高等教育中的移动学习能力建设:电子书和iPads~

Building Mobile Learning Capacity in Higher Education: E-books and iPads

电子书、电子书阅读器和平板电脑等设备的流行和广泛使用,使得人们对教育中"书籍"的各种功能开始进行重新审视和评估。而且,当新技术使得阅读成为更舒服、更友善、更能够被接受的一种经历时,电子书就成为移动学习生态学中更为凸显的元素之一。英国开放大学在2010年至2012年间实施了一项远程教育研究课题,它是"打造英国开放大学移动学习能力实施方案"的重要组成部分。该课题历时一年半,主要过程是把英国开放大学自己制作的互动电子书连同iPads介绍给一组辅导教师,并请他们对两者进行评估。本文对该课题的研究成果做了简要报告。互动电子书和电子书籍的大量使用,使得需要对随之出现的教学目的进行检验。因此,该课题的一个重要目标就是:让这组辅导教师就如何使这些资源融合到远程教育和教职员工的职业发展当中去形成一种观点。该课题采用调查问卷、焦点小组会议、网上论坛发帖、博客和维基等方法帮助参与者记录他们的经历和观点。其研究成果之一就是明确了电子书六大主要使用领域的螺旋形结构图,尤其是,"情境阅读"、"协作/小组学习"、"电子书制作"启发了户外面授辅导的协作式小组活动设计。这些过程仍在被跟踪,本文对此也有所描述。该课题的经历与许多其他情境下的混合型学习设计和移动学习设计都存在相关性。

E-books are becoming a more salient element in the ecology of mobile learning, as new devices make reading a more comfortable and sociable experience. We report on the results of an 18-month project(2010-12) undertaken as part of The Open University's Building Mobile Learning Capacity initiative. The project introduced a group of Associate Lecturers to interactive e-books produced by the university and to the iPads on which they could be accessed. The proliferation of increasingly interactive ebooks and e-book collections calls for an examination of their evolving pedagogical purposes; an important aim of the project was therefore to enable this group to form ideas of how these resources could be incorporated in distance education and professional development of academic staff/faculty. The project used surveys, focus group meetings, online forum postings, blog posts and wikis to enable participants to record their experiences and ideas. One project output has been the identification of a spiral of six key use case areas for e-books. In particular, the categories ‘situational reading',‘collaborative/ group learning'and‘e-book production'inspired a collaboratively designed group activity for a face-toface outdoor tutorial, which was trialled and is described in this paper. The experience has relevance for the design of blended learning as well as for mobile learning activities in many other settings.