The Women's Postgraduate College for Internet Technologies (WIT) at the Faculty of Informatics of the Vienna University of Technology and the E-Learning Centre at the Vienna University of Technology invited to:

Adaptation in Mobile Learning

Prof. Kinshuk
School of Computing and Information Systems
Athabasca University,
Canada

When: Where:

Friday, December 21, 2007 14:00 Vienna University of Technology Zemanek Hörsaal 1040 Wien, Favoritenstrasse 11 Ground floor

After the event

About 30 guests came to listen to the famous speaker.

Abstract

Mobile educational systems have started to emerge as potential educational environments supporting life-long learning. However, these environments still suffer from various technological and access related problems in many parts of the world. For example, the access to course materials is slow; courseware does not adapt to individual students; the real time interaction between student and the environment is hard to achieve because of the connection unreliability and bandwidth limitations. There is also a lack of pedagogical infrastructure for mobile learning. This talk will discuss the research in mobile learning, with particular focus on adaptivity for individual learners. While adaptivity in desktop based environments has attracted much attention and sophistication in e-learning environments, mobile learning is still struggling with basic technological and pedagogical problems. But there is much evidence that suggests that mobile technology is going to provide a natural extension for e-learning in long run. With greater restrictions posed on mobile learners due to time, space and varied technical solutions available in different circumstances, adaptivity is expected to play even greater role. This talk will touch some of these issues. In particular, the dimensions of multiple input and synchronous ad-hoc discussion based problem solving scenarios will be discussed in the context of a mobile learning project of northern oil field camps.

Bio

Kinshuk is Professor and Director of School of Computing and Information Systems at Athabasca University, Canada. Before moving to Canada, Kinshuk worked at German National Research Centre for Information Technology as Postgraduate Fellow, and at Massey University, New Zealand as Associate Professor of Information Systems and Director of Advanced Learning Technology Research Centre. He also holds Docent position with University of Joensuu, Finland. He has been involved in large-scale research projects for exploration based adaptive educational environments and has published over 200 research papers in international refereed journals, conferences and book chapters. He is Chair of IEEE Technical Committee on Learning Technology and editor of the SSCI indexed Journal of Educational Technology & Society (ISSN 1436-4522).

Contact Person at Vienna University of Technology

Mag. Sabine Graf, graf@wit.tuwien.ac.at, Tel. 58801-18817

Funding

WIT is funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Science, and Culture (bmbwk) and the European Social Fund (ESF). This event was sponsored by Erste Bank.