Students and mobile devices: choosing which dream

There is a crisis looming and a paradox emerging. Many educators advocate, promote and encourage the dreams of agency, control, ownership and choice amongst students whilst educational institutions take the responsibility for provision, equity, access, participation and standards. The institutions traditionally procure, provide and control the technology for learning but now students are acquiring their own personal technologies for learning and institutions are challenged to keep pace. These allow students to produce, store, transmit and consume information, images and ideas; this potentially realises the educators’ dream but is for institutions potentially a nightmare, one of loss of control and loss of the quality, consistency, uniformity and stability that delivered the dreams of equity, access and participation. This paper traces the conflicting dreams and responsibilities

Learners - should we leave them to their own devices?

Emerging technologies for learning report - Article exploring learner owned devices and their potential for edcuatio

Stop Piracy with Edification: Intellectual Property Education in School

From introduction: The global population is showing substantial disregard for intellectual property. As children, they practice the production of illegal music copies for friends and family and engage in plagiarism. Adults commit in addition software piracy, the purchasing of pirated video, and various other copyright violations. The utter disregard of such works and creativity is stumping innovation and stems from the lack of adequate intellectual property education. As an academic course counselor, I propose that elementary, middle, and high schools introduce Intellectual Property Education in to their current curriculum. This would effectively and noticeably decrease copyright infringement and would promote a sense of appreciation for creation. Yet, copyright laws and trusted systems should still be in position to prevent further encroachment

The Online Student: Lurking, Chatting, Flaming and Joking

This paper looks at the use of online conference interaction as a part of a web-based distance-learning course. There has been much debate surrounding the potential of educational technology, particularly online conference interaction, to support teaching and learning yet little attention has been paid to student experiences and understandings of the online learning environment. Drawing on data from auto-ethnographic fieldwork the paper identifies 5 categories of participation in asynchronous online conferences: lurker participation, member participation, expert/experienced participation, flamer participation and joker participation. Through an exploration of these forms of participation the paper attempts to understand and illustrate the complexities and contradictions of situating conference interaction alongside the demands of study. The analysis highlights the role of online conferencing as a space for \'interaction work\' distinct and separated from existing repertoires of formal study. The paper concludes by suggesting that pedagogically successful use of conferences as part of distance learning needs to understand the challenges and demands of remediating existing practices of interaction and study.Distance Learning, Auto-Ethnography, Online Conferencing

A Study of E-Cheating Habit of Students in Three Selected Universities in Nigeria.

Several studies have emerged on examination misconduct in Nigeria, but „e-cheating‟ habit of students, a new form of examination fraud is yet to be given adequate attention in the literature. This study is provoked to address this problem not only in the country but also in academic scholarship. Using three selected Universities samples, the study examines methods which students are using in engaging ICTs to perpetuate examination misconduct. Relying on raw data of one hundred and ninetynine (199) students retrieved, the study attempted to uncover if a significant difference exists in echeating habit between ICT-compliant students and other students in rubrics not science-oriented. It equally tried to discover if there is a significant difference in e-cheatng habit between male and female students. Drawing on the recorded data in each institution, the study reported five ICT tools associated with examination misconduct. Using chi-square (X2) to test the hypotheses, the study reported a significant difference between ICT-complinat students and other students in rubrics not scienceoriented. Finally, it revealed a significant difference in e-cheating habit between male and female students

Participant Experience of the First Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) from Pakistan

Background: In recent years, massive open online courses (MOOCs) have steadily gained popularity. It appears, however, that MOOC learners are concentrated mostly in the affluent English-speaking countries. MOOCs’ free-of-cost, easy accessibility should make them obviously attractive to participants from low-and-middle-income countries (LMIC). The reason why LMIC enrollments in MOOCs are so low is therefore unclear. In the year 2014, the first MOOC was launched from Pakistan. We administered a survey to the enrollees of this MOOC to explore concerns, fears, and limitations that might be deterring the LMIC audience from participating in MOOCs. Methods: The MOOC was a three-week course on bioinformatics that covered current concepts and techniques employed in the area of computer-based drug design. More than 230 participants enrolled for this course. At the end of the course, to examine the MOOC experience from their perspective, we invited the participants to take an online survey. Results: Fifty-four participants, mostly from Pakistan, completed the survey. The participants reported satisfaction with the course, and felt that the course participation was an enriching experience. Although they appeared eager to explore MOOC learning, we found that the learners from LMICs may not be completely comfortable with various aspects of online learning. Conclusion: Our results indicate that there is a definite market for MOOCs in LMICs. Computer accessibility and literacy must be enhanced in the LMICs to allow the citizens of these regions to feel comfortable with e-learning. Moreover, LMIC nations acknowledge their own unique learning cultures and experiences when they produce and share their MOOC offerings with the world

