Half Way There

Well the project is officially half way to completion, with 3 months hard research under my belt I am surrounded and educated by a plethora of information on mobile learning, from journal articles to blogs, reports to newspaper special supplements.

I am now frantically searching for other institutions that support their students in a mobile learning context in order to make informed recommendations towards the steps LJMU should take in order to foster an effective and successful mobile learning culture amongst our staff and students. I've posted to LIS-LINK which unfortunately did not return many leads and I have been in contact with a number of librarians, both here in England and in America, in order to gain insights into how their library service supports mobile learning. In an ideal world I would have more leads to follow up however as is the case with mobile learning a lot of people preach but (apart from small scale departmental pilots) there isn't much practising taking place!!

I have booked my place for LILAC this year which has a key theme of 'emerging technologies' so hopefully I might be able to network and find some HEIs that are already pushing out information and learning materials to their students in a more mobile format than is done traditionally. If not I still think that I will be able to gather some very useful opinions and ideas from other librarians and I know that there is a parallel session about using mobile phones for information skills sessions so I will definitely be able to get some good information that I can feed into the report.

We (the project team) submitted out journal article to ALT-J in the nick of time and it is now under peer-review so fingers crossed that we get some good feedback on that. It worked out quite well really as it also served as a bit of an interim report for the project and made me realise where the focus of my remaining research needs to be.

The M-Libraries conference has also accepted our paper so Will Reid will be going over to Canada to officially present the project findings in a public forum in June. We'll also have to provide a written summary which will contribute to the M-Libraries Conference book.

In the short-term I have a meeting with a Digital Media Co-ordinator from a FEI tomorrow and me and Will will be doing a CPD session for the students of the postgraduate Information and Library Management students here at LJMU on Thursday.