Learning and Teaching with Ambient Mobile Video

Experience It Session
* Cyprien P. Lomas, ELI Scholar in Residence / Director, Learning Centre, The University of British Columbia
* Sang Mah, VP Strategic Projects / Researcher, ComVu Media, Simon Fraser University

What happens when all learners have a casual ability to create, share, and broadcast live video, anytime and anywhere? The latest mobile phones and wireless networks allow unprecedented capabilities for event recording and sharing, videoblogging, citizen journalism, and collective broadcasting. Participants will use mobile phones to create a live channel on the Web that can be seen by a personal community or global audience.
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Gadget time. This was excellent. Used a Nokia N80 phone to broadcast live video will PocketCaster. And ComVu. $400 phone broadcasting to a web page. Mash that with GoogleMaps and a bit of blue tooth and not only can you watch live video selected by locations of interest (we searched for and watched video from mobiles in various cities around the world) you can also search for videos that have been saved for various locations and see a visual trail of a journey as the video plays. So we watched a stream from Stanley Park in Vancouver and by its side saw a trace on the map representing the vehicle's position as it travelled round the island.
So what can we do with this? Well, the main characteristics are mobile, easy to use, live and very accessible and discoverable (and reusable when saved too).
It has a special place and high impact when there's a live, story worth telling. 'Live' and 'story' or 'event' I think are key here. 'Personal' may be something another useful word. Someone else suggested 'wow factor', but that's wow for us and in the hands of students they're likely to be too cool to be wow-ed by the time we could get this on campus.
There's also a web-based studio facility, so given a range of these tools I imagined their use in changing variables in some augmented reality scenario. ie a simulation facilitator is getting instant feedback on augmented reality team exercise and can throw unpredictable challenges out as needed.
This sounds like gadget time Richard! Various phones can use PocketCaster including the Motorola Q.
It was good to meet Cyprien Lomas and put a face to a voice. He and others here have been very friendly in welcoming us foreigners.
Got to dash to a games session now... and can't keep up on the sessions.