Professor Angela McFarlane delivered the opening keynote presentation at the mlearn conference - making the connections in Melbourne 17 October 2007.
The presentation provided participants at the conference with an overview of the work in progress that Angela McFarlane is undertaking with 3 primary schools and 2 secondary schools in the UK, funded by BECTA.
The project is working intensively with teachers, with the research looking at:
- what happens to teachers and learners when handheld devices enter their lives
- making sense of what is happening
- what pedagogical changes might take place.
Emerging themes from the research include:
- Question of mobility, eg motivation level of students to take work away with them, questions of ergonomics (the stylus for PDAs not easy to use - students replacing stylus with pens + pencils which were easier to hold and use but not good for the PDA screen)
- Question of choice - relates to autonomy and ownership
- Ready store of prior work as an aid to reflection
- Ready access to a range of applications in a range of places.
Issues which have emerged from the research to date have included:
- “shoehorning” learning into technology doesn’t work
- potential for learning with devices is not yet being fully exploited
- need to teach students about meaningful file name conventions and choices about archiving
- need to build in iteration, ie going back and using information that has been stored and saved for further reflection.
McFarlane’s observation from her research is that - Effective teachers use technologies effectively.
Angela McFarlane referred to Hilda Kruger’s flowchart of technology supported activites. See link to Kruger’s map of technologies supporting academics to include resources that might contribute to information literacy.
The following link is to Angela McFarlane’s keynote presentation at Building Learning Communities in Boston MA, July 2007. In the address Angela discusses online communities of learning.
deebo-Deanne Bullen-education.au
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