Mobile Devices in Education

What is it?

Mobile devices include media players such as iPods and other digital audio and video players; media capture and playback devices such as the iPod Touch or multimedia cell phones such as Blackberrys or iPhones; mobile devices with integrated Geographic Positioning System (GPS) capability; and small, ultra-lightweight personal computers or other converged devices that combine some or all of these functions.

In some cases mobile devices offer unique features which could be utilized by educators. More often, mobile devices offer an opportunity to further educational goals by leveraging and building upon the functions of technologies already adopted by and considered indispensable to a majority of students.

Who uses it?

Students spend an average of 11 hours a day engaged with media, are constantly on the go, and spend an average of 20 minutes a day sending & receiving text messages on their cell phones (Sept 2006, Harris Interactive College Explorer Study). Many faculty use mobile devices to enhance their personal productivity but may not have considered how such devices could be effective teaching tools.

Uses as an instructional technology

The following are some "blue-sky" examples of how various mobile technologies could be exploited to support teaching and learning (note that these are for illustrative purposes only and are not all supported at Duke at this time). 

Example:  ClearTXT software can enable one-way messaging to students when components of a Blackboard course site changes. Students opt-in and indicate how they want to be notified of such things as announcements being posted, content being added or grades being updated in their course site. Messages can come to their cell phone or email.

Example:  Libraries (including Duke’s Library) are developing versions of their catalog and reference services tailored to handheld computers and cell phones. For example, a student walking on west campus could access the library catalog via a cell phone to check whether a book is in. Or, a student working in a part of the library away from the reference desk could text message a reference librarian via cell phone. With NCSU's MobileLIB, students can use their cell phones to access the catalog, check availability of computers anywhere in the library, get the library hours for that day, search the campus directory and see the current location of all buses in the University’s transit system.

Eample: Google’s SMS service lets you enter a search term from your cell phone and have the results returned as a text message.

Example:  Guide by Cell produces audio tours of Libraries, museums and outdoor spaces playable on cell phones. Students stop at designated spots on a map (or markers in a building), press a number and hear a description of the location. Dartmouth University has created a cell phone tour of key places in the library.

Example: Mobile learning in China, an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus blog, describes how students in China will be able to use their cell phones to access English lessons, test-prep training, and other courses from New Oriental Education & Technology Group, a leading Chinese educational company.

Example: iPods or PocketPCs loaded with reference materials can be accessed during training for just-in-time look up of information. The iPhone can generate maps and driving directions while touring a new area.

Example: With iQuiz, you can create your own custom quizzes, sync them from iTunes to your iPod, and then share them with others. Multiple languages are available. Students can review material and quiz themselves in any location, using short segments of time.

Example: Study Cell allows teachers and students to create flashcards online to study on their phones. You can download flashdecks created by others to your cell phone and share your flashcard decks with friends and study groups.

Example:  Gabcast is a podcasting and audioblogging platform that offers an easy way to create and distribute audio content. Most people will use a touch-tone telephone to make their recordings but the company also provides worldwide access to the service through VoIP. Once you have made a recording and have published it, a newsfeed is immediately and automatically updated to alert subscribers to your channel. Students could use this to record “in the field” notes or interviews for course projects.
Example:  Students studying abroad could use phones with built in digital cameras and digital video recording features to capture examples of authentic language, images of archeological sites or short movies of cultural events. Students can post videos from cellphones directly to YouTube. Here's one person's video diary of a trip to Barcelona.

Example: Mediascapes is a Hewlett Packard Labs research project that makes it easy to author and play multimedia content (image, audio, or video) on a mobile device based on context triggers. A trigger could be from a location sensor (such as a Geographical Positioning Sensor - GPS) or any sensor, even a heart rate monitor. The software can be used to create games, historical tours, educational tools, and other applications. See also : http://h20325.www2.hp.com/blogs/wee/archive/0001/01/01/2435.html?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN .

Example:  Facebook and other social networking tools allow users to set their preferences to have information from the site delivered to their cell phones. Although mostly used for non-academic work, sites like Facebook do have academic groups within them and can link directly to external academic tools. Students could choose to interact with members of a study group or with individuals throughout the country studying a similar topic via their Facebook accounts and mobile alerts. Educause’s 7 Things You Should Know About Facebook presents an academic scenario of using Facebook throughout a study-abroad experience.

