Being Workshops chair of the mLearn 2012 conference in Helsinki, it is my duty to distribute the call for submissions. We are looking for hot topic workshops on mobile technologies in the wider context of learning, education and training, ubiquitous technologies for learning and m-commerce. Today I have finalised the call for the workshop and tutorial submissions and made it available to the public.

The STELLAR Network of Excellence and CELSTEC organise the workshop Learning in Context on 26 and 27 March in Brussels. This workshop is aligned with the third grand challenge of Technology enhanced learning of STELLAR. I have been invited to present my recent work on mobile learning for security and defence organisations at the ISN.

Go and register for the event if you want to learn about the challenges of mobile learning in the security and defence sector.

Currently, I am conducting a broad analysis of contemporary mobile learning research. I was looking forward to this exercise because I wanted to contextualize the results of our concept mapping study with ongoing research. In this post I list a few high-level views on the mobile learning research based on statistics reported by Thompson's ISI Web of Science.  A side objective of my research is to identify specific developments in Africa and South America, so don't be surprised to find references to this region.

A few weeks ago the mobile learning week was held at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. A couple of days ago the report of the results of the weeks have been published online. The report emphasizes the "access to education for all" theme of mobile learning. Certainly, this is one of the key challenges that mobile technologies can help. It is interesting that as a response to this focus, the main criticism and concerns mentioned in the report were of the types "technological limitations" or "organisational limitations" (from a teachers perspective). 

It would be really interesting to have a concept mapping study on the statements collected from this event and compare the results to our previous expert study.