By Lim Ee-Lon, Teaching and Learning Centre

1. The Scene…

Daniel is studying taxonomy and plant identification as part of the Landscape Design & Horticulture diploma.  He and his team mates have spent time in the wooded ambience of Clementi Woods Park, gathering data and information relating to the  identification, use, origin and scultural requirements of trees and shrubs.  Daniel scans the park environment and sights a Tembusu tree.  Excited, he whips out his iPhone, launches the Plants@NP app, takes photos of the tree from various angles, takes some observational notes, geo-tags the entry and uploads to the Plants@NP database. Nifty.  Back in campus, another team accesses Daniel’s micro-blog entry, peer reviews the content and contributes additional information relating to the Tembusu’s optimal growing conditions based on their observations and research.  

Sue is a nursing student: passionate about advocating healthy eating and healthy lifestyles; passionate about providing patients with knowledge so they can make informed and realistic choices; passionate about helping people make sustainable behavioral changes; and passionate about mobile technologies meeting nursing practice needs.  As part of Clinical Attachment, Sue frequently needs to apply mathematical formulae, mainly when administering drugs.  Sue launches the medical calculator app on her iPod Touch to accurately compute the dosage, volume and rates of drug administration.  To unwind after a tough shift at the hospital, she indulges in a session of the wacky Hospital Havoc time management sim game whereby she assumes the role of a budding doctor by admitting, diagnosing, and treating some of the most whacky patients ever encountered.

2. Ubiquitous Mobility

Mobile learning has become a ubiquitous and integral element of campus life at Ngee Ann Polytehcnic (NP), whereby our students are living increasingly media-saturated, digital and co-located lives.  Embracing handheld technologies and apps is thus a natural extension for the polytechnic given the proliferation of converged mobile media devices and tech savvy students demanding access to info and instantaneous communication on portable devices such as smartphones and media tablets.  When considering mobile learning, it is important to frame our approach with handheld devices and apps, not as the ‘next big thing’ but as ubiquitous learning tools meaningfully integrated into teaching and learning.  

3. Replacement, Augment or Part of the Blend?

At a broad level, mobile learning could be defined as any educational interaction delivered via mobile technology and accessed anytime, anywhere, on location. Here at Ngee Ann polytechnic, definitions of mobile learning are evolving, as we come to grasp the rapid emergence of new mobile technologies and begin to gain a deeper understanding of mobility.  So, the transition from desktop to laptop was in itself a significant move toward mobile learning.  However, a key area of focus for the Future MeL section in the Teaching and Leaning Centre, going forward, will be on the transformative capabilities of mobile learning with highly mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets to augment the laptop.

It is important not to think of smartphones and tablets as a replacement for the notebook (which has been a mainstay of NP’s MeL since the year 2000), but rather, as a new form factor that augments what our students are doing with their notebooks, opening up new areas where computing-based learning was just impractical before.  

As mobile and tablet touch-points proliferate and smartphone ownership continues to rise amongst our student population, it is highly conceivable that students at NP could be owning and bringing multiple devices (say a tablet and a laptop) to campus and leveraging each device for its unique learning affordance.  The degree of a specific device’s mobility will largely determine the ways it is best used in learning.  

So, in a ‘device-plus’ scenario, students such as Daniel and Sue will still use their laptops for extensive data entry such as report writing and spreadsheet creation, whilst tablets such as the iPad and Motorola Xoom could be used for consuming, interacting and exploring information, allowing navigation with taps, finger swipes and pinch zooms, not feasible on a typical laptop, and finally, using smartphones for geo-locative experiences (e.g. check-ins) and live blogging during field trips, given its great on- the-move portability, unobtrusiveness, and sheer instant usability.  

4. It’s All About Learning with the App

Beyond snazzy hardware, it’s also about the mobile applications (or apps for short) designed specifically for learning purposes.  Mobile technology will no doubt continue to follow Moore’s law, but the real innovation, the stuff that will change students’ lives in the future, now lies with app software and interfaces.

