Mobile Learning & Creativity

I am proud to announce that our Special Issue on Mobile Learning and Creativity with the International Journal of Blended and Mobile Learning is now online!

You can find the editorial by Ilona Buchem, Isa Jahnke & Norbert Pachler here (PDF), in which describe the rationale for this Special Issue:

“Creativity has been proclaimed as one of the so-called key 21^st century skills and as the driving force of economic development in post-industrial era. With the ‘creative class’ (Florida, 2002), comprising different types of creative workers, tackling complex, societal problems ranging from solving economic problems, through creating innovative technological solutions to devising new ways of social entrepreneurship, the role of creativity will arguably increase dramatically in the years to come. Already today many of the fastest-growing jobs and emerging industries rely on workers’ creative capacity, such as the ability to think laterally, inventing new scenarios and producing novel solutions. To face this demand, both education and business have to embrace new technologies and design new ways to foster the creativity of students and workers.”

The five selected best papers we included in this Special Issue can be found here, Volume 5, Issue 3. Also, the papers can be found in the ACM digital library. Please make sure your article search is for the whole ACM guide, not just the ACM and affiliated publications.

These papers are:

• Isa Jahnke: Teaching Practices in iPad-Classrooms: Alignment of Didactical Designs, Mobile Devices and Creativity (pages 1-16)
• Maria Ranieri & Isabela Bruni: Empowering Creativity in Young People Through Mobile Learning: An Investigation of Creative Practices of Mobile Media Uses In and Out of School (pages 17-33)
• Sobah Abbas Petersen, Emma Procter-Legg & Annamaria Cacchione: Creativity and Mobile Language Learning Using LingoBee (pages 34-51)
• Steve Wright, Ben Short & Gale Parchoma: Supporting Creativity in Craft Brewing: A Case Study of iPhone Use in the Transition from Novice towards Mastery (pages 52-67)
• Jennifer Masters: Creative Teaching and Learning Strategies for Novice Users of Mobile Technologies (pages 68-79)

Congratulations to all authors for starting the conversation with us on how mobile learning can foster creativity.

NB: We have started the discussion on mobile Learning and creativity in the TEL community a few years ago and held a workshop on Mobile Learning and Creativity at the European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning in 2012 (EC-TEL 2012 & #MLCW12) and the workshop on Computational Tools Forstering Creativity in Learning Process at the EC-TEL 2013 (EC-TEL 2013). You can find out more about the two workshops on creativity in TEL here:

• Mobile Learning and Creativity Workshop 2012: Cloudworks.
• Computational Tools Fostering Creativity in Learning Process 2013: CCL2013.

I believe there is yet much to explore – if you are interested in projects in cooperations related to Mobile Learning and Creativity please let me know!

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PLE and Smart Cities

As the guest editor of the first Special Issue of eLearning Papers on Personal Learning Environments with best papers from the PLE Conference 2013: Learning and Diversity in the Cities of the Future / 10-12 July 2013 Berlin & Melbourne, I am glad to announce that the whole Special Issue and the single articles are available online and can be downloaded as open access under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivativeWorks 3.0 Unported License here:

http://openeducationeuropa.eu/en/paper/personal-learning-environments

Here is the list of articles:

• Personal Learning Environments in Smart Cities: Current Approaches and Future Scenarios; Author(s):Ilona Buchem, Mar Pérez-Sanagustín
• A gamification framework to improve participation in social learning environments; Author(s):Jorge Simões, Rebeca Díaz Redondo,Ademar Aguiar, Ana Fernández Vilas
• Developing a framework for research on Personal Learning Environments; Author(s):Rita Kop, Hélène Fournier
• Developing PLEs to support work practice based learning; Author(s):Graham Attwell, Lars Heinemann, Pekka Kamarainen, Ludger Deitmer
• Using PLEs in professional learning scenarios – The Festo case for ROLE; Author(s):Maren Scheffel, Michael Werkle, Martin Wolpers
• Investigating teachers’ perception about the educational benefits of Web2.0 personal learning environments; Author(s):Ebrahim Rahimi, Jan van den Berg, Wim Veen
• Decentralized badges in educational contexts: the integration of Open Badges in SAPO Campus; Author(s):Carlos Santos, Luis Pedro, Sara Almeida,Mónica Aresta
• Personal Learning Environments: A conceptual landscape revisited; Author(s):Sebastian H.D. Fiedler, Terje Väljataga

Thank you to all authors and to the editorial team of eLearning Papers for swift collaboration on this Special Issue!