Two weeks ago I presented ‘Mummies, War Zones, and Pompeii: the use of tablet computers in situated and on-the-go learning,’ at ALT-C, the annual conference of the Association for Learning Technology, which took place this year in Manchester. Tablet computers in learning is not new; mathematics and physics teaching especially has long benefited from the ability to scribble a formula and share out to students and receive students’ formulae in return — one use of in-class tablet computers. It didn’t take long after the launch of the iPad in 2010 for one-iPad-per-student projects to spring up in every level of education.
The case studies I presented on, however, made use of the out-of-class benefits of tablet computers. I describe each in a nutshell:
1) Mummies: University of Leicester Museum Studies masters students take field trips to such destinations as the British Museum. After the trip, students report back, group by group, and discuss as a class. Using cleverly-designed Powerpoint shows on Windows tablets, instructors gave students video interviews with British Museum academics and other learning material. Carrying the tablets around the museum, students viewed and learnt from the material while standing before the actual artefacts, took notes and photos, and created presentation reports in time for a 10am deadline next morning. The project has been felt to be a great success and plans are underway to create material for further, different field trips.
2) War Zones: University of Leicester Criminology students of the online Masters in Security, Conflict and International Development are each sent an iPad and instructed to download the free app (yes, you can download it too! It’s called SCID). The app serves multimedia learning material which works on the iPad whether or not there is an internet connection, which is key because for their day jobs these students are visiting refugee camps or living in a submarine for weeks at a time. Early feedback is overwhelmingly positive for both iPad and app.
3) Pompeii: In the Porta Stabia project and the Quadriporticus Project (directed by Steven Ellis of University of Cincinnati and Eric Poehler of University of Massachusetts, and in which some of our University of Leicester Archaeology colleagues joined in the research), iPads were taken into the ruins of Pompeii to process photographs of the ruins and overlay archaeological layers. iPads were also used as field notebooks in every way, including receiving data into Filemaker Pro to be later synced with data collected by all iPads. The end result was an efficiency increase of 371% plus other benefits.
These case studies illustrate the power of mobile outside of the classroom, in what I refer to as situated and on-the-go learning. I’m especially interested in this kind of use of mobile devices; please comment if you know of any other great case studies along these lines.
Terese Bird, Learning Technologist and SCORE Research Fellow
Places: Evaluating Mobile Learning 