In the age of the app, a quick browse of Apple’s iTunes AppStore as well as Google’s Android Market will reveal a host of education-related apps, ranging from study aids, reference guides, calculators, translators to immersive game-based learning apps.  

So, whilst apps are undoubtedly cool, it is imperative to peel back the covers on the hype and take a serious look at why, when and how we should approach the mobile app strategy here in Ngee Ann Polytechnic.  Our primary focus has been on developing a cohesive app development strategy that clearly identifies the case and role for apps for teaching and learning, whereby hyper mobility is pitched as a new platform for learning.  

It is this very platform that will help bring learning to life by enabling our students to go to various kinds of places and do the kinds of things that weren’t even imaginable with the laptop, transcending the boundaries of structured lecture and tutorial-style learning environments and associated confined modes of communication.

Case Study 1

SkelePracti App: Immersive, Interactive Learning via Multi-Touch & Motion Sensing

Sue browses the reference section to learn about the bone groups (learning by exploring), having hands-on practice by assembling each bone group from constituent bones using the iPod Touch’s multitouch capability, then naming them and testing herself on correct joint movements using the 3-axis accelerometer and gyroscope (learning by doing).  As an added impetus for learning, Sue gains bragging rights amongst her peers on the leaderboard for correctly joining the bones to form a bone group as well as executing the correct movement of the various joints.  

SkelePracti is an app conceived and developed for use by students in the Diploma in Health Sciences (Nursing) program.  It is an educational tool that helps students refresh knowledge on the human anatomy and the skeletal system – serving as both a reference and a self-assessment tool for skeletal bones and joint movements.  In terms of learning experience and change value, through allowing students to manipulate and ‘touch’ the various elements of the skeletal system in a fun, engaging way, the app has helped students to more intuitively grasp and understand the skeletal system, including the classification of bone types and divisions of the skeletal system, how they function and, how they are linked.   With this app as the first gesture-based learning app prototype in NP, there is rich potential for NP’s future app development projects to incorporate similarly intuitive gestural interactions for students to tangibly interact with content via mobile devices. It’s early days for SkelePracti and we are looking forward to further testing to determine the effectiveness for learning.

Case Study 2

Plants@NP App: Bringing Learning to Life

Daniel comes across an Acacia tree at Clementi Woods Park and needs further information on its care and propagation methods.  He launches the Plants@NP app,  scrolls through the plant categories and queries the networked plant database and learns that the tree requires full sun and moderate watering.  Real-time performance support, in-context, just-in-time learning in Clementi Woods Park! Beyond just passive acquisition of information, Daniel is also an active constructor of knowledge whereby he records and shares his personal reflections on the Acacia’s propagation methods of seed and stem cutting, participating within a community of practice.  

One of the key custom iOS apps developed by the iMedia CEntre is Plants@NP – a plant directory-cum-micro blogging app that combines a desktop wiki environment with a companion mobile app.  

Ngee Ann Polytechnic previously piloted the use of PDAs for location-based content delivery via HP’s MediaScape Authoring Toolkit in 2008, following the adoption of Clementi Woods Park as a learning park. Going beyond mere content delivery and access, this latest iteration of the project incorporates features that empower students to collect, organise, and curate plant data in authentic learning contexts. Through using the app, the field work experience of students from the Diploma in Landscape Design & Horticulture are enhanced and enriched, whereby they can refer to, contribute to, and update the plant directory, while on the go, on location in a park or nature environment.  

In terms of pedagogical value, the hyper-mobility afforded by the iPhone/iPod Touch offers rich potential to embed context in learning, whereby students don’t just merely consume, but are engaged as co-creators of plant info in authentic contexts, collectively building and peer-reviewing contributions.   

As part of a project, students were engaged to work in groups to gather data on plant species from an allocated zone in Clementi Woods Park.  Each group was tasked to gather information and data for a minimum of 20 plant species, encompassing a combination of flowering plants, palms and other categories.  All entries were to be submitted to the Plants@NP database, peer reviewed and fine-tuned by group members.  

