Thursday 26 February 2009

IADIS09 location-based mLearning reminders for university students

Arrived at the IADIS conference in Barcelona and looking at the first presentation by Bjorn Hedin from Stockholm university.

His presentation is based on a powerpoint, which can be viewed below or on slideshare. His research was based on a study with 11 students, one application during one week. So in order to be conclusive, more research needs to be done, nevertheless it does sound interesting because it connects location, to personal cell phones and relevant student content.

Some interesting points:
His university tried to push content to the students and they liked it as long as the content pushed was relevant and not too stearing (e.g. "you should be studying now" was not appreciated as an sms)
Every cell phone has a unique ID, so this means that cell phones can be located in a particular area. But in case of this research project, it was not necessary to locate every student up to 5 m, they only needed to locate them 'more or less'.
Why was an estimated location enough? Because that would enable the university to tell the students that during their mobile day, they were passing good study locations (like library, on the metro, a content relevant building...). So if a student's cell phone was in the vascinity of a library the universities mobile application would tell them, thus giving them the opportunity of looking at books or references.
This application enabled meaningful micro-learning.

For the user results and a more in-depth look into this research, suggesed improvements, go through the slideshow, it is adding worthwhile thoughts, techniques and ideas.

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