Category Archives: Mobile learning

Decline of the PDA?

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Some good commentary this week from Russell in The PDA is Dead, Long Live the Smartphone.

Latest from Gartner is that Smartphone sales are soaring, eagle-like, into the ether, with an increase in sales of 75%. During the same period, PDA sales barely rose 5%, with Palm not even bothering to launch a new model in 2006 at all. Their renewed focus on the Treo sends out its own message that it really is Game Over for this sector. The smartphone sector is now 4 times as big as PDAs and this trend will now accelerate to the extinction of PDAs as a category.

Certainly, if you live in the US (or certainly Canada,) you could be excused for thinking that Blackberrys and Treos are the only PDAs around. But when you speak to educators, follow educational technology trends or visit certain other parts of the world—it’s a different story. (I only know South East Asia. I’d love to hear about PDA use in BRIC nations, Africa and the Middle East if anyone has some data handy.) Walking around Bangkok, I see lots of people everyday sitting in public places using PDAs. And by ‘using’ I mean everything from making voice calls to doing homework with friends, having meetings with colleagues or or surfing on a bench in front of a known wi-fi hotspot. There’s also lots of choice here. I bought a lower-end HP last week but there are also Dopods, O2s, iMates, Lenovos, Asus, Gigabytes (from Taiwan—very interesting product line) Samsungs, Fujitsu-Siemens, the odd smaller regional brand as well as the obligatory hybrid devices like the Treo, Blackberry, Sony Ericsson’s P990i and Nokia E series. Last time I was in Malaysia and Singapore, it was about the same. Lots of models, lots of usage on the street.

Still—call it a smartphone, PDA, Ultra Mobile PC, hybrid or something else—what we really need is a device that fills the space the PDA occupied (assuming you agree it is at risk of extinction.) The educational community continues to buy PDAs by the thousands all over the world because they’re super flexible and therefore make the most sense in a learning context. And—whether you believe education is a viable market segment or not—it’s that very combination of features that educators and students find useful that make me wonder if the PDA is going anywhere at all—or if bigger, better smartphones are really the alternative.

The average PDA feature list can be daunting compared to the average smartphone: (especially in my opinion the first 3)

  • Hackable O/S: By this I simply mean that there is the ability to create and distribute applications for the device without affiliation with the OEM or an operator. Huge advantage when compared to the overall smartphone category at the moment.
  • Less Fragmentation: Whether you care for Microsoft or not, the fact that many PDAs now use the Pocket PC platform is a huge plus. (Pocket PC had about 52% market share in 2006 followed by 22% for RIM and 13% for the soon to be Linux PalmSource/Access OS.) Screen sizes are also pretty consistent as are input mechanisms.
  • Application EcoSystem: I’m always amazed at the sheer number and variety of applications available for the PDA. Some are ‘mom and pop’, others more sophisticated but you have so much choice compared to smartphone applications.
  • Large and/or VGA screen, touch screen and stylus: Making usage much easier and providing more options for developers when creating UI and interaction widgets. Also makes the device more usable in certain accessibility scenarios (though potentially less usable if manual dexterity is an issue.)
  • Navi-Pad: All the PDAs i’ve seen lately have one of these too which allows for backup stylus-less interaction when needed and can be useful when playing games.
  • Off the rack memory card: Never mind all the reduced-reduced sized MMC cards and ever changing formats. Most PDAs still seem to take SD cards.
  • Bluetooth: Now fairly common.
  • Wi-fi and browser: I have the pre-installed Windows browser and also downloaded Opera. The wi-fi is easy to connect to and also allows for use of IM and VOIP clients.
  • Media Players: Not an expert here but most PDAs can play video, audio (often also record audio) and some flavour of Flash content. There’s also SVG support in some browsers.
  • Common Document Support: Multiple versions of Office document readers, PowerPoint viewers, Acrobat PDF, Piscel, E-Book readers. Some are proprietary but the ability to transfer and make meaningful use of documents is quite high.
  • Keyboard and Text Input: On screen QWERTY equivalents, dockable or Bluetooth keyboard. Also ‘graffiti’ style handwriting recognition on many devices.
  • Built-In Telephony: Not all PDAs have this of course but many do, and not having to be tied to an operator can sometimes be a good thing :-)
  • Camera/Video Capabilities: Here again, not available across the board.
  • Data Synchronization: I find this a blessing and a curse but many people love it and it certainly can be useful in business and learning scenarios where the PDA is used during the day—in lieu of a laptop—then synched up at night.
  • Decent Battery: Ok, I know this is one of the criticisms but they have improved and i’m guessing some of the high end smartphones are no better when used for video and the like.

