e-learning through mobil telephone platforms

Can't resist posting my own experience of an Acer Aspire that's now in the dustbin. Cheap? 900 euros. Good? Within a month I started getting very painful static shocks off it that made the programs jump all over the place. Next came the keys dropping off. The space bar never worked properly anyway. Final pleasure? The motherboard irretrievably broke down. Aftersales and guarantee? I beg your pardon !! What aftersales? The shop refused to even take it back. Mr. Acer I will NEVER buy another piece of your rubbish again. Now I have a Japanese laptop and it works perfectly and it goes without saying that I have never received an electric shock off it. If Acer now want to flog "cheap" so-called laptops can I suggest they take a course in basic electronics first? You know "How to avoid electricuting the customer"
Lindsay Fraser.

Short Term Memory is our selective memory filter. It holds roughly 9 elements of information in 6 second sweeps. Anything that is not "personally important" to us, is not processed up the memory chain. If you imagine a building you see every day, and were suddenly asked to draw a picture of it, and then compared your picture with the real building, you would notice that your memory drawing was a representation of the building with features that had made an impression on you. We could not possibly remember every brick and crack. So memory is a bottom up & top down selective event. It is also associative. When we remember something, connective (neuronal chemical) pathways are created that will "recognise" related new material later. The feature of STM is that it is a limited-capacity filter and it can easily go wrong. The cause of disfunction can be broadly divided into two categories. 1) Psychological e.g. distraction and 2) Neurological damage. V e r y !! briefly, we could use computers, theoretically, to help in a number of ways. In psychological problems of e.g. trauma, the trauma needs to be resolved through psychotherapy, before memory is likely to recover and there is not much a computer can do there, because computers cannot "feel" pain, but where memory strategy is involved, a lot could be done. A computer program could be devised to teach people how to maximise their STM processing. For example, people often ask me "Hey, I just never remember where I have left my mobile phone !! I am always losing the damn thing !! What can I do about that?" Surprisingly, the answer is very simple. STM needs a reason to remember and so if you give it some work to do, it should work much better. Remember all within just 6 seconds !! Also note the system is associative, so if you develop the habit of associating the grain of wood, the texture of the plastic at the moment you put the phone down somewhere, STM will pass that information up the chain, because the act of association gives it a reason to do so. Later, you might feel your mind completely blank when looking for the phone, but a millisecond later, the textual clue comes flooding down and you know you put the phone on wood etc. And the only piece of wood around is ... Ah !! Found it !! See if you can think of how a computer program might teach us this strategy in practice. The idea is to make us do this rapid association very quickly, so that it becomes automatic behaviour. I'll leave you with another thought. Neurological damage. It is well known now that other parts of the brain can be "taught" to partially do the work the damaged part cannot do. Visual STM is not the only "STM" mechanism. See if you can think of how a computer might teach someone how to "maximise" acoustic STM to help someone who cannot visually process memory selection.