Reading through the H807 case studies – the course materials require me tomake blog entries.

The one I’ve just read is ‘Any time, any place learning: Multimedia learning with mobile phones’. It’s based on an initiative at City College, Southampton.

They provide ESOL students with whizzy mobile phones which have camera and PDA abilities.

Then eg the lecturers upload an image such as a map of the college campus and create zones within it. Learners work in pairs to send images and messages from each zone, and a composite picture is built up.

This is to help students integrate and to help them develop linguistically. As the course goes on they can be asked to do more grammatically complex things and to find out information and answer questions.

There’s a claim that learners are practising ‘grammar, idiom and pronunciation’. I’m not quite sure how this works. They get to record audio files, but there doesn’t seem to be much talking going on.

I must say, I’d be wary about teaching people English in an environment which requires a lot of texting. Is there not a danger of developing some bizarre Pidgin English style based on learning the language via text messages?

It does sound good fun, though, and I think I’d enjoy learning a foreign language in this way. They don’t say what happens if you come from a background that uses a different character set.