Mobile Learning Part 5

I have a few more ideas for using free-response questions with classroom response systems taking advantage of mobile devices (especially smart phones) as response devices.  I brainstormed these ideas while preparing to speak at the recent ConnectEd Summit.  As with the previous posts in this series, I’m just brainstorming here.  I haven’t tried any of these ideas nor talked with instructors who have.  All three of these ideas are variations on the idea of “crowdsourcing” during class using mobile devices.

Pattern Finding – I mentioned this idea in a previous post in this series, but I thought I would include here, too.  One might have students respond to an open-ended questions using their mobile devices, then send the entire response set back to the students’ devices in order to have the students individually or in small groups analyze the set of responses and look for patterns.

For example, let’s suppose you ask students to identify important factors in Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential election victory.  When you send those responses back to the students, they might find that most responses fall into one of three categories, with a few outliers that are worth talking about.

Having the students do the pattern-finding might be used to help them develop categorization and analysis skills.  Since different groups of students might come up with different categories, a classwide discussion of the pattern-finding process might help students develop evaluation skills.

Group Tagging – At a session at EDUCAUSE, I found out about a very interesting article by Andrew Churches of New Zealand connecting Web 2.0 activities with categories in Bloom’s Taxonomy of educational objectives.  The example that stood out to me at the time was that tagging (as in tagging a blog post with categories or tagging photos on Flickr) is an example of an “understand” task in Bloom’s Taxonomy.  So if conceptual understanding is an important learning goal for a particular course, why not have students engage in tagging?

And if students have mobile devices, why not have students engage in collaborative tagging, kind of like what happens on social bookmarking sites like Delicious?  An instructor might send a set of items of some kind to students’ mobile devices and ask each student work independently to tag each item with one or more keywords that describe the item.  This would be an “understand” level task in many instances.  Then the students might submit their tags to the instructor, who would then use a tool to create a tag cloud for each of the items.  This would give the instructor feedback on the ways in which students understand the items in question, and showing the tag cloud to the students could generate useful small-group or classwide discussion.

This kind of task is probably fairly easy to implement using existing Web 2.0 tools.  Perhaps one of my readers can suggest something that might work.

Group Concept Mapping – Similarly, having students construct concept maps is a great way to assess their understanding of course concepts as well as help them develop their understanding of those concepts.  Mobile devices could be used to engage students in collaborative concept mapping during class.  An instructor might send to the students’ mobile devices a list of concepts for a particular unit in a course, then have each student work independently to construct a concept map using those concepts on their mobile devices.  With the right software, students could then submit their concept maps to the instructor and the instructor could display a group concept map in which each relationship identified by each student is shown on a common map.  The class could then discuss the various relationships identified by students, collapsing similar relationships into single arrows between concepts to arrive at a master concept map.

There might be existing Web 2.0 tools to do this kind of thing, but if so, I’m not familiar with them.  Any readers who can point me to something along these lines are welcome to do so in the comments.

Thus ends my series on my brainstorming for the ConnectEd summit.  I hope you’ve found this stimulating.  Anyone interested in further brainstorming or developing tools to facilitate these kinds of activities or seeking funding to do so is encouraged to contact me.

Update: Thanks to a Twitter conversation started by Gardner Campbell, I recently ran across a few online concept mapping tools.  These services, MindMeister, bubbl.us, Gliffy, and CmapTools, might be used with students in class on mobile devices as described above.