Innovation in Mobile Learning: A European Perspective

In the evolving landscape of mobile learning, European researchers have conducted significant mobile learning projects, representing a distinct perspective on mobile learning research and development. Our paper aims to explore how these projects have arisen, showing the driving forces of European innovation in mobile learning. We propose context as a central construct in mobile learning and examine theories of learning for the mobile world, based on physical, technological, conceptual, social and temporal mobility. We also examine the impacts of mobile learning research on educational practices and the implications for policy. Throughout, we identify lessons learnt from European experiences to date

Synchronous Online Philosophy Courses: An Experiment in Progress

There are two main ways to teach a course online: synchronously or asynchronously. In an asynchronous course, students can log on at their convenience and do the course work. In a synchronous course, there is a requirement that all students be online at specific times, to allow for a shared course environment. In this article, the author discusses the strengths and weaknesses of synchronous online learning for the teaching of undergraduate philosophy courses. The author discusses specific strategies and technologies he uses in the teaching of online philosophy courses. In particular, the author discusses how he uses videoconferencing to create a classroom-like environment in an online class

Information systems development course: integrating business, IT and IS competencies

Information systems development (ISD) is a capstone course in the Information Systems and Technology undergraduate program at School of Engineering, University of Minho, Portugal. ISD is viewed as an organizational change project that aims at improving an organization through the adoption of IT applications. The course is designed following a project led approach. The project involves describing an organization as a system, describing its information handling activities and proposing a set of IT applications that could be adopted and used. Students are guided by a ISD methodology that demands the application of previous developed competencies in areas such as: organization theory, accounting, marketing, information systems fundamentals, data bases, software engineering, computer networks and several other IT courses. Together with the ISD course, students are also taking courses on organizational behavior and data-warehousing. Students are organized into large teams of 10 to 12 members. Several roles are distributed among team members: e.g., team leader, analyst, document officer, technology officer, methodologist, development tools specialist, IT specialist. Students are suggested a fictional organization in a specific business area. Ideally students should deal with a real organization. As the course is having around 100 students enrolled this is not possible. However it is common that each project team finds an organization in the proposed business area where they go and have actual contact with an organization. The main outputs of the project include: project plan; organization description including - purpose, environment, main activities, business ontology, main performance indicators; general information systems description using UML; requirements for an IT application; IT architecture. One of the most important steps of the project is to decide on what IT to suggest to the organization. The decision should take into consideration the capability of current IT, the specifics of the business area and its current practices. Besides the reports, each team makes two public presentations. The first one is to present the organization description making sure business is clearly understood. The final one is to present the solution in terms of information systems and IT architecture. These presentations are attended by industry guests that focus their attention on the students' communication skills from the perspective of a manager. The evaluation of students' performance is based on: reports corresponding to the outputs mentioned above; public presentations; weekly assessments of the teams' progress. The final mark attributed to each team (a numerical value from 0 to 20, where above 10 is a pass) can be re-distributed among team members, by themselves, in order to account for different levels of commitment or effort within the team. Several other rules are set in order to promote professional behavior.(undefined

The genesis and development of mobile learning in Europe

In the past two decades, European researchers have conducted many significant mobile learning projects. The chapter explores how these projects have arisen and what each one has contributed, so as to show the driving forces and outcomes of European innovation in mobile learning. The authors identify context as a central construct in European researchers’ conceptualizations of mobile learning and examine theories of learning for the mobile world, based on physical, technological, conceptual, social and temporal mobility. The authors also examine the impacts of mobile learning research on educational practices and the implications for policy. Finally, they suggest future challenges for researchers, developers and policy makers in shaping the future of mobile learning