Tuesday, November 3, 2015

Mobilizing Innovation

Previously I looked at using the Moodle Interests Tag Cloud for a Team Building Exercise, as part of an innovation course. Here are some more thoughts on mobile learning strategies, methods, and technologies for innovation.

Menkhoff and Bengtsson (p. 229, 2012) suggest that mobile learning can be applied in an entrepreneurship course at two levels:

  1. discursive level: "between instructor and students as well as students themselves with the help of productions, concepts, ideas, questions and comments"
  2. experiential level: "based on the respective task goals, trial actions, actions, feedback, and revisions."

Suoand Niu (2014) describe the modification of a university computer science course on mobile technology to incorporate entrepreneurship. In this case classes of 15 to 18 students spend eight-weeks in the elective. Curiously, given the subject matter is mobile devices, the course appears to have used conventional lectures assignments and examinations. Student feedback questioned the large number of lectures, but the authors do not appear to have considered making use of the mobile devices as part of the teaching.

Joo, Lim, and  Lim (p. 436, 2014) found that perception of the advantages of mobile devices had a  positive effect on learners use of mobile learning. The reverse may also be the case: the use of mobile devices may be result in students having a more positive outlook. Given that many examples of contemporaneity successful start-ups the students will be familiar with are related to mobile technology, the research by Joo, Lim, and Lim (p. 436, 2014) suggests that the student's perception of an innovation cruse would be more positive if the course uses mobile technology.

Menkhoff and Bengtsson (p. 230, 2012) provide two examples of mobile exercises:

  1. Photo-sharing: Students were to take photos relevant to the course on a 45 minute walk, share on a website and discuss the results,
  2. SMS-enabled scavenger hunt: Students explored a specific location to answer questions.

Social Media for Team Building

Mascia, Magnusson and Björk (2015) point to the role of social networks in innovation in organizations. With a course made up of students not previously known to each other, there is a need to quickly form teams and begin the innovation process. It is proposed to use social media techniques through mobile devices to speed this process. Mobile learning can also be used to deliver conventional course content and collect student input for assessment, but this is secondary to the social role of the technology.

Podcasts for Content

Schuck (2015) describes using podcasts as part of a professional learning community using m-learning. Interestingly, Rahimi and Soleymani (2015) found that language learners did better and had less anxiety when using a mobile device for listening to podcasts than those using desktop computers. The authors attributed this to the listeners being under less time pressure when using their own mobile device, than when using a language lab computer.

Mobile Entrepreneurship Games

Antonaci, Dagnino, Ott, Bellotti, Berta, De Gloria and Mayer (2014) describe the use of mobile games for teaching entrepreneurship in Italy, Spain and the Netherlands at the  Bachelor, Master and PhD level. The games were played at home, both individually and homework and as competitions against other students. This was preceded by an in-class discussion and post-game debrief. The course had a final "playoff". The concerned finance, marketing and other aspects of a business, relevant to entrepreneurship.

References

Antonaci, A., Dagnino, F. M., Ott, M., Bellotti, F., Berta, R., De Gloria, A., ... & Mayer, I. (2014). A gamified collaborative course in entrepreneurship: Focus on objectives and tools. Computers in Human BehaviorDOI: 10.1016/j.chb.2014.11.082

Joo, Y. J., Lim, K. Y., & Lim, E. (2014). Investigating the structural relationship among perceived innovation attributes, intention to use and actual use of mobile learning in an online university in South Korea. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 30(4). Retrieved from http://ajet.org.au/index.php/AJET/article/download/681/1060

Mascia, D., Magnusson, M., & Björk, J. (2015). The Role of Social Networks in Organizing Ideation, Creativity and Innovation: An Introduction. Creativity and Innovation Management, 24(1), 102-108.

Menkhoff, T., & Bengtsson, M. L. (2012). Engaging students in higher education through mobile learning: lessons learnt in a Chinese entrepreneurship course. Educational Research for Policy and Practice, 11(3), 225-242. Retrieved from http://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs10671-011-9123-8.pdf Rahimi, M., & Soleymani, E. (2015). The Impact of Mobile Learning on Listening Anxiety and Listening Comprehension. English Language Teaching, 8(10), p152. Retrieved from http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/elt/article/download/53347/28473

Schuck, S. (2015). Mobile Learning in Higher education: Mobilizing staff to use technologies in their teaching. eLearn, 2015(March), 3. Retrieved from http://elearnmag.acm.org/archive.cfm?aid=2749226

Suo, X., & Niu, T. (2014, October). Incorporating entrepreneurship topic into a mobile computing course. In Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), 2014 IEEE (pp. 1-6). IEEE. DOI: 10.1109/FIE.2014.7044483

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