Mobile

• Improving levels of adult and youth literacy: how mobile technologies can support literacy development and increase reading opportunities
• Improving the quality of education: how mobile technologies can support teachers and their professional development
• Achieving gender parity and equality in education: how mobile technologies can support equal access to and achievement in basic education of good quality for all, in particular for women and girls

MLW 2013 will consist of the following events:

• Symposium on Mobile Learning (open)
  18-19 February, Paris
  This two-day conference constitutes the backbone of the MLW and will feature keynote speakers, demonstrations of mobile content and technology, and thematic breakout sessions.

• Senior Policy Makers' Forum (invitation only)
  20 February, Paris
  UNESCO, in partnership with the GSMA, will host an invitation-only meeting of high-level government officials to discuss issues relating to mobile learning and policy.

• MLW Webinar (open)
  21-22 February, virtual
  The Webinar will allow people outside Paris to discuss topics related to mobile learning. It will be moderated by leading thinkers in the field of ICT in education. Selected mobile experts will present their projects and will field real time questions from online participants.

Officials from Ministries of Education, international experts and practitioners in mobile learning, as well as representatives from major partners in the field will share innovative ways of learning with, and through, mobile technologies, and how they can be used to achieve the Education for All goals and improve the quality of education.

eLearning refers to on-line learning delivered over the World Wide Web via the public Internet or the private, corporate intranet. The conference is intended to provide an overview of technologies, approaches, and trends that are happening right now. The constraints of e-learning are diminishing and options are increasing as the Web becomes increasingly easy to use and the technology becomes better and less expensive.

As the ease of execution increases, more and more institutions are discovering the benefits of delivering training via the Web. Interest in e-learning is at an all-time high, and the workshop wants to serve as a stimulus to accelerate collaboration and dialog among the e-learning providers, trainers, IT researchers and the lifelong, self-directed learners. Such business trends as an increased global economy, the pressures for rapid development, and the necessity of teamwork are shaping the present state and the future of eLearning.

Employees are increasingly aware that they must continue to update and advance their skills if they want to understand the state-of-the-art technologies and remain valuable to their organizations. This means that learners will be more and more self-directed, and they will want access to what they need when they need it. The Internet based educational materials and the e-learning providers have to meet this demand.

The conference focuses on the latest trends in e-learning and also on the latest IT technology alternatives that are poised to become mainstream strategies in the near future and will influence the e-learning environment. Ubiquitous systems proliferate quickly due to the latest achievements in the industry of telecommunications, electronics, wireless, and economical globalization.

Wireless and mobility allow any user to timely use resources using various access technologies under (assumed) secured and guaranteed privacy. The family of the mobile devices expand dramatically, allowing a user to have a portable office everywhere, every time. Mobile learning became a fact, due to the technical accessibility and Internet communications. Many online classes, learning systems, university curricula, remote education, and virtual training classes are now part of the corporate education and use.

Progress is made in user modeling and adaptive learning models. The generalization of successful practices on mobile learning is favored by many national and international projects and policy synchronization boards. Adaptation implies also the use of the classical methods, still in use and useful in some contexts and for some categories of users. Hybrid learning is an increasing trend in education today. The traditional classroom learning has been historically proven beneficial. Hybrid learning is rather a series of different learning strategies going from teacher-centric to student-centric. This improves the critical thinking, creativity, self-management, self-study, and advance problem solving thinking of the student.

We solicit both academic, research, and industrial contributions. We welcome technical papers presenting research and practical results, position papers addressing the pros and cons of specific proposals, such as those being discussed in the standard fora or in industry consortia, survey papers addressing the key problems and solutions on any of the above topics short papers on work in progress, and panel proposals.

Industrial presentations are not subject to the format and content constraints of regular submissions. We expect short and long presentations that express industrial position and status.

Tutorials on specific related topics and panels on challenging areas are encouraged.

The topics suggested by the conference can be discussed in term of concepts, state of the art, research, standards, implementations, running experiments, applications, and industrial case studies. Authors are invited to submit complete unpublished papers, which are not under review in any other conference or journal in the following, but not limited to, topic areas.

All topics and submission formats are open to both research and industry contributions. You can check them all here.

The morning will start with an interactive session in which participants will exchange experiences on mobile apps in primary education processes. Marcus Specht, Professor for advanced learning technologies at CELSTEC, will discuss the trends regarding Mobile Learning. Then, Oscar Buma (Ipad project, Utrecht University) will discuss recent literature studies on Mobile Learning. In the afternoon in the Medialab, employees of CELSTEC will demonstrate some recent developed and applications for mobile technology.