News and Background Information on the Conference

Learn to Make Quick Decisions – With Your Mobile

Imagine you are a manager of civil defence utilties in a town. Local weather conditions are changing, and you have to respond to these changes to prevent a flood disaster. Your mobile phone would be your most important communication tool as the situation unfolds, enabling you to manage the situation instantaniously. The University of Aberdeen, UK, has adapted such a scenario for a group of undergraduates. For the project “Flood Disaster Management Simulation”, Alastair Gemmell, School of Geosciences, and Phil Marston, Centre for Learning and Teaching, University of Aberdeen, used a specifically developed software. Also, an agreement with a mobile provider was made, including an e-mail-to-SMS function to make authoring and managing messages easier.

Stress or fun?

Participating in the “Flood Disaster Management Simulation” project certainly means both. The activity encourages rapid assessment of information and application of previous learning.

During the simulation, the students received SMS messages at irregular intervals over a three-day period, some providing information about the situation, others requiring a decision. They returned responses by SMS or e-mail, determining the path the simulation takes next for each individual learner. Learners used their own mobile phones.

The simulation was run for the first time with students in 2006 after piloting. A few updates and changes were made before the second implementation, which is also the subject of Sarah Cornelius’ presentation. Following implementation in 2008, a comprehensive evaluation was carried out to explore not only technical and implementation factors, but also wider contextual issues. Some of the questions were:

Control: How do learners feel about receiving study-related messages at potentially inconvenient times? How do they feel about using their own mobile phones for learning?
Context: Was the activity actually undertaken independently, or were phones and other technologies used to allow interaction with peers before decision making?
Communication: Did the style of messages reflect 'normal' use of a mobile phone? Did learners favour SMS or email communication?

During the evaluation, it turned out that the majority of students found the learning experience rather funny. Nonetheless, a range of emotions were covered, from enjoyment and involvement to annoyance, mostly due to technical difficulties. Cornelius will present more of the results in her session.

Aberdeen University is currently developing further aspects that will improve the realism of the scenario – for example by encouraging collaboration through teamwork and using a wider range of media in messages. While SMS proved effective, it was rather limiting due to constraints on message size. The use of MMS is therefore being explored.

Sarah Cornelius, University of Aberdeen, UK Real-Time Simulation on the Move: The Learner Context, Thursday, December 4th, Session “Extending the Range of the Mobile Phone”, 11:45 – 13:00

September 26, 2008

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