Mobile technologies, storytelling and learning objectives;

Mobile technology is being rapidly adopted and is consistently on the growth in developing countries around the world. According to Moco News there are currently 4.1 billion mobile subscribers worldwide, a global penetration rate of 61.1%; It is an important factor assisting in the growth in economies and communication in emerging nations like India (India Mobility Trends) and Kenya (Mobile in Africa). Furthermore, as computation moves to the cloud, cell phones will be able to transfer more of the heavy computing away from the device allowing it to offer more functionality to the end user.

Mobile technology is hence, a great way to create new learning spaces that can be given to children in developing nations. One way this has been accomplished is by loading short stories for children in a small town in Baja, Mexico, who can listen to and learn from these stories. The mobile devices are small and can be hand cranked, so the children can carry them as their families move in search of work. There have been proposals on how best to crank up the mobile devices, perhaps using a bike or a toy, or alternatives like solar or wind, but this still has some ways to go.

Moving away slightly, we learned that storytelling is a great way to get children to participate and motivate them to learn. It doesn't require the child to have access to books, or a formal school or technology, but allows them to draw on their creativity. According to Dr.Kim's working paper "Stories to tell and 1001 more days to live: Exploring the Micro Creative Economy as a Means to Fund and Promote Literacy Development in Underserved Areas", one of the most important things to learn about education in developing nations is that it should be sustainable, and we need to provide incentives to children who are still struggling with the basic necessities in life, making literacy secondary to their other needs. The "1001 Stories Project" allows the child to explore their creativity, contributes to their literacy and lets their voice be heard at a global level. The goal is to spread this to other nations and also organize drawing and singing competitions to empower children through their creativity.

Children also rapidly learn how to use mobile technology and the web to teach themselves new things. It was observed in a school in Ahmedabad, India, that given a set of mobile devices with mathematical problems, it took barely an hour for some groups of children to learn how to use them effectively. Collaborative learning between children helps build collective intelligence and hopefully motivates them to catch up with their peers and learn more new things. Technology is probably most effective on the under and over performing brackets, but it will likely make some kind of an impact across the graph.

Now a little about learning objectives; Kapp's notes, is a blog post that goes briefly over ABCD, the basics of creating an effective learning objective, which we discussed in class.

In programming if ABCD were arguments to a function, A and C are your inputs, and B and D are the return values expected after the function finishes processing.

A is your Audience, an input field, which is the group of individuals who are being targeted for the instruction. It also addresses their prior knowledge, if any is needed as a foundation before participating in the learning.

B is behavior, an output field, which is the desired outcome of your learning method. It's what you want the Audience to be able to do as a result of your training. Behavior should be defined in a concrete manner and it's really important to define it because your tutorial may go off track if you haven't clearly stated what is expected at its completion.

C is condition, another input field, which describes the circumstances or the conditions under which the learning takes place.

D is degree, an output field, which is a measurable component that tries to assess the level of learning attained by the person. For instance after completing flight lessons, a pilot should have a success rate of 99% or higher.

I think it's important that we define ABCD, not to create boundaries, but to set broader learning objectives and allow the learners to experiment to some extent.

We also touched briefly on the topics of cognition "knowing" and meta-cognition "knowing about knowing". For me, coming from a non-educational background, the words initially seemed like ancient greek, but now I've had a chance to study them a bit more closely, they make more sense. I hope to be able to go more in depth into these in a future blog post to improve my own understanding of them and the theories that surround them.