Mobile CSCL Workshop: Initial Reflections
The car park was very, very close to the airport, making the transfer time ridiculously short. Waiting at the airport was so boring, but I had a journey to look forward to; and not just the physical transportation type. My first workshop was in Switzerland, and many thoughts were flowing through my mind. What kind of professors would I be meeting? What would the other Ph.D students be like? Will I mess up the networking opportunity? What will become of my research ideas afterwards?
The four star hotel - superb. I had probably one of the hugest rooms in the whole place. We had workshops in the meeting rooms on the ground floor, so I could walk down from my room, straight to breakfast, then to the workshop without exposing myself to the cold, snowy outside. Skiing was 12:30 till 16:30 every day, and that was exciting as I was new to it! But that’s not really the purpose of this blog.
The workshop was called “Beyond Mobile Learning: Innovating Rather Than Replicating Existing Learning Scenarios”, organised by Inmaculada Arnedillo-Sánchez of Trinity College, Dublin. The workshop consisted of two parts: the first, consisted of creating a story narrative by brainstorming as a group. Then we would split up into three groups: editing, vision and audio.
The idea is that each group would have little contact with each other and would work together using mobile technologies to create the final short film, which would consist of still images and sound. The aim was to simulate the collaboration process; but unfortunately they couldn’t let us use MMS to send audio and video to the editors, so physical transportation was the alternative.
The story we ended up with was about a mad professor coming up with a solution for global warming. She got a bit too happy and would sprinkle the formula on people, turning them into snowmen. One of the professor’s students, acted by me, would become a hero by melting the snow professor!
Vision worked well, periodically visiting the editors to upload new images. Audio worked well too, with Mike Sharples getting a bit over-enthusiastic with his high pitched imitation of a mad female professor. The proximity between the mic and his lips could not have been any more than 1mm. And another funny thing was that my voice was staged by a female! Either way, I’m famous! They’ll be putting the video up soon, so I’ll link to it.
No Comments Yet