Ipod Heritage Trail – My Wifey

 

My wifey is working on a Masters in Historic Preservation, and her thesis project involves creating an iPod heritage trail for Cumberland Island in Georgia. The idea is that visitors to the island will be able to experience interpretive exhibits in a remote setting. Using portable technologies, visitors can obtain a personalized tour in dense forests, untouched beaches, and abandoned buildings.

So far, she’s been doing research, writing scripts, etc. But now she’s finally working on the actual exhibits… and I gotta say, this is gonna be cool. Imagine standing at the Dungeness ruins and getting a multimedia lesson on the history of the site. Or… stand at the chimneys from the old slave cabins and see a rendering of how the site used to look.

Anyway, I think it’s great and I’m proud of her. Hopefully when she’s done with a couple of the exhibits, she’ll allow me to post one on Youtube so you can see it here.

Text Your Own Adventure w/ Spiderman

I stumbled upon this video a few days ago… it’s a Text Your Own Adventure w/ Spiderman! Remember those old Choose Your Own Adventure books? Well, this sorta works the same way.

Basically, you watch a video in which Spiderman tries to save the world from the Golden Girls and trans-fats. At the end of the video, you send a text message to choose your ending. Either spiderman uses his power for evil, spiderman loses to the girls, or spiderman wins… you decide. Once you send a text message with the ending of your choice, you get a message in return that includes instructions on viewing your ending. Click the thumbnail below to see an example:

This is a pretty interesting use of text messaging, and it made me curious if e-learning professionals had begun trying something similar. After all, many colleges are already beginning to adopt text messaging as an option for broadcasting announcements to students. I don’t suppose it would be a giant leap for faculty to begin sending pop quizzes, scavenger hunts, hints/tips, reminders, and other messages via text.

Mlearning-world.com recently posted several good examples of using text messaging for education. The first example is a “data burst”:

To improve her team’s sales skills, a sales manager polled her top sales consultants as to key aspects of different products that resulted in sales. She also gathered information from various sales training courses. Gathering all of the information collected, she organized this into 100-200 word chunks like the following two examples:

Sales Tip: Use Examples- ABC corporation saved $100 a month by switching from RDI 750 to 1000.

Did You Know: The RDI 1000 can handle 5 times the users as the 750.

The next example was a scavenger hunt:

The new Customer Service representatives were sent to random retail stores they supported. Challenges were sent to their mobile phones and the students would text back their answers. In one example, the students were challenged to find the price of a specific model of digital camera. The students would search the store to find the camera and either take a picture with their phone and send it or text the answer back. This gave the students a customer experience in searching for products their customers would want to find.

Has anyone out there tried any learning activities via text messaging? If so how’d it go?

Kudos to anyone who can comment using only text messaging abbreviations.

Re-posted from my abandoned Eduspaces blog