Mobiquitous: Tech-Nomadic Learning

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Story

We are a small team, from the University of Lugano (Università della Svizzera italiana), who spent the last 3 year experimenting different approaches and contents for a practical use of the personal mobile phone for educational activities. The project aims to apply mobile learning for the education of students in different professional domains, inspired by the new and particular communication language, spontaneously originated by the younger generation’s use of these mobile devices. Doing so these devices will extend their involvement, their use and their amount of users, turning into instruments at the service of educational contexts helping young people to learn linguistic, logical-numerical, professional, environmental and communicative contents.

How it was done

During the academic year 2006/2007, 5 classes have taken part in the project, 3 of which were integration pre-training classes and 2 were tutorial Italian courses that involve of 60 young students (mainly foreigners) between the ages of 16 and 30, and 5 teachers. The shared characteristic of the participants is that they are all young people whose mother tongue is not Italian.

The integration pre-training classes, composed of 2 year long full-time courses, allow young foreigners to acquire linguistic know-how and cultural notions which will help them pursue their educational goals and successfully integrate in the employment world. The students, who attend the tutorial courses, are instead, already working or attending higher schools, but need further support for the comprehension of the Italian language.

Throughout the regular classroom-based courses we have interspersed distance-learning activities (LA), during which the participants accomplish an assignment (homework) through the use of their cell phones. In order to prepare the students for the distance learning situations performed outside the classroom, we have created a technical activity, aiming to verify the competences held by the young participants once faced with the different functions offered by the mobile devices. This methodology also provides the opportunity to draft a set of behavioural guidelines that can be followed during the situations of distance learning. The week before a new LA is handed over, a meeting is organized with the students, so that the assignment can be presented and illustrated to the whole class.

The activities carried on from December 2006 through Apri 2007l have been 4; 3 of which have been LA and 1 has been a technical activity. Such activities had different goals: learning grammatical notions and concepts, learning new words and language comprehension. The duration of each activity has been of about a week and was preceded by the distribution of the assignment, in presence and by the teachers, and followed by a feedback, oral and written, performed in class.

We have very interesting feedback and conclusion. At the moment (2007-08) we are carrying out the experiment with a bigger number of students and including other area of interest (electronical apprentices).

External links

For more information: http://www.lifi.ch/progetti/ubiquitous/

Download full paper of the project: http://www.lifi.ch/UserFiles/File/ubiquitous/Mobiquitous.pdf