Through this learner-centred activity of learning by exploring, collaborating and reflecting, students engage with plant taxonomy and identification in a way that transforms their interactions and modes of exploration, thus deriving a richer learning experience overall.  Above all, students have developed a deeper understanding of the basis of classification of plant groups and the association of species in natural vegetation based on features of flowers, fruits and leaves used for taxonomic purposes.   

Cheng Yingwei, a second year student from the Diploma in Landscape Design & Horticulture shares how the Plants@NP app has enhanced her field-based learning experience

“… the app has helped me a lot by letting me know what kinds of plants are suitable to grow at particular areas, and also, where the plants are exactly located.  This info can be used for almost all our course modules, thus if we had an iPhone/iPod Touch and did not bring our laptops, we can use the mobile platform to research on plant species that we would like to know.   Going one step further, I hope useful apps such as this will benefit students from our very own junior  batch from Dip Landscape Design & Horticulture as well as supporting students from other courses to explore the flora in our parks.”

5. Developing App-titude for Future Work, Learning and Life

As part of Ngee Ann Polytechnic’s efforts to hone students’ mobile media literacies for future work, learning and life, we have been actively engaging and mentoring students in various app development projects.  Through this initiative, students are transformed from mere consumers to creators of apps designed to meet their campus needs.  

To support the burgeoning interest, app development workshops are regularly organised, focusing on both the business perspectives (app idea research, IP protection, app marketing, understanding the AppStore etc.) as well as the basics of objective C programming (XCode).

Following completion of these introductory workshops, students then embark on implementing their app ideas.  Through app projects, students not only get the opportunity to hone their app development skills, but, more significantly, are empowered to participate in and shape their campus experience – developing apps that benefit their peers and the wider campus community.  

To date, there are over 25 student-initiated and developed apps on the iTunes App Store.  Apps developed include a campus food review app (Hungry@NP) and an app to check out the latest schedules and pickup points of the polytechnic’s shuttle bus service (NP Shuttle Service). The apps are all free and available for download on iTunes at www.itunes.com/apps/ngeeannpolytechnic. (You need to have a Ngee Ann Polytechnic name and password to access most of the apps.)

The QR code on the right will take you there.

One of the student-developed apps is ‘NP Courses’, developed by Alson Toh, a 2nd year BIT student in collaboration with the Corporate Communications Office.  The personality quiz app enables prospective students to check out the many diploma courses that NP has to offer. It is targeted at students who have multiple interests and are still not sure which diploma they should pick. Through the quiz, users are able to find out which courses are likely to suit his/her interests.

6. What’s Next?

So, as the mobile learning revolution gathers pace, what’s next? From the utility of learning the human skeletal system to the geo-locative experiences of gathering and sharing plant information on-the-go, it seems as time goes on there will be an app for just about everything. But in the minds of the most students, this is merely the first generation of handheld technologies that we will wonder how we ever lived without. So what do apps of the future look like?

Could an app advise if you should avoid the bag of chips or that chocolate bar?  

Sue envisions that the future of mobile technology in healthcare will somehow combine a person’s DNA and genomics information coupled with his/her personal health record within an app, whereby the smartphone is then used to scan against ‘barcode’ labels of food products to determine which foods are best or detrimental to one’s nutritional needs.

Could there be an app that will help in the promotion of eco-efficiency and environmental awareness? Are random park visitors capable of forming a network of ‘automatic intelligent mobile sensors?  Daniel envisions the use of a smart, location-aware, ambient mobile app that integrates dynamic real-time environmental data automatically collected by park visitors with central environmental databases to help develop innovative eco-solutions.    

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the subject matter contribution and assistance given by  our colleagues, Dr Myat Maw Tun (Dip HSN) together with the HS next-gen mobile learning  team and Mr Gregory Chow (Dip LDH) and Mr Phang Chee Boon in the design and  development of the SkelePracti and Plants@NP apps respectively.

Author

Lim Ee-Lon, Manager, T&L Infrastructure Teaching and Learning Centre, Ngee Ann Polytechnic