ELI Webinar | From Standardized to Personalized: A Trajectory for Mobile Learning

Special Guest

Dr. William Rankin
Director of Educational Innovation
ACU

William Rankin is a professor of English and director of educational innovation at Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas. With colleagues, he helped design ACU Connected, ACU’s initiative that gave every student an iPhone or iPod touch as a platform for exploring next-wave mobile learning. As part of this initiative, Rankin has worked on everything from defining pedagogical approaches to designing interface elements, and along with others on ACU's team, he continues to work to discover and create new ways to engage learners through emerging technologies.

Summary

Join the ELI’s Malcolm Brown, director, and Veronica Diaz, associate director, as they moderate this webinar with William Rankin. For almost five centuries, our educational structures and practices have been shaped by a particular relationship between people and information that emerged from the technologies of printing and print culture. Yet as that culture is transformed by emerging technologies such as mobility, pervasive connectivity, and digital texts, our relationship with information is changing radically, and our approaches to teaching and learning will have to change as well. Five years ago, faculty and technologists at Abilene Christian University began an experimental program based around an emerging generation of new media devices designed to understand how a highly personal relationship with information—pervasive and asynchronous access, social networks, personal media collections, and flexible digital media, including next-generation e-books —would impact higher education. What they're discovering is encouraging them to push the boundaries even further. In this presentation, you'll discover some of their reasons for exploring mobility and other emerging technologies, some principles they've discovered for reimagining and restructuring the classroom, and some of the results they've discovered as they work toward the future of teaching and learning.

Additional Resources

• ACU Connected