mLearn 2008 set to tag delegates

Around 40 of my colleagues enjoyed an excellent research seminar last week presented by John Traxler who is Reader in Mobile Learning Technologies at the University of Wolverhampton. He spoke about the current and future uses of mobile and handheld technologies and the future of m-learning. There were many positive comments, and John also mentioned next year's conference on m-learning which he is chairing. This week I received full details of what appears to be a very exciting and innovative conference - mLearn 2008. It links in with the Handheld Learning 2008 conference the following week in London, and delegates can purchase joint attendance. Here are the themes for mLearn 2008...

• mobile learning, mobile knowledge, mobile societies: covering discourse, identity, knowledge and learning with pervasive, ubiquitous, mobile technologies;
• social, individual and cultural aspects of mobile learning
• devices, systems, technology and standards: convergence, diversity, frontiers, trends
• mobile learning landscape: work-based, informal, subject-specific, context-aware, social
• mobile learning for all: inclusion, assistivity, scalability, embedding, participation, evaluation, evidence, assessment

As part of mLearn's registration pack, delegates will be given an ‘active’ ID badge and asked to choose one or both of the broadcast technologies available in order to allow automatic detection of the delegates throughout the conference. A benefit of this will be to record the sessions that they have attended and to automatically generate a blog as well as transmit relevant information to delegate devices. The blog can then be accessed post conference to review the individual experiences of the delegate. This technology will be carried over to the evening sessions, with the full cooperation of all venues involved. Sounds like fun.