Author of the personalisation and mobile technologies research paper, Agnes Kukulska-Hulme, is a Professor of Learning Technology & Communication at the Open University and has worked with learners of all ages in a distant learning format. As mobile learning started to enter this space about 15 years ago – that’s when her experiments with this media began!
The talk began with Agnes giving us an overview of how students can learn beyond the classroom in a more self-directed and collaborative way. I was particularly interested in hearing how students can improve their listening and speaking skills by using a cell phone. Agnes also talked about the new roles for teachers in this situation. For example, in mobile learning teachers can help students learn by becoming online facilitators, advice givers or counsellors.
Agnes also talked about some of the other research that is being done about mobile learning and some of the projects that her team are working on. For example, she showed how her team were using mobile learning with immigrants and in relation to the environment.
She also showed us an app that was developed by her team called Audio News Trainer. Audio News Trainer provides news links that students can listen on their phones. The news is separated into three categories: green, yellow and red according to the difficulty. Students can then choose which news they want to listen to at a level that is appropriate for them.
Agnes closed her talk by discussing mobile pedagogy in ELT and provided a free guide that teachers can download. The guide is a framework for rethinking our practice and also provides some useful practical examples.
Overall, the talk was very insightful, particularly as mobile technologies with personalized learning look to be an increasing feature of the ELT landscape. You can watch Agnes Kukulska-Hulme’s talk in full below.
For a more in-depth look at this area, download the Personalisation of Language Learning through Mobile Technologies research paper.