Tuesday 2 March 2010

Mobile learning for development workshops by Great researchers



Over the years I have met both Niall Winters and Yishay Mor on many occasions. They are both strong believers in empowering people. They just finished the first of a series of workshops on the topic of mobile learning and... if you can join them in the upcoming workshops, do it (I will if I can), you are bound to learn a lot!

What is it all about? Niall and Yishay recently started a new idea on the site Mobile Learning for Development (ml4d) in which they search for the narratives behind mobile projects aiming at building a knowledge bank that can serve qualitative research on mobile projects later on. Now they only started to upload mobile projects, but the aspect of narrating what has happened and which impact it has is such a fine resource of information, that it is already a worthwhile read. If you have great mobile projects and you are willing to share your input send them a message.

Some information from their own site:
"The ML4D initiative aims to engender a design-level discussion among practitioners in the field, in order to inform them of the challenges and potential solutions, and to facilitate rapid spread of critical design knowledge.

Our main channel of activity is a series of workshops, supported by open on-line resources. These workshops will provide participants with the capacity to design their own solutions using mobile and social technologies. This will build on techniques we have developed over the past three years and on the course module 'Designing mobile learning activities', run by Dr Niall Winters at the LKL.

These workshops are targeted at education, social action and development practitioners across the academic, commerical and NGO sectors. The typicial participants will be involved in the practical work of designing and developing a mobile application to support learning and/or training. The workshops have been designed for those at the beginner and intermediate levels."

Workshops coming up:
One during eLearning Africa;
One in London in conjunction with Africa gathering