Multimedia platforms (Source: Holmes8604, goo.gl/JctepT, under CC BY-SA 4.0 licence)
With smartphones and tablets, it is easy to make multimedia recordings consisting of some combination of text, photos, audio, video and animations. This means students can create records of their educational experiences, or initial reflections on those experiences, while they are engaged in learning on field trips, excursions, or in everyday situations. These records can later be revisited, reorganised, reworked and perhaps even built into digital stories, as well as shared and discussed with teachers and peers.
Note that if students are merely passively viewing pre-existing multimedia recordings, ranging from lecture captures to YouTube videos, this is a very web 1.0 educational approach based on information transmission; it only becomes a web 2.0 educational approach based on (social) constructivism and situated learning at the point when students are asked to create, reflect on, share and discuss their own recordings. In either case, however, it aligns with mobile learning to the extent that the recordings are viewed or created on mobile devices.
One of the earliest techniques involving the creation and sharing of multimedia materials was moblogging, where students could post text, images, audio or video files created on the fly to the web, usually from a mobile phone. Some moblogging services, such as LocoBlog and Moblog, are still in operation.
Nowadays, moblogging has largely been subsumed into geosocial networking, such as updating Facebook or Twitter from a mobile device (especially if multimedia materials are appended to the status updates or tweets) or using mobile-first sharing services such as Foursquare, Instagram and Periscope.
In educational contexts, teachers may ask students to rework their raw recordings into multimedia presentations, possibly within a digital storytelling framework, thus (re-)presenting their materials with the help of web-based or app-based tools. These presentations or stories might be shared on a class platform such as an LMS. At other times, students’ annotated recordings of their learning or performances might find their way into their e-portfolios.
More information about multimedia recording is available on the Publications on Mobile Learning page.
Mark Pegrum
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