Today I watched the project presentation of the iPhone programming course from the RWTH, all videos and materials are available on iTunes U. Quite nice projects that offer new services for students and educators for the RWTH campus. There is also a WIKI page for the final projects.

Final Projects:

• iL2Phone: A mobile client for the L2P System
• iUConnect: A location based social interaction app.
• iMensa: Check todays menu with recommenda
• Flashcards: Learn for your exams alone or in multi-player mode.
• uDay: Schedule your lectures, find your way to the lecture halls.
• Hörsäle: Gives a survey of the RWTH lecture halls

Would be interesting what kind of apps and services would be relevant also for lifelong learners of OUNL type. For lifelong learners the daily environment becomes your campus. The project presentations show classical flashcards applications (with a nice tweak on collaborative flashcards), scheduling, location tracking, social networking, and others. Quite a broad use of frameworks and nice demos.

 Apple is recently investigating the use of context and contextual sensors for contextual marketing (see report from AppleInsider http://is.gd/ciEmm ). This is doing a lot of stuff we have been exploring the Learning Media Lab about using barcode scanners, RFID readers, location tracking indoor and outdoor for filtering content for the current context of the user. The description includes also different aspects as personalisation and contextualisation. So I wonder if one could use the the iAd framework not only for selling advertisements but also learning nuggets ?

As I described in Specht (2009) technologies today are in rapid changing process influencing daily use of media, especially mobile and embedded use of media in real life situations.  The impact mobile and ubiquitous technologies is not only visible in every day life especially with the younger generation, but also in education as described in the Horizon resports (2005-2010). As such we are confronted with a rapidly changing technological environment offering new options and media related innovations enabling new educational support. Therefore necessary actions for a successful research on mobile and ubiquitous learning technologies is threefold

 Developing a theory of learning in technology enhanced environments: Understanding the effects of embedded and mobile media artefacts in the real world and their effects on learning has to consider a variety of cognitive science research, educational sciences, and psychology of learning, as also underlying research as mobile HCI, Internet of Things. These approaches and theories have to be considered and a theory about what is learning, performance, and education in such an technology enhanced world has to be developed.

Abstract modeling of technology enhanced learning process and environments: Understanding design options and possibilities of new technologies and defining an abstracted model that allows the specification of learning support of the future. The designed models can be seen independent from current technological developments but aligned with a future vision of what we expect technology to be able to support in the coming 10-15 years.

Evaluation with design oriented research practices: based on the theory, the abstract modeling of technology enhanced educational artefacts and the interaction with those specific implementation and instantiations of these have to be built and empirically evaluated.