On June 6, Deb and Colleen from the MiLK team presented MiLK at the Get Game conference held at the ICT Learning Innovation Centre.

We had a great response from the teachers who attended our presentation are are looking forward to seeing some of them in our training workshops soon.

Overall the conference was lots of fun, particularly Vincent Trundle’s workshop on making Machinima with multi-player games.

Currently researchers at the Gamelab Institute of Play are piloting MILK in New York and Chicago. For this pilot we have adapted the system to work with WEB ENABLED mobile phones as this is more conducive to the current conditions/capabilities/attitudes in US schools (please note that the UK and Australian schools will be sticking to SMS for now with occasional pilot studies using web enabled mobiles.)

We are know sharing our MiLK system with researchers at the Gamelab Institute of Play in New York. Currently Katie Salen and her team are working with students in New York and Chicago to experiment with ways of using MiLK to cooperatively compose mobile game events for a variety of learning contexts.

“The Institute will work in partnership with you to develop a set of demonstrations for the platform, exploring the kinds of experiences that it can support, particularly from a game design perspective.
We will also assist in the development of identifying and designing a set of processes/resources to support the use of MiLK by teachers and students, and will look into the development of supplemental technologies that might extend the MiLK experience.
… we’d really like to think about how to integrate MiLK at an infrastructural level in the new school we are designing, and this initial phase of research will help us better understand how to do that.”

Katie Salen Executive Director, Gamelab Institute of Play (nonprofit organization.)
19 W. 24th Street, 12th floor, New York, NY 10011

We were invited to present MiLK at the recent VATE Conference at La Trobe iniversity, Victoria. Deb also participated in a panel discussion on the opportunities of new ICTs in the classroom:

The Victorian Association for the Teaching of English, Conference, July 2007:
“This conference aims to tap into teachers’ never ending quest to make their classrooms so interesting that, despite their adolescent misgivings, kids just can’t resist getting involved. That’s why the conference offers panel discussions and workshops related to the technological world kids experience, from panels on the future of television, to the use of the mobile phone in the classroom, to workshops on ICT.”

PANEL - Saturday 28 July: Staying in touch - kids, classrooms and the mobile phone
Participating chair - Colin Thompson, Thornbury High School
Panel Experts - Ross Gibson (UTS), Deb Polson (QUT/ACID), and Vince Trundle (ACMI)

“The ubiquitous mobile phone can be tyrannous or empowering, convenient or a nuisance. Teenage students might see themselves as enlightened and courteous if they inform their teacher beforehand that they are expecting an important call in the middle of double Year 11 English! But how can mobile phone technology have an informative and instructive role? How can it be harnessed to serve formal education?
How has it changed the ways in which we access, store and convey information? How can it help create new texts? And how is it fundamentally reshaping the nature of our communication and relationships? All of the above questions highlight just some of the issues to be addressed in the panel discussion. Prepare to be impressed with the possibilities of phone technology.”

VATE 2007 Program
VATE Website

We have just been notified that a paper of ours about MiLK has been accepted for the M-Learning Conference, 2007. The paper was authored by Deb Polson and Colleen Morgan. The Conference will be held in Lisbon, Portugal on the 5th-7th of July. Click here to view the paper

MSTE is the Maths, Science, Technology and Education Faculty at the Queensland University of Technology. The team at MSTE assisted in the April 16th teacher trials by sourcing participants, contributing to the workshop evaluation framework, hosting the day’s activities and providing catering.

The MSTE Team:
Margaret Lloyd
Kar-Tin Lee
Shaun Nykvist
Vinesh Chandra
Chris Chalmers
Ken Garrad
Jennifer Tan

The AGM Mobile Learning Demonstration and Forum was held to demonstrate current mobile projects designed for educational contexts and to introduce the new ACID Mobile Learning Project. We invited several guests to discuss the potential for new collaborations for the project.

As a result of the forum, several new collaborators were invited to join the project. These were Paul Doherty from the Technology School of the Future (TSOF) and Margaret Lloyd from the Music, Science, Technology and Education Faculty of QUT.