I just finished up a 2-half day virtual conference on Mobile Learning 2.0: The Next Phase of Innovation in Mobility sponsored by Educause. This was my first experience with attending a conference like this and I have mixed feelings. It was really nice to be able to concentrate on one thing for two half-days but it might also have been an overload of information. The speakers had great resources to share and the back channel in twitter #elifocus had even more!
Several institutions joined the conference as a group which was great for the times when we broke for discussion but it made the built-in chat function and polling tools in Adobe Connect pretty useless. I think that a lot of the individuals in these groups joined the twitter stream so that they were free to chat and add their comments.
Those of us who joined as individuals were put on virtual teams. Unfortunately each of the teams was made up of about 50 people so getting any kind of meaningful discussion going didn’t work. On the second day we only had 15 and it worked much better.
My main take-away from the conference is that we’re behind as an institution on providing content that is mobile-ready and that we need to get a move on it in order to get information to the students in a way that they are able to find it.
As far as using mobile technologies in the classroom, there is an opportunity to use the technology to engage the student and to keep them interested in the topics you cover. Using it as the sole form of delivery, study, assessment, and student contribution isn’t going to happen very soon.
Session Recordings – you might have to join the NING group to access the recordings. I think it is open to the public but if you want an invite just let me know and I’ll invite you to join.
It will take awhile to get through the resources and to think about how to start implementing all the issues and challenges that were brought up but it is exciting stuff!