sisirnath

Today I have put together four sets of the Collaborative kits, these were give to the four teachers who gratefully volunteered to participate in the user study. The Collaborative kit consists of Image/quick cards (40 No.s) and a Notepad (20 pgs).

All the volunteering participants are requested to take pictures of all or any events related to their day to day pedagogic activities. The teachers can capture/ write about any task related to teaching but not limited to course planning, material preparation, execution of the course.

The Image/quick cards are used to write a quick line of text about the picture they have captured and the dairy would be used to scribble or doodle any thoughts in detail which they feel relevant to day to day activities. This user study will go on for a period of two weeks the conclusion of this would be a group session involving all the volunteers in week three.

Most of this week was spent in reading a lot of academic papers, and research documents. After reading roughly about 600 pages I have decided to read a bit more collaborative/generative technique (user study) methods.  Last days of the week were spent in learning more about Contexmapping research method and later I have started to recruit some teachers at UID to participate in the research for my project. I intend to use the outcome of this research to steer the project.

Some of the research documents and papers I have read are as follows:

1. Mobile learning: A practical guide (Published by the Leonardo da Vinci programme of the European Commission)

2. Literature Review in Mobile Technologies and Learning (FutureLab, University of Birmingham)

3. Mobile Applications For Higher Education (Adam Figueira, Edesigntree)

4. Mobile Learning: The Next Generation Of Learning (Desmond Keegan, Distance Education International)

5. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (Hnry Jenkinsm, Director of Comparative Media Studies Program Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

6. Mobile Technologies: The NKI case study (Morten Flate Paulsen, Professor of Online Education, NKI Distance Education)

7. Multicasting Services and Information in Sweden II (Musis, Mobile Media Service Trail report)

8. The Impact of Digital Technology (Jean Underwood, Professor of Psychology Nottingham Trent University)

9. Contexmapping: Experience from practice (Sleeswijk Visseretal , International Journal of CoCreation in Design and the Arts Vol 1 No 2)

10. Ubiquity and Reusability (Judy Nix, Ericsson)

All these reading gave a good amount of knowledge related to the history of digital learning, methods studied and standard industry concerns regarding Mobile (digital) learning.

UID Students at TEI10. Photo Credit: Camila Melo

Thanks to Umeå Institute of Design. Myself and couple other students from Umeå had the opportunity to attend the TEI10 conference at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston. The three days conference was well organised and packed with inspiring talks, demos, papers and poster sessions. I have also participated in a workshop during the conference.  I was an honour to share the space with inventors, researchers and designers from the field of interaction. I am eagerly looking forward for the TEI11 registration to be open.

During the first week of the project I have planned to read lot of material including academic papers and some blogs. So I started reading some papers related to mobile education, but before starting to read all the material I felt the need to take time to answer some of the question which rose during the first tutoring session.

So Myself and Ruedee meet one afternoon, and discussed different issues related to each other’s projects. We felt that while trying to explain each other we can get a better understand of the own project. This helped us in getting another perspective about the project. During this session we talked about some basic things like what is this project about, why is it important to do this project, who are the beneficiaries (users)and how are we going to deal with this in the due course of the project. We also talked about how to focus and utilise the time effectively to come to a satisfactory result, some future possible scenarios and directions we can take.

That was a fruitful session, we both came up with some basic yet useful insights in to the project. Some of the things I felt useful for my project was as follows.

a.  How much a technology affects teaching methodology?

b.  How does collaboration affect teaching? Ex: if schools collaborate on a specific skill than a general institutional collaboration.

c.  How to focus on technological differences, online mode vs. offline mode of teaching.

d.  How craft based learning could be tackled compared to set standard learning.

e.  Social learning vs. School based learning.

f.  How the local skills can can be converted in to a valuable and exchangeable course material.

Kick-off and tutoring

yesterday After the project kickoff I had a chat with my project tutor. We spend some time getting to know each other and also about the project. The chat was very provocative, there have been lot of discussions about the different stages of the project, what do i expect as a possible outcome of this project and so on.

After the chat I have some basic question to find answers for asap.

1. which area of teaching i am going to focus on, planning, execution or evaluation. To do so I need to have come quick senarios in hand before discussing with any of the teachers.I am planning to do so by the end of this week.

2. Rethink about the timeplan, I need to revisit my timeplan and see where in the process I can fit different design methedologies.

3. Read read & read, have to do lot of reading also to get a good understanding about the existing teaching methods and so on.

4. Getting in touch with the experts, I am also in the process of getting in touch with the experts of the feild. With the help of whom I might be able to draw conclusions a bit earlier in the process.

Interaction Design Year 2 students at the Umeå Institute of Design and IDEO teamed up for a fun filled project and Serious Play is the name.

Excerpt from the project brief explaining about the project:

Serious play is a twofold exercise, On one hand there’s the possibility of exploring the field of game design, what’s cutting-edge on that realm? hoe to design a great game? Is it playable? Is it fun and engaging?. Another perspective on the subject is related to what we can learn from games that can be applied on to other areas. Can we use play to help the elderly have a more active lifestyle or to make individuals save energy? can we help people adhere to some activity and be compliant therefore promoting desired behaviours like recycling or taking chronic disease drugs?

Students are divided in to four groups and my group (myself and Linda). We thought that how a person is perceived plays a important role in creating awareness. We wanted to concentrate on other areas of sustainability leaving out, fuel, energy usage and aspects related to shopping. Drawing parallels from Dr. Shashi Tharoor’s TED talk about a nations SOFT POWER we thought that, for person a SOFT image plays the similar role in understanding a person. SOFT image is nothing but a reflection of his attitude, attitude is an out come of behaviour, behaviour is a collective effort of all his habits. Habits are of two types Personal habits and Social habits. Social habits are the ones you imbibe from people around you or from other cultures.

We want to explore the possibility of adopting as many social habits as possible in to personal habits with the help of a game, this in turn will shape ones SOFT image and that in building up the SOFT POWER of a nation. Visit this page to see the progress of the project and this page to know more about the game.

More on the background of the game soon.

ADAM: Notion Ink's Android powered internet tablet

Unlike most of the IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) graduates who go abroad or work for a industry with high perks, some decided to stay back and contribute to the growing Indian economy. The result of this is a start-up company  Notion Ink and its  internet tablet, recently named as Adam.

This is not just another Internet Tablet in the market, this come packed with lot of innovative technologies like scratch resistant anti grease coated Pixel Qi display, and NVIDIA’s powerful, yet energy-saving, eight-core Tegra system-on-chip, which will drive the system at astonishing speeds while ensuring battery longevity. A rotatable three megapixel camera at the top can effortlessly take pictures or videos within a 180 degree angle.

Adam’s small form factor sets no limitation on what’s packed in side, it is also loaded with  water, ambient light and proximity sensors, accelerometer, assisted GPS, digital compass, built-in speakers and microphone. It will have three interfaces: the touch screen, an on-screen virtual keyboard and a track pad located behind the screen, allowing users to manoeuvre the cursor from the front or the rear.

Thanks to Android OS Adam is enabled with gesture control. The tables developers got help from NID’s ( National Institute of Design) Banglore research and development center regarding elements of next generation operating system (OS), user interfaces, usability issues and product concepts.

All of this comes for just about 325$, you have enough time to save until its release in June 2010.

more technical information and product shorts here, article inspired from TheHindu.

Professor Henry Jenkins of the Masschusetts Institute of Technology’s comparative Media Studies Program explains about Participatory cultures and learning by using games.

this is test post.

A one minute promo version of the actual song, India by Arya