After some initial competing over providing educational laptops the technology Web log 'Good Morning Silicon Valley' writes "that apparently the craziness is over. Intel announced today that it would join the board of the OLPC project and kick in money and expertise". (read)

NewswireToday reports that "The UK's largest-scale exercise in mobile education to date is helping 9,000 students throughout Yorkshire to assess their own competencies via their phones and related handheld devices"(newswire - St Albans, Herts, United Kingdom, 07/10/2007). (read)

PRNewswire reports (ATLANTA, June 25) that Nokia and the Pearson Foundation have announced two significant expansions of their Mobile Learning Institute program: "The Mobile Learning Institute Leadership Network and the Digital Arts Alliance Leadership Institute." (read)

The conference aims to promote the development of eLearning and mLearning in the Middle East, provides a forum for education and knowledge transfer and encourages the implementation of mobile applications in teaching and learning. (read)

The aim of this workshop is to engage researchers from a variety of disciplines to discuss new methods and techniques for studying the use of technology in a mobile context. We encourage the submission of short papers on a variety of projects. The workshop will be structured around a these papers with plenty of time for discussion and debate. Issues that are suggested in the call for papers are:

· The recruitment and retention of participants
· Ethical and Intellectual Property issues arising from research involving a cohort of participants
· Appropriating new or existing technologies for new forms of data collection
· Optimising data quality from a cohort of participants
· Opportunities and costs of sustained interventions
(read)

The OLPC project is one of the projects we are following closely in the mlearning SIG. This is the third video documentary available from Red Hat Magazine about OLPC. (read)

The 5th International Conference on Wireless,Mobile and Ubiquitous Technologies in Education (WMUTE2008), to be held in Beijing, will be a prestigious and high quality international conference that establishes a forum for a scholarly exchange and interaction in employing the use of wireless,mobile and ubiquitous technologies in education. (read)

This is a workshop in conjunction with ICCE 2007 (http://www.icce2007.info). The theme for the workshop will be "Design and Experiments of Mobile and Ubiquitous Learning Environments (MULEs)". (read)

A series of some really nice videos of the 'green machine' are available from the Red Hat Magazine. In these videos you will among other matters be introduced to the team behind the OLPC including the ideas behind the project. (read)

Chip-maker Intel "should be ashamed of itself" for efforts to undermine the $100 laptop initiative, according to its founder Nicholas Negroponte. (read)

There's been discussion in the media over the past months about concerns over Wi-Fi and other wireless technologies in schools. The BBC have joined the debate with a 30 minute Panorama documentary in the UK on Monday 21st May. Dr William Stewart, Chairman of the UK Health Protection Agency is reported to have called for a review into the health risks of using Wi-Fi in schools after the Panorama programme-makers measured signal strength from a laptop that was three times higher than a typical phone mast. (read)

“After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement — none,” said Mark Lawson, the school board president here in Liverpool, one of the first districts in New York State to experiment with putting technology directly into students’ hands. “The teachers were telling us when there’s a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational process.” (read)

3iMobile has announced the introduction, in France and several other European countries, of a new method teaching English using a 3G/UMTS Video phone combining interactive self-study lessons with live English tutoring by native speaking instructors in New York. (read)

Last week CBCNEWS Canada Toronto reported that "Toronto District School Board trustees voted overwhelmingly in favour of a motion to force students to turn off their cellphones and other personal electronic devices such as BlackBerrys." This is bad news for productive use of personal computational devices in education and is a view we as a community need to be aware of. (read)

The PI (Personal Inquiry) project is a new joint project between the University of Nottingham and the Open University. In this Australian PC World magazine article, "Ultramobile PCs to lead in 21st century science education", you can read about the aim of the projects including short about it's 'scripted inquiry learning' approach. (read)

Recently TI has demonstrated a projector that fits into a mobile phone. The mobile phone is slightly larger than a normal mobile phone, but this is existing news with regard to the development of larger mobile displays. (read)

Arstechnica reports that Quanta, the company manufacturing the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)
project's XO laptops, plans to begin selling low-cost budget mobile computers for $200 later this year. (read)

This special issue deals with the techniques and pedagogies for personalized, adaptive and intelligent m-learning, and aims to include issues that cross the boundaries of software engineering, artificial intelligence, and information systems to bring solutions in m-learning context. This collection will serve as a forum for researchers and practitioners to discuss the state-of-the-art, present their contributions and set future directions in information and service personalization for mobile learning. (read)

This conference, hosted by The Open University in partnership with Athabasca University, aims to explore and share work carried out in libraries around the world to deliver services and resources to users ‘on the move,’ via a growing plethora of mobile devices. (read)

The "Big Issues in Mobile Learning" report has now been published. The report is edited by Mike Sharples and contains chapters from 8 collaborative sessions organised around important and emergent topics of mobile learning.

A limited number of printed copies are available and will be sent to those who first send their personal profile (postal address, email, affiliation, description of your mobile learning interests, and a photo) to rune.baggetun AT intermedia.uib.no.

(read)

The new website for the SIG has been launched. It will collate an extensive resource of news, documents, projects and provide a forum for researchers with an interest in research into mobile, contextual and ambient learning across Europe and beyond.
(read)

On New Years’ Day I had the good fortune to travel in a new Boeing 777-300ER commissioned by Singapore Airlines. The 13 hour flight gave me plenty of time to explore the latest design and technology developments. (read)