Michael Fitzpatrick asks:
>
> Is this really catching on Japan I wonder.. want to write it up for
New
> Media age magazine in UK. Anyone had experience? Education side looks
> especially interesting. Anyone heard of teachers using the mobile to
> increase literacy, etc? Heard of any studies in Jpn on teaching with
> the ketai?
There's some movement in mobile educational apps, here are some stories:
--------------------------------------
http://rcrnews.com/cgi-bin/news.pl?newsId=17669
McGraw-Hill tests study aids via wireless
by Mike Dano
April 12, 2004 1:26 PM EST
Text book company McGraw-Hill/Irwin announced it will offer textbook
study guides for mobile-phone users. The offering, still in testing,
allows students to access textbook-correlated quizzes, key terms and
flashcards using their mobile phones' WAP Internet browsers.
"Many students today have complicated schedules and need to maximize
small increments of free time. Knowing this, we recognized the need for
delivering flexible ways to study materials outside of the classroom,"
said J.P. Lenney, president of McGraw-Hill/Irwin, a unit of McGraw-Hill
Higher Education. "This is another option for students that delivers a
simple, yet powerful way for them to use their cell phone to study when
they have down time in their busy schedules."
Called Study To Go, the offering currently includes study guides for
Nickels, McHugh, & McHugh's Understanding Business, 7e, 2005 and Larson,
Wild, & Chiappetta's Fundamentals of Accounting Principles, 17e, 2005.
The company said additional titles are planned for September classes.
The offering follows the release of similar study guides for personal
digital assistant users.
Trial versions of the service are available at
http://cell.studytogo.com.
------------------------------------------
http://ojr.org/japan/wireless/1080854640.php
Language E-Learning on the Move In Japan, where more people own cell
phones than PCs and language education is a huge industry, there is
potential for a booming market in mobile e-learning. While education
sites aren't currently moneymakers, more sophisticated content may allow
providers to charge more for bite-sized learning. Tony McNicol Posted:
2004-04-05
Few people in Japan own personal digital assistants, and Web-based
distance learning has only caught on after the relatively recent
introduction of broadband Internet. But the ubiquitous cell phone here
can help people who want to study on the move.
"The only device that's really handy enough to let you study where, and
when, you want is the cellular phone," says Junko Ogawa, mobile-Internet
content producer for Tokyo language-textbook publishing company, ALC
Press (Japanese).
Streamlined study, testing and reference sites are used by everyone,
from the salaryman hoping to cram in a little English vocabulary during
his morning commute, to the high school student with five minutes to
spare for brushing up on a few Chinese kanji characters.
Studious subscribers can access distance-learning sites for
Sino-Japanese character study, professional qualifications or English
language study. Other distance or e-learning content is linked to
Japanese or English dictionary sites. At the same time, not all
e-learning content is serious study. One can find abundant
"edutainment," such as quizzes attached to entertainment, or practical
information.
NTT DoCoMo's i-mode mobile Internet service has more than 40 million
subscribers and lists study and reference sites on its main menu. Last
month, No. 4 on DoCoMo's "dictionary list" was Pocket Eijiro (Japanese),
an English-language learning site provided by ALC.
The Pocket Eijiro site started in December 2002 with an
English-Japanese, Japanese-English dictionary. Now the site gets more
than 100,000 hits per day (data on individual visits were not
available), and its subscribers number in the hundred thousands. The
service costs $1.53 per month, plus tax and packet charges.
"We guess that our customers tend to be young," says Ogawa, the
dictionary's chief content creator. Ogawa says that there are as many
male as female subscribers, although women tend to use the service more
frequently. ALC has little detailed data about who accesses the site,
but its producers can make a few guesses by looking at how the
dictionary is used.
No. 1 on a top 10 list of dictionary searches last month is "maybe" with
2,909 requests. ("Maybe" is the enigmatic catchphrase of Takuya Kimura,
a popular actor and singer, in his latest television drama.) Other
popular searches are "eternity," "precious" and "love" -- ALC suspects
users are looking up romantic English words for amorous text messages.
In addition to the dictionary, the site also includes simple
multiple-choice quizzes to test users' English. Students are given a
"corporate" rank -- from probation to CEO -- that can gradually improve
if they study often and answer correctly. Too many mistakes or too
little study and they are headed for demotion.
"The most important thing was to design it so that one session finishes
in around five minutes," says Masayasu Morita (Japanese), Pocket Eijiro
designer and researcher at the Kyoto College of Graduate Studies for
Informatics (Japanese). "I don't think a user would use this for hours
-- they would probably get tired because of the hardware."
On the other hand, he believes that this kind of bite-sized study might
attract students too busy to stick to an organized school or Web-based
learning course.
"The reason that people quit Internet-based learning is that their
motivation gets very low. They work all day, come home and they don't
want to study. With mobile phones, you can study when your motivation is
high."
Mobile Internet technology on cell phones lends itself well to
fact-based learning, such as language vocabulary. Many of the most
popular services are for learning English, a huge part-time study
industry in Japan. A 2001 government survey found that about 10 million
Japanese over the age of 10 were learning English in their spare time.