[FYI-Gartner defines a PDA as a "data-centric handheld computer weighing less than one pound that is primarily designed for use with both hands. These devices use an open market operating system supported by third-party applications that can be added into the device by end users. They offer instant on/off capability and synchronization of files with a PC. A PDA may offer WAN support for voice, but these are data-first, voice-second devices. Smartphones offer all the attributes of a PDA, except that smartphones are voice-centric and are designed for primarily a one-handed operation."]

So of course ‘hybrid’ and ‘convergence’ enthusiasts will proclaim that we can cram all this stuff into a smartphone and maybe we can (or already have)—but should we?

For every person who staunchly says “I only want one device” I still see lots of people still carrying a phone + a separate mp3 player, a PDA, a laptop, an Game Boy—or yet another phone. Part of that choice is likely economics but the remainder is often a personal choice to use (and choose) a device that helps you do something you like to do, does this well—and makes you feel good doing it. Even hybrid devices, are still designed to fill some sort of consumer niche!

When you look at the some of the more sought after smartphones, it’s pretty clear that somewhere along the way, the OEM decided they were making a niche device—be it media (N Series), business (E Series, Q,) fashion (Razr, L’Amour,) gaming (NGage) etc. Of course the telephony part is a given since it is after all a phone. But once you get past that—it’s probably lifestyle and productivity features (be they work or play) that actually sell the phone.

It’s about user wants & needs. They don’t have to carry all devices at all times—they can pick & choose, just as most of us do now. I make a decision about which of my 2 main phones, my PC, my iPod or my digital camera to carry. Sometimes I take one device, sometimes four or five. Sometimes none.

Plus you’re missing the core consumer argument that people like having more stuff.

In product markets, divergence is almost always more important than convergence. I bet most people have more electrical items in their kitchens now than 30 years ago, despite washers & driers “converging” in many cases. Convergence has occurred in basic enablers: common electricity & water supply, and scale economies in motors, controllers & other components. It hasn’t occurred at a product level – my microwave, dishwasher, and, yes, toaster again are not integrated. It’s possible, but there’s no demand. And this is despite the huge increase in house prices which should put a premium on compactness to fit appliances in a smaller kitchen. [Dean Bubley, via Forum Oxford on a well debated similar topic]

Plus, for every additional lifestyle feature you enable an effort to make a truly ‘all purpose device,’ (qwerty keyboard, gaming control, larger screen, high end video) the less useable or practical the phone may end up being for its primary purpose—being a phone. (Remember the original NGage ‘taco’ phone :-) By comparison, the PDA is already pretty good at what it’s trying to do. And with wireless connectivity one may argue that many PDAs don’t really need to be phones anyhow. (Certainly in the case of the educational community—having to activate hundreds of SIMs, negotiate group plans and keep track of data usage is a growing problem. Lots easier to get a slightly cheaper PDA, use the extra cash to buy more memory and peripherals, then take advantage of VOIP and wi-fi to communicate.)

In some ways, the PDA is at a turning point. It may evolve into a smartphone niche device or simply remain a PDA (one that sometimes includes telephony features.) What may likely tell the tale is the PDA users themselves. The same person who now chooses a PDA for what it does best will still want—and expect—its smartphone successor to offer the same features and flexibility—some of which smartphones can’t currently offer! And as a niche smartphone device, will it really begin address the needs of some of its current sub-niche groups as certain PDAs do?

If not, I bet there will be a lot of people walking around grumbling about the ‘good old days’ of the PDA :-)

Nokia, Youth, and ICT

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“Nokia and international children’s organisation, Plan (formerly Foster Parents’ Plan), have joined forces to use modern communications technologies in Africa to raise children’s awareness of their rights and opportunities. Nokia has provided an initial donation of 1 million Euros for 2006. The first stage of this new joint effort will see Nokia focus on supporting Plan’s existing media and communications technology projects for Africa’s children and youth.” [via Mobile Africa]

More about Plan’s media and communications programs can be found on their site. The existing programs seem to mostly focus on children producing radio programs for local broadcast:

Africa – Rights of the Child in Malawi
Radio program in Malawi, in partnership with Malawi Broadcasting Corp and funded by UNICEF. Children produce radio shows about their rights.

Asia – Agami | “Future” in Bangladesh
Weekly television show in Bangladesh broadcast by BTV, the national public network. Children host the shows and talk about issues relevant to their lives. The show reaches millions of viewers.

Asia – Children’s voice in Nepal
The radio project produced and broadcast in Nepal has involved more than 100 children. The show aims to promote child rights and child participation.

Adding mobiles with video, audio and moblogging capabilities to all this would certainly enhance the content creation capabilities and lead to all sorts of interesting roving child journalist programs. I ran into an example (PDF) of a similar project a while back from India via Nokia’s New Horizon’s Newsletter. The project offered students a 7610 cameraphone along with a copy of Life Blog to allow them to creatively record aspects of their community engagement.

