News

Participatory Academy: The 5th International Workshop on Crossmedia and Collaboration

Sun May 25 03:23:01 -0700 2008 by: Marcelo Milrad

Do you work with young people in the fields of media production or education and do you want to learn the secrets of successful co-participatory work and design? You should then attend the Participatory Academy Workshop to be held in Växjö, Sweden on 12-14th of September 2008. A number of CeLeKT`s members will participate as invited speakers and will also lead different activities. More information about this event can be found at:

http://www.pa2008.se/

Spikol and Milrad are invited speakers at Mobile Monday in Copenhagen

Tue Apr 29 16:35:56 -0700 2008 by: Marianne Björn

Daniel Spikol and Marcelo Milrad are invited speakers at Mobile Monday Copenhagen for a special session on Mobile Learning that will take place on May 5th. The Mobile Monday network was founded in Finland in 2000 and has now spread to more than 50 cities worldwide. The concept is that people within the telecom sector, creative firms and researchers meet on the first Monday of the month to discuss new trends, business strategies and results. More information about Mobile Monday can be found at:

http://www.mobilemonday.dk/

IEEE WMUTE2008, Beijing China

Fri Apr 04 02:06:23 -0700 2008 by: Daniel Spikol

Spikol, Milrad, and Metcalf were present for the WMUTE conference in China from March 23-26. This conference was first held in Växjö in 2002. Milrad was part of the program committee and introduced professor Ulrich Hoppe, the first keynote speaker. Metcalf presented the paper “My Sports Pulse: Increasing student interest in STEM disciplines through sports themes, games and mobile technologies”. Spikol presented a paper titled “Combining Physical Activities and Mobile Games for Designing Novel Ways of Learning”. Spikol and Milrad also spent some days in Shanghai working on a new start up project that deals with TEL in emerging markets. More information about this project will be published soon.

Paper by Svensson & Pettersson accepted to ICALT08

Fri Apr 04 01:19:17 -0700 2008 by: Oskar Pettersson

The paper titled “Making Use of User-generated Content and Contextual Metadata Collected during Ubiquitous Learning Activities” was accepted as a full paper for the IEEE ICALT 2008 conference that will be held in Santander, Spain in the beginning of July. The camera ready version has now been submitted to IEEE Computer Press and all that is left to do is to attend what seems to be a very interesting conference.

Spikol holds talk in Colorado

Thu Mar 13 02:26:47 -0700 2008 by: Daniel Spikol

On March 3rd, Daniel Spikol gave a small talk for the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Professor Michele Jackson provided the opportunity to meet 3 fellow PhD students and discuss common themes of research across mobile devices and educational practices.

Active Participation in the University´s Open House Day

Sun Feb 24 06:52:11 -0800 2008 by: Marcelo Milrad

On February 10th, more than 3000 people came to the open house day at Växjö University. CeLeKT was actively involved in this event. Marcelo Milrad hold an open lecture describing some of the on-going activities underway at CeLeKT aiming at bridging informal and formal learning activities using mobile technologies. Daniel Spikol gave visitors the chance to test the mobile game “Skattjakt”. Teacher students from Växjö University helped to guide those visitors (see picture below) that participated in the game.

New Publications from Two of CeLeKT´s Members

Sat Feb 23 08:34:07 -0800 2008 by: Marianne Björn

Marcelo Milrad and Daniel Spikol have recently published a new article describing the results from the MUSIS project. The paper is included in the latest issue of the Journal of Education Society and Technology. Marcelo Milrad has been the guest editor of this special issue focusing on “Current Approaches to Network-Based Learning in Scandinavia”. The content of this special issue can be found at:

http://www.ifets.info/issues.php?show=current

Moreover, Spikol and Milrad have also a full paper that will be presented at the IEEE WMUTE 2008 Conference to be held in Beijing, China next month. Their paper entitled “Combining Physical Activities and Mobile Games for Designing Novel Ways of Learning” describes the results of the latest efforts from the Treasure Hunt project.

Skattjakt in Skoggsport Magazine

Fri Feb 22 00:49:36 -0800 2008 by: Daniel Spikol

Skattjakt was the cover article in the Sweden’s National Orienteering Magazine, Skogssport that has over 100,000 members. The article details the research project as a technique to get the entire school on their feet with mobile maps. The article talks about how Skattjakt is bringing new technology to the sport while helping to interest young people in the sport and physical activity by having them participate in the design of novel mobile activities. You can download the article here

Mobile Games for Enviromental Awareness

Tue Jan 15 05:34:08 -0800 2008 by: Marcelo Milrad

Skattjakt is a mobile phone game that has been conceived and implemented to promote physical activity and collaborative problem solving. The game is inspired by the ideas behind treasure hunt activities and the sport of orienteering. The activities in the game explore informal skills such as learning about the environmental factors and navigation. The game requires different degrees of collaboration between team members to solve the mystery. Up to six teams can simultaneously compete using mobile phones, as they progress through the playing field with detours for wrong answers. The playing field is spread out over the downtown Växjö with seven locations. A strong narrative drives the players to solve a mystery about space aliens, the environment and how to reduce greenhouse gases in everyday life.

The game has been co-developed with students (ages 13-15) from Norregaardskolan in joint collaboration between the Center for Learning and Knowledge Technologies at Växjö University and Mapping Växjö. The game will be played this Thursday, January 17th, by almost 20 children, ranging from ages 13-15 from Kronobergskola, a local school from the city of Växjö.

A press release (only in Swedish) about this event is available from the URL below:

http://www.mappingvaxjo.se/pressmeddelande/pressmeddelande_2008-01.htm

Daniel Spikol in London

Sun Jan 06 14:29:20 -0800 2008 by: Marcelo Milrad

Daniel Spikol participated at the event “Research methods in informal and mobile learning: How to get the data we really want” held at the Centre for workbased Learning and Education (WLE), at the Institute of Education, London, UK on December 14, 2007. His paper, Designing Mobile Games that Explore Novel Learning Practices with Co-Design, was selected for presentation and will published in the conference proceedings later this year.

Spikol participated in the tools track where participants explored different concepts for creating more sophisticated tools for analyzing the complex
environments that mobile learning operates in. More information about this event can be found at:

http://www.milrm.wle.org.uk/programme.htm