Cool Paper:
- 3-60 Mobile Film Festival – A Model for Engaging Students and Local Communities Through Mobile Communications and Social Networking. (Munnerley) Zayed Universtiy, United Arab Emirates
There were a few interesting sessions on Tuesday, talking about various ways that one can make use of ideas from gaming and adapting the dynamic and personally directed to manage everything from creating stories to managing university programs. Some of them seem to be little more than lip service or window dressing to the problems that they are trying to solve. While I think that games certainly can be used in many learning environments, I don’t think they can be used everywhere – games are best used where there is a repeated opportunity to fail with low risk. I don’t think it can be made to scale all the way to an entire degree, or even to a traditional assignment that is really only a game for the prof. But the assignment is a single high risk exercise, as is a degree, but ironically to a lesser extent (you can – and perhaps should – fail a course and it’s not the end of the world).
There were also sessions that talked about storyboarding entire learning systems (right up to degrees) which actually made quite a bit of sense, as storyboarding is really just another form of planning. If instructional events are planned, enrichment can be intertwined with instruction to create a unified experience. This is something that I hope all instructional designers would do when looking at what is happening in the courses that they are working on.
The one paper that I found worth mentioning is Munnerley’s that talks about a mobile film festival (360 Mobile Film Festival, Dubai – like Mobifest in Canada). With the help of the sponsor, SAE, this festival is reaching across a massive geographic, cultural and political expanse to solicit the creation of one minute movies taken and screened on cell phones, but edited in any manner that is available to the individual. This event was in part spurned by what students in the women’s universities were doing.
These students were plugged in almost constantly with their cell phones (they have a 160% possession rate as many have one for family and one that is “private” for use with friends and others that may not be approved of by families) or on social networking sites (up to 10% of total bandwidth). But before this exercise, these students were forced to unplug when in the classroom. With this exercise (that uses open source software for some elements and apps like Broadcast Machine or Video Bomb and Around (About?) Me were used on their internal networks to allow the students to upload, tag and comment on the videos of their classmates. This has proven very empowering for the students as they seem to have really enjoyed it.
So overall, the conference was pretty good, but there are a few things that could have been improved, the biggest of which, I have already suggested to the organizers. Having people volunteer to help presenters who are not comfortable with their English present would be a real asset to this type of international conference.
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