Only the study of computer subjects was more popular. Some Japanese
businessmen in major firms have found that English competency has
increasingly become a condition for promotion.
Despite the popularity of language study in Japan, education sites don't
make much money at the moment, says Morita. And they only account for 1
or 2 percent of mobile Internet content.
English isn't the only study possible on cell phones. Another popular
learning service is kanji study and testing. Kanji are the over 2,000
Chinese pictogram characters used in written Japanese, in addition to
two Japanese alphabets and the Roman alphabet -- enough to keep even
adults studying. This makes Japanese-to-Japanese dictionaries popular,
and the fact-based study services on the mobile Internet allow users to
test their knowledge for professional examinations.
What all the learning content has in common is that it is fact-based and
easy to test on a cell phone, says Morita. "If you have a multiple
choice question, that's much easier. If you have to fill in a blank or
write an essay, I don't think you can do it on a mobile phone."
Tokyo-based start-up Cerego Japan believes a potential exists for
smarter learning software.
"The phone is a ubiquitous platform; it's very tempting to go out there
and do a word-a-day vitamin," says founder Andrew Smith Lewis. "What
people haven't done is take a scientific approach to the problem."
The company has assembled psychologists, cognitive neuroscientists and
information scientists to find ways to enhance learning with technology.
One major client is the Princeton Review of Japan, also founded by Smith
Lewis in 1989 as an independent franchise of the U.S. Princeton Review.
The night school teaches test preparation strategies for English
language and SAT-type tests. It uses Cerego development software on PCs,
PDAs and cell phones.
"We were able to build a product that can present information to the
user in such a way that they pay attention to it, and a device that can
handle the scheduling and review of that information over time."
The company's software monitors students' progress by looking at how
much they work, how correctly they answer questions and how quickly they
can respond. It alters study plans using Artificial Intelligence
technology to match the users' strengths and weaknesses.
Sam Joseph, a computational neuroscientist and Cerego scientific
adviser, says that AI learning systems ensure that more time is spent
actually learning rather than organizing and planning study.
"The advantage of an intelligent mobile learning system is to reduce the
cognitive burden of study organization on the user, so that they can put
more effort directly into studying. A really intelligent system will
also compensate for the user's biases about what they think they know,
actually producing a schedule that is more efficient than the user could
devise for themselves."
Smith Lewis says that study in short bursts on mobile devices is
effective as well as convenient.
"Most people use (our software) for about an hour a day, but on average
they use it six or seven times a day. It's more efficient that way if
you break it up over time. You are much better off doing it seven times
a day for 10 minutes than for 70 minutes straight."
For the moment, says Smith Lewis, most cell phones in Japan have too
little memory to hold effective learning engines. Princeton Review
students do most of their learning on PDAs or on the Internet. The
devices are able to exchange data with each other and allow teaching
staff to monitor progress.
Morita believes that, despite technological limitations, Japanese people
may still choose mobile phones over other devices.
"The computer is a much better tool for anything, but the question is,
people in Japan tend to (use) the mobile phone. They feel more
comfortable having things at their fingertips. Even when they take a
shower, they put their mobile phone right next to them. When you lose
your mobile, you lose part of your brain."
Small keypads and displays aren't enough to put people off, he says --
especially the youngest users.
"I asked middle-school students in Japan which was easier to use, (a
mobile phone keyboard or a computer keyboard) and they said the mobile
phone. They told me that there are (too many) buttons on a computer
keyboard!"
New technology may make more sophisticated study possible in the near
future. Some third-generation phones are already capable of playing
short audio clips -- say of English pronunciation -- and Morita expects
the first voice-recognition applications to be available this year. ALC
also hopes to include video clips of native speakers on its English
learning site. And more sophisticated content may also allow providers
to charge more.
"If people want to spend money on a mobile phone site, first they might
go to a ring-tone site, then a character site like Pokemon, or a
fortune-telling site -- fun content. It's very tough to make a profit
from learning content. It's the same priority as their (regular)
lifestyle -- first good food, drinking, karaoke; then you might study."
Whatever way e-learning is delivered -- by PC, PDA, cell phone or a
combination of all three -- it is already clear that the potential
market is huge. Education and training is a $2 trillion market
worldwide, according to a July 2003 report by eMarketer, an Internet and
e-business consultant group. The Japanese government predicts e-learning
will balloon from an $800 million market in 2003 to $1.9 billion by
2006.
But, Smith Lewis acknowledges, the need for the classroom environment
isn't about to disappear.
"The big mistake is trying to import the classroom experience to
different platforms -- that's not going to work. You have to figure out,
what are the tasks that can be accomplished given the parameters of the
computer? Mobile learning isn't a substitute for a great teacher or a
great class experience."
Instead, mobile phones may find a recognized place in the schoolrooms
here in Japan -- as well as abroad.
"I think in 10 years or so we may see that, rather than cell phones
being banned in classrooms, they will be required, as was once the case
with slide rules and is now the case for calculators," says Cerego's
Joseph. "I expect many teachers to be distributing material over the
wire, and polling students in the class to see how they are progressing.
"Students themselves will increasingly use their cell phone or other
wireless device as a tool that they couldn't go to school without."
--------------------
Received on Fri Apr 30 17:21:36 2004