implies an increasing awareness of transient and fragmented specifics around, for example, preferences, punctuality, taste, slang, privacy, place and status.
Mobile technologies are not only widespread but, unlike other ICTS, they are concentrated at the ‘bottom-of-the-pyramid’. This raises two specific ethical issues for the design researcher: firstly, there is considerable corporate multinational interest in what is perceived to be an enormous potential market for content and services delivered by mobile technologies and hence pilots and projects taking place perhaps below the scrutiny of conventional ethical supervision; secondly, working with communities in developing regions entails attempting to work ethically across multiple differentials of power, status, lifestyle. The mechanics but also the ethics of participative design are challenging and novel in these contexts.
Design researchers in developing regions must recognise wider social contexts in order to be aligned to the ethics of their academic responsibilities whilst being aligned to the ethics of the fragmented, multiple and transient communities and individuals with whom they research. This will ensure that their work is not only moral in the eyes of these communities and individuals but that this work is methodologically authentic and credible.
The proposed contribution will look at these issues from the perspective of someone who has worked across a range of roles and relationships, sometimes as evaluator, sometimes consultant, sometimes as researcher, sometimes as research mentor or supervisor, sometimes as visiting scientist, a mixture perhaps typical of many academics working in developing regions, working within research environments, consortia, not-for-profits, working in both developing and developed countries, however interpreted, attempting to understand and address inclusion, opportunity, diversity and the development agenda
The contribution will use real incidents, suitably anonymised, to address questions drawn from the workshop themes and to illustrate the points made in this outline
Add Comment
Comments
|
|
John Traxler,
University of Wolverhampton
|
Add Comment