“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said, ‘faster horses.’” –Henry Ford

Marisa is on a mission. She is passionate about integrating emerging technologies in learning. At TCC 2012, she dazzled her audience with a presentation on Augmented Reality. This year she followed up with her culminating Master’s research project on enriching the mobile learning experience.

Entitled “’Talking is the new Typing’: Challenging Smartphone Users to Dictate Instead of Type in Order to Enrich the Mobile Learning Experience,” Marisa’s 20-minute presentation was a treat for the curious minds and for the eye. Her slides were beautiful, engaging, and meticulously crafted to tell her story. And Marisa’s study was full of compelling reasons for using speech-to-text technology in smartphones for learning.

Did you know that

• 94% of adults 16 and older use mobile phones.

• In 2012, 54.9% of adults reported owning a smartphone.

• Access to the Internet from a smartphone has surpassed access from laptops & PC.

• 6 million students are learning online and the number is growing.

Figure 1. A smartphone in 2013 is equivalent to all the devices you see on the left.

Marisa created a totally-mobile learning module from scratch. I’m guessing that she spent many hours designing and coding to create the iPhone learning module. Dr. Peter Leong said, “The mobile learning module is very engaging. I encourage people to check it out.” You can download Marisa’s module on your iPhone from http://tinyurl.com/s2tmodule.

After going through the module, the participants reported being motivated to use speech-to-text app in the future, feeling more confident with dictating over typing, and seeing the benefits of using speech-to-text app instead of using keypad. When others might have suggested making bigger keyboards or bigger screens on a mobile phone, Marisa “really wanted to change the participants’ attitude toward using dictation…to motivate them to feel comfortable…” I love her forward-thinking.

Presenter: Marisa Yamada

e-mail: myamada@hawaii.edu

Twitter: @marisaETEC