More Events Posted By FutureLab – b.TWEEN & mLearn 2008

b.TWEEN

18-20 June 2008
Museum of Science & Industry, Manchester

“b.TWEEN08 features a huge host of industry experts from advertising, creative technology, film, games, mobile, TV and web. Nowhere else will you find such a diverse mix of ideas-rich indies and ideas-hungry big industry players meeting on a level playing field to explore and exploit the creative and commercial potential of digital technologies.”

www.just-b.com/btween

See post here.

mLearn 2008

7-10 October 2008
Ironbridge, Shropshire

“mLearn was the first conference on mobile learning and is widely recognised as one of the most prestigious international conferences in the field. The aims of the conference are to bring together the world’s leading mobile learning researchers, developers and activists in an environment that will stimulate dramatically increased deployment of mobile learning and catalyse dramatically enhanced innovation.”

www.mlearn2008.org

See post here.

Nokia debuts mobile gaming system

Nokia expects to have about 60 games available by 2009 Nokia has lifted the veil on its revamped mobile gaming service known as N-Gage. Visitors to the N-Gage website can download software that connects their phone to the handset maker’s growing library of games. Nokia expects to have about 30 games available for playing on its higher end phones by the middle of 2008. The launch of N-Gage marks one of the biggest moves by a mobile maker into the content market. Author: BBC News, Technology, 4th April 2008 Full article available here.

Expect the unexpected

Since September I’ve been using a set of handheld devices, Nokia N800’s, in my classroom. The idea has been to link the N800’s, the Uniservity Learning Platform, via the Smartboard to create a new classroom environment. This has led to many challenges. Tasks which appeared to be obvious and easy have proved to be impossible, new ways of working have emerged.

For instance, take Bluetooth technology. The children very quickly realised that they could send each other information via Bluetooth and that such sending would be impossible for the teacher to monitor, especially if there N800 was set to silent. There is now a steady stream of Bluetooth information across the classroom. Some of this is curriculum based, much of it is not. Pictures, text, drawings, applications, games all move seamlessly around. We now have a set of class rules, which we have agreed upon, about what is proper use of a device during lessons.

Author: Phillip Griffin, 24th February 2008

Full article available here.

Newtoon Update

Newtoon update… (last mentioned here)A video has been added to the page at Futurelab, so you can see Newtoon being used/played by students – and being discussed by the developers. I have to say that I’d still be more tempted to use Phun based on what can be seen here. Phun looks far more powerful, and based on open-ended play.Author: Daniel Livingstone, Learning Games Blog, 12th March 2008

Full article available here.