Signal poor on m-learning's impact | Education | Guardian Weekly - 0 views
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Lisa Stewart on 08 May 12This article resonates with me because it serves to remind us that measuring the benefits of using mobile devices with ESL learners, is a difficult thing to measure. That said, it therefore serves as a double reminder that we must make sure we take the time to design well thought-out lesson plans involving mlearning, or the benefits might not be reaped by those we are teaching.
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benefits it will have had on their language development or teaching skills are harder to measure
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elatively little critical attention paid to how the outcomes of many projects are measured and reported.
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common message: this is a medium that can bridge educational and digital divides.
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the monitoring and evaluation design does not appear to include a control group, but rather focuses on English language competency of only the participants at the beginning of the year compared with the end.
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The excitement surrounding the variety of m-learning projects is well-deserved, but there is clearly much to learn about how far teaching and learning English using the medium can benefit those in developing countries. As Traxler says, "Brilliant and exemplary work is being done on the ground by people using mobiles to deliver and enhance learning to distant and disadvantaged communities. Our problem is more to do with how badly we try to explain it, think about it, reason about it, learn from it, generalise from it and evaluate it."
