Week 15: Networks of Personalized Learning (e.g., language learning, tutoring, etc.)

One of the main characteristic of social-network sites is to link people, particularly those who share the same interest altogether into one community. Then many activities have taken place depending on their concerns. For example, MovieMobz, the Brazilian social-network site where gathers movie lovers into one place. Members can vote for the favorite movies to be projected on their own cinema.
Live Moch is also another business that employs the use of social-network features. The Live Mocha website offers users the chance to converse with native speakers online. Pictures, audio, and text lessons are also available to assist learners with language development.

I think this is an excellent idea. Long time ago I used to take an English course online. Although the program offers high interactivity, but Live Mocha may have more potential use and importantly, it is more natural. Since languages are part of social culture, leveraging social-network aspects seems to be the most appropriate means of learning. For instance, even though learners would already have a huge collection of vocabularies, they hardly carry out a conversation in foreign languages they are studying. Furthermore, in the formal education, oftentimes students can learn only the formal terms which are use in an academic realm, they miss an opportunity to study other informal or terms which are normally used in real life. One of my foreign friends asked me to teach him the rudest term in Thai. He gave a reason that because such word cannot be learnt in school. When traveling to my country, if he happened to hear that term, so he knows that person should be avoided.

In addition to providing real-world perspective on how a language is spoken by natives, the social-network aspect of the site will keep users motivated as they form friendships with native speakers. In this way, learners are motivated by his/her online friends; they can check each other login time or their scores and gain enthusiasm of their own. For example, I just tried to subscribe to the system. There is one feature that allows learners to take a TOEFL test and then be able to compare the scores with other test-takers. Moreover, these learners can also practice a foreign language in a way that gives cultural perspective. To put it differently, the social-network system help them practice conversational skills while learning about the world.

Currently, most available features are still of a free service. Nonetheless, this kind of business is a great source of income (esp. when “the world is open”, when we require to know more than one language!

Reference:

Erica Naone. “Learning Language in Context: Startup Live Mocha Leverages Social Networking to Teach Foreign Languages,” Technology Review (October 5, 2007), http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/19484/?a=f

Week 14: Mobile, Wireless, and Ubiquitous Learning

Back to the last three decades, it was very difficult to communicate with someone. We primarily depended on letter, telegram, or the most recent technology available at that time might be a clunky telephone. Nowadays some of those communication tools can be seen only in the museum. Many new devices and technologies have replaced these out-dated equipments; the more they have been developed, the more they seem to be smaller and look efficient. The underlying reason of these innovations is to respond an infinite number of human’s needs.
Until recently, there are much research and development on the wireless and mobile technologies. Many products have been continuously launched into the market. We, as a consumer, would always have to follow and update our devices. (I used to ask myself what will happen, or what I will be if I just stop following these trends since almost everything around us seems to be coined by the advanced technologies). We might be familiar with “E” and “I” technologies, such as E-commerce, Iphone, and now we are starting to hear about “M” technologies like M-learning.

“m-learning” was abbreviated from “mobile learning” which means “Learning that happens across locations, or that takes advantage of learning opportunities offered by portable technologies” (Wikipedia). This term has some relation with E-learning and distance education, however, M-learning is distinct in its focus on learning across contexts and learning with mobile devices.

In the field of education, M-learning is still in an early stage due to the limitation of the device. Cost of communication might be another reason that makes this device not as much popular as other learning tools. Nonetheless, many academic institutions have been working on research in order to make use of this mobile technology in learning such as the Norwegian Knowledge Institute (NKI (Distance Education (Rekkedal and Dye, 2007).
According to the research, even though M-learning provides a lot of benefit in education (e.g. Flexibility for students studying at a distance, quick access, portability, memory aid, etc), there are lots of challenges which need to be improved.

People who are responsible for the network should be knowledgeable and be up-to-date all the time. In addition, system designers must be able to modify the learning materials to be compatible with all kinds of devices. Next, the designs of certain types of mobile devices are not suitable for being input/output tools. For example, some models of mobile phones do not have a keyboard that allows users to conveniently type in.

Despite the fact, as mention earlier, this is just an early era of mobile technology as well as M-learning. I strongly believe that the mobile devices would be widely used in education (although it is not necessary that they will be the main learning device). The cost of communication and these devices would definitely be lowered and, hence, more access points or “hot spot” would be increased.