Example: CourseFeed has launched a Facebook application that brings Blackboard’s functionality to your Facebook account. With the Facebook application, changes to your Blackboard course site come in the form of a news feed to Facebook. Because students spend so much time on Facebook, they may be more likely to see the information there than in their standard course site. There are security concerns about passing private information via this application, so Duke and a number of other schools are not currently using it. However, there may be a more secure form of the application or an alternative building block in the future with similar functionality. Harvard University, for example, has developed its own application for linking its course web sites with Facebook.

Example:  The MIT Teacher Education Program has been working on creating "Augmented Reality" simulations to engage people in simulation games that combine real world experiences with additional information supplied to them by handheld computers. For example, Environmental Detectives is an outdoor game in which players using GPS-guided handheld computers try to uncover the source of a toxic spill by interviewing virtual characters and conducting large scale simulated environmental measurements and analyzing data. Early research has shown that this mode of learning is successful in engaging university and secondary school students in large scale environmental engineering studies, and providing an authentic mode of scientific investigation.

Example:  Classtalk is similar to Personal Response Systems (clickers) but uses calculators and a two-way network for class polling and quizzing. Unlike typical PRS’s which focus on multiple choice answers, students can type in their answers individually, or as a group-dissenting answers or as opinions. Responses can be words, sentences, numbers, formulas--even symbolic algebra--as well as multiple choice. Classtalk allows the instructor to send feedback messages directly to students, customized to each response. Classtalk can also accept queries from students. 

Duke faculty projects using mobile devices in education, past and present

Fuqua’s Executive MBA program delivers content to students using video iPods and provides additional content in mobile device formats via Fuqua on iTunesU. (http://www.ee.fuqua.duke.edu/programs/open/alp/0507/)

PhD students in Brenda Neece’s course on Musicology experimented with small form factor Ultra Mobile PCs (UMPCs) for field research uses such as note taking, dictation, and digital sketching. (http://cit.duke.edu/ideas/projects/2007/11/02/micro-computing-for-musicology/)

Students in the "Methods Primate Field Ecology" course use a Global Positioning System (GPS) unit and accelerometer unit to track primates at the Duke University Lemur Center. (http://cit.duke.edu/ideas/projects/2007/05/04/visualizing-movement/)

Under the direction of Trudi Abel, students are gathering audio, digital photographs, and GPS data to enrich historical maps available via the Digital Durham web project. (http://cit.duke.edu/ideas/projects/2007/05/04/visualizing-durham/)

Pat Halpin from NSOE loaded Geographic Information System(GIS) software onto a set of Pocket PCs (palm-sized computers), which were then made available to students in his courses to take into the field.  Paired with portable Global Positioning System (GPS) devices, the Pocket PCs enabled students to verify and collect environmental geospatial data.
(http://cit.duke.edu/showcase/2002/program.html)

Laura Richman in Psychology used Palm Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and Experience Sampling Program software to collect research data from fellow students. The PDAs were programmed to beep and prompt the subjects to answer a questionnaire at various times throughout the day. When the surveys were complete, the data sets were downloaded from the PDAs and analyzed.
(http://cit.duke.edu/ideas/projects/2005/08/24/pda-data-collection/)

Students in Sally Schaumann’s Environmental Studies course used iPods with recording attachments to conduct interviews with Durham residents. They then developed presentations utilizing the audio clips to summarize conclusions to their research.
(http://cit.duke.edu/showcase/2005/posterpdfs/ipod-poster2.pdf)

Instructors in language classes have developed short videos, digital images and recorded speech and loaded the materials onto their iTunesU sites. Instructors use their own iPods as a lightweight, all-in-one media source to project or play examples during class.  Students use the iTunes U site to sync their iPods so they can have access to the materials before and after the class sessions for further study and discussion.
(for example, http://cit.duke.edu/showcase/2006/pdf/clifford.pdf)


Last modified March 18, 2008 10:49:10 AM EDT