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This experiment´s results encouraged us to continue since we found that students feltthe
experience was engaging and worthwhile, they felt comfortable working with their
mobile devices, and it did not bring any real change in their daily lives except for the fact
that they received more SMS per week on their phones. According to the data obtained,
the subjects preferred receiving small bits of information (all contained in one SMS)
which could be answered immediately. We also found that the subjects preferred
answering the exercises that did not need any support material. The possibility of
answering at any time and in any place was regarded as an extremely positive feature.
These results were published in Volume 21, Number 1, of The EUROCALL Review.
The next one was entitled “Improving learners’ reading skills through instant short
messages: a sample study using WhatsApp” (2012
-2013): what stood out as a
conclusion of this study was the need to create a teacher-independent
application to
automatically send all the text messages and exercise
s to avoid relying on a teacher’s
constant availability to send the messages, according to a set schedule, via a handheld
mobile device. Also, the main conclusions were the following: the vast majority of the
students reported a high level of satisfaction and agreed that not only had their
willingness to read in English increased, but the experience
had also had a positive
impact on their reading habits, and had resulted in more regularity and confidence.
These results were presented in the WorldCALL2013, and published in the Conference
Proceedings. Also, the team was granted the 2013 University Council Award:
PremidelConsell Social de QualitatDocent 2013 for this project.
The most recent study related to the use of mobile devices in education at our University
is entitled “WhatsApp as a tool for the enhancement of spoken fluency at university level”
(2014). This project is carried out as a doctoral thesis (by Olga Hryckiewicz and
supervised by Gutierrez-Colon). The data has been gathered and the analysis is still in
process. Part of the data was analyzed and the self-perceived fluency results show that
students using mobile phones for the activities in the subject they were enrolled in, at
the end of the course, felt more comfortable while speaking and thought they improved
significantly. This, together with similarly higher scores in motivation levels, might result
in those students being more eager to engage in spoken discourse in L2, practice more,
boost their confidence and thus make quicker progress in their overall spoken fluency
results.
Finally, there is the project our University group has started working on recently. We
wish to transfer the knowledge we have gained in our previous studies and move on to a
more practical field and create a tool that could be used in other educational insitutions.
This is because despite the slow but steady increase in the number of projects based on
mobile
technologies practices, there are few that have researched the discipline of
Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL). Research studies on the use of mobile
technologies in this field are practically non-existent. In order to fill this gap, this new
project aims at the integration of Smart-Phones to support the development of reading
and listening comprehension skills of secondary school students studying the CLIL
subjects of Technology and Science. The working name of the study is
–
SmartCLIL and
it involves the creation of a mobile app for learning that would be adequate for its use in
Primary and Secondary schools.
The reason for the short description of the studies on mLearning carried out at our
university is for us to be able to shed light on some of the challenges we have
encountered along the way and that, we believe,
are universal for some, if not the
majority, of investigations in this field. One of the issues present throughout all the
projects we have carried out was that of technological disparity or, in other words,
technological differences that are present in mobile technology. In general, students own
a great variety of mobile devices with different operating Systems (OS) when it comes to
phones and other handheld mobile devices (such as tablets and PDAs); these include
Android, iPhone, iOS, Windows Phone, Symbian, Firefox OS, to name a few.
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This leads to a situation in which not all the programs and files necessary to carry out the
experiments are supported by all the phones our subjects own,
the necessity to
download compatibility layers, still, these initial incompatibilities lead to problems with
memory management when layers are downloaded, etc. Still, these shortcomings can be
solved but it requires a lot of additional time on the part of the students as well as the
investigators and, quite importantly, can lead to confusion on the part of the learners and
significantly decrease their motivation as to their participation in the project. These are
the circumstances all investigators try to avoid
–
demotivation, especially when we are
studying a new and a quite challenging field that faces a lot of different hurdles along the
way.
System compatibility is only one of the differences in mobile devices we have observed.
Screen sizes are another confrontation we faced. The majority of our studies required the
sending visual files (such as pictures,
cartoons, photos and videos) to our students.
Some of them were unable to carry out a given task solely due to the fact that they could
not see the image clearly enough in order to perform the task they were asked to do.
These students reported the necessity of resorting to regular computers and/or laptops in
order to be able to do so and this was something that, for obvious reasons, we wanted to
avoid.
Still, the challenges present in mLearning research are often independent of the devices
themselves. It has been observed that the very attitudes towards mobile phones in
academic settings: both institutional and from the learners´ point of view affect this field
of study. Mobile-learning has not yet gained the label of a ´serious´ research field, even
amongst university students.Such learners often produce responses to (especially
spoken) mlearning activities in a quite informal fashion; they do not treat their tasks as
seriously as they would if they were to hand in a written paper, for instance. This fact,
we believe, could be attributed to the medium, the circumstances are such that handheld
devices are present in everyday lifes of the students, they accompany them from
morning to night and they go with them everywhere from schools to bars. This
omnipresence (that on the other hand surely is a great asset of mobile learning) causes
the diminishing of the ´seriousness´ of the medium and might influence students´
performance.
Also, the institutional view on mLearning manifests itself in, for instance, the need of the
researcher to seek official permissions in order to be able to use mobile phones in class,
something incomprehensible and unthinkable in the case of the use of any other
technological devices and programs such as computers, smart boards or PowerPoint.
However, there often are no clear regulations on the possible use of handheld devices in
class or they are just being (often reluctantly) introduced
which only adds to the
confusion and the possible negative judgments about the field.
The last challenge that we are going to mention is that of the amount of data: there is
animmense input of data gathered when using mobile phones as a tool in language
classroom but we still do not have the tools to organize, analyze, and present this data.
We, to date, need to adapt it to the computer interface; this is extremely time-
consuming for the teacher/researcher and often considerably slows down the process of
data processing and the results’ release dates. Furthermore, to give a vivid example,
spoken data gathered need to be transferred onto a desktop computer; however, this is
just the beginning. Such data, to our knowledge, needs to and
is
analyzed manually. This
I to say that, for instance, all the temporal fluency measures need to be examined that
way since there is no program that could aid the researcher in this process. Here, we are
not only touching the topic of time investment but also,
or even primarily, results´
reliability and human error that mightaffect the study´s outcomes.
Mobile learning, even though it has been repeated for quite a few years now, still
remains a new field of study and, as such, is bound to face obstacles and challenges that,
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to our mind, are, in the end, positive as they help seek solutions and improve the overall
investigation in the field; they also aid us in intending to find new paths and also be
aware of the limitations and the possible shortcomings of the studies. All in all, we do
believe that all the challenges enlisted in this paper can and will be overcome with time
which will greatly improve the process of our research and, in turn, will pave the way for
mLearning to fully establish itself in foreign language classrooms as
an equal partner to
such tools as desktop computers and smart boards.
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