www.acu.edu /connected
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Faculty, staff and students pose for the camera after wrapping filming in one of the video’s final classroom scenes.
teams. However, several of these novel and prospective uses for the new generation of highly mobile, converged computing devices have since become reality. “One strength of incorporating mobility at ACU has been putting educators and developers in the same room,” says Dr. William Rankin, associate professor of English and director of educational innovation. The chance to work together in producing the Connected video yielded benefits for each group – faculty, students and developers alike.” The video has been viewed more than 107,000 times by visitors to the university’s Web site. Videos about mobile learning at ACU have been viewed or downloaded more than 177,000 times since late February 2008. Q A 32-inch flat screen monitor at the entrance to the Adams Center for Teaching and Learning shows the locations around the globe where people are viewing the university’s Web site. The larger the red circles, the more people who are online. This Google Map graphic represents the traffic generated in one hour – 10-11 a.m. CST on Feb. 28, 2008 – as people downloaded the Connected video on the day the mobile-learning initiative was announced.
2007
ACU’s Connected mobile-learning initiative is the product of a decade of research and experimentation. In Fall 1999, ACU began evaluation of mobile learning by providing IBM laptops to a freshman learning community led by Dr. Paul Lakey, Sherry Rankin, and Randy Daughtory. Later that academic year, Dr. Terry Pope began evaluation of mobile computing in an upper-division course. Though promising, the technology wasn’t quite ready. Over the following years, teams of technologists, faculty, and students – led by George Saltsman and others – continued evaluation of laptops, PDAs and cellphones. Each successive generation of technology presented more promise, and ACU gained an increasingly informed understanding of the potential of mobile learning. When the iPhone was announced in January 2007, discussions of mobile learning reached a crescendo. The time to act was at hand.
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n Jan. 23, 2008, ACU premiered Connected, a 15-minute film showcasing a compelling and futuristic vision of how mobile learning could transform higher education. The HD film, written and produced entirely by Abilene Christian students, faculty and staff, and featuring ACU students and faculty as actors, follows a freshman through her first two days on a college campus. She watches and participates as converged mobile devices such as the iPhone are leveraged to build student community, augment educational rigor and innovation and simplify day-to-day tasks. At the time, many of the applications portrayed in the film were fictional, based on ideas being developed by ACU’s faculty and staff research
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Mobile-learning History at ACU 14
Connected video put a face on ACU’s initiative
The first meeting for what will become ACU’s mobile-learning initiative takes place in the Adams Center.
A recommendation for building a mobile-learning initiative based on Apple’s iPhone is first presented to ACU’s LINK team for consideration.
April 18, 2007
May 2, 2007