Imagining a mobile Moodle

For this year's 4th International Slovenian MoodleMoot I decided to explore the efforts being made to bring Moodle to mobile devices. I found several interesting projects in this field, although I think we're just starting to explore all possibilities, and that more interesting developments will follow in the next few years, especially when teachers start experimenting with things like geolocation, augmented reality and resources that can interact with sensors on mobile devices.

The main goal of my paper and presentation was to invite teachers to think about possibilities that mobile devices can offer for education and the ways we could embed mobile learning in Moodle, a well established Learning Management System.

Here's the abstract from my paper Taking Moodle Out of the Classroom: Making Learning Mobile, Context-Aware and Fun:

"Mobile devices are becoming increasingly more powerful, better connected and are able to provide better user experience and new services based around location and context of users, which opens new possibilities for learning. The paper presents an overview of mobile learning and the efforts being made to provide better support for mobile devices and learning activities/resources in Moodle. In conclusion we also present some future trends in mobile computing that could also provide new ways of learning on the go."

You can see a video of my presentation at the conference on YouTube (total length 15 min):



And if you'd like to learn more about the topic, you can read my full paper on Scribd:

Virtual worlds in education and Moodle

Today I'd like to share with you my recent paper about using virtual worlds in education, with a special focus on how we can use virtual worlds with Moodle. I wanted this paper to be a basic introduction to why virtual worlds are good for education, and also provide a basic overview of some of the most interesting virtual worlds/tools on the market today.

Here is the embedded version from Scribd:

Virtual worlds in education and Moodle

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Internet & Technolog Research Virtual worlds second life

I presented this paper at the 3rd International Slovenian MoodleMoot with a live demonstration of Webline.lite (a super easy way to add avatars to any website), and I hope I managed to encourage some teachers to think about virtual worlds as a possible addition to their online courses. This year I was positively surprised to hear so many teachers using blogs and wikis in their classrooms, so perhaps next year I won't be the only weirdo talking about virtual worlds anymore :)

MIC'06 Conference Report

Here I am back again from the MIC'06 conference in Koper (Slovenia) where I presented my article Communication in a Virtual Classroom (read the abstract). The conference was focused on management and business topics, but there was also an e-learning section. There weren't many papers in that section, so I didn't really attend to many of the presentations. But of the presentations I did attend, I most enjoyed Alex Koohang's presentation of his paper In Search of a Learner-Centered Instructional Model for Blended Learning in which he presented his blended learning model (in this context blended means half face-to-face and half online learning) and some of the constructivist methods he uses with his students. And although our students come from a different background, I think that they could benefit from the methods that Alex mentioned. I really liked the idea of students writing short essays with their reactions to some material and then having to read, comment, analyze and react to essays written by their pears. That's really constructivism in action!

I will be posting the link to my and other interesting full articles from the conference as soon as they are available online. But for now here's my conference presentation. For any additional information about my paper or the presentation feel free to contact me!

MIC'06: Communication in a virtual classroom (Abstract)

Here's the abstract for the article Communication in a virtual classroom that I will be presenting at the MIC'06 conference. I will post the link to the full article when the conference publication is published online.

ABSTRACT

Internet is a communication information technology that can be used for different activities, including online learning. As with traditional learning, communication is an important aspect of the interaction between teachers and students. In this paper we try to present the communicational view of online learning and the unique issues that must be taken in account when using Internet for pedagogical activities. Our research showed that differences in relationships, communication comfort and forms of communication emerge in online learning. We also found out that Internet can be used for successful learning based communication, provided that the participants have sufficiently developed skills for online communication.

Keywords: online learning, communication, learning flexibility, online relationships