Their assignments were aimed at fostering the self-directed, collaborative approach to learning that is often lacking in Indian schools. The most significant benefit of the Learning Lab Initiative for students, says Mr Sood, is that it offers them a hitherto unavailable chance to learn by expressing themselves creatively.

You can subscribe to the newsletter on this page (beware, it’s a paper copy sent by mail. A PDF is also available if you hunt for it.)

I also ran into the related Nokia Community Involvement section which outlines other similar projects, case studies and success stories involving youth in emerging markets.

Mobile Learning Reading List Part 2

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After a far too long hiatus i’m back (from Bangkok!—more on that very soon.) So for starters, a bunch of new mobile learning material :-)

Mobile Learning on the Cheap

Lots of good ideas here that range from how to use PDAs in the classroom to SMS based activities.

Mobile and Media Literacy

Equitycampaign—out of the UK is an initiative that hopes to decrease the digital divide in the EU. Not specifically mobile focused but some of their rationale can easily be applied to justify mobile learning and i’m sure there will be some mobile components in all of this.

In essence, the digital divide is the difference in access to learning resources that modern technology offers young people, usually a working computer and an Internet connection. While our schools are better equipped than ever before, the variation in the quality of learning that takes place at home is huge. And as children only spend 15% of their lives at school, the learning that takes place at home is extremely important to their future success.

Technology offers us a unique opportunity to extend learning support beyond the classroom, something that has proved impossible to do until now. But the digital divide means that millions of children are currently denied this help.

On a somewhat related note, the European Centre for Media Literacy (ECML) was a 24 month program from 2004-2006 with the following objectives:

With media technology becoming so prevalent in homes, and with multi-media education more possible now with student access to computers and the Internet, “media literacy” expands the basic concept of literacy (i.e. “reading” and “writing”) to all forms of communication – from television to T-shirts, from billboards to multi-media environments. ECML project would like to help stakeholders to understand why teaching media literacy is so important and give students new education tools.

And finally, an ambitious Mobile Content Education campaign from the Australian Interactive Media Association:

…with increased sophistication, comes an increased burden on the consumer to understand, interact with, and consume mobile content. Recent reports such as the Australian Mobile Phone Lifestyle Index, international research and much consumer feedback shows that only a relatively small group of early adopters are engaging with mobile content. Early experiences with mobile content—good or bad, will spread quickly via word of mouth. We need to ensure that consumers overwhelmingly have positive experiences with mobile content—and tell their friends!

…The AIMIA Mobile Content Industry Development Group is inviting mobile content companies to join with operators, content providers, trade associations and handset manufacturers in developing a cross-industry national education campaign focusing on:

  • What is mobile content?
  • Why engage with mobile content?
  • How much does it cost?
  • How do I get it?
  • What do I do if I have a problem?

The campaign is envisaged to include television advertising, in-store brochures, web site and a mobile site and will be ‘owned’ by the industry as a whole.

Lowest Common Denominator

Leonard Low with another great post pondering what it will take to make the mobile web truly useful—not only in education—but to the masses.

In my research into best practices for designing mobile learning, I’ve recently come across a number of sources that advocate, strongly, that a LCD (Least/Lowest Common Denominator) approach to designing mobile experiences is a bad thing….An LCD approach to interface/activity design is one that caters for the widest range of platforms by creating a single, non-adaptive document designed to be viewable on the most basic and least functional of those platforms. The currently prevailing philosophy regarding resource generation for the mobile web is that documents should be designed to exploit the functionality of any platform on which they render, to maximise the user’s viewing experience. This view is strongly advocated by leading mobile web commentators, researchers and academics, and indeed, the W3C itself through its Mobile Web Best Practice standard and MobileOK project:….My feeling is that web content design guidelines used to be centred around avoiding problems; current mobile content design guidelines are centred around maximising user experiences. Both perspectives have pros and cons – what do you think?

This on the heels of a recent announcement by the W3C of a workshop on the Mobile Web in Developing Countries. Mobile learning is such an obvious fit for many emerging nations as larger numbers of the population have mobiles compared to PCs. That said—content creation for mobile is still relatively difficult and for this reason, many mobile learning initiatives still focus on PDAs rather than handsets. With inexpensive or free applications like mobile Word, Excel and Power Point, a good PDA with memory card and wi-fi can easily be incorporated into both lesson planning and student generated mobile activities. As for mobile web on PDA, it seems to be limited to surfing and i’ve yet to hear of any projects willing to take the leap into actual content creation via XHTML and CSS for the browser environment—possibly because it’s still too difficult and/or unpredictable in its results.

Wildlife in the Field

A lovely example of fun, simple practical mobile learning from the UK. WildKey is an interactive identification program that enables pupils to take ICT beyond the normal limits of the classroom and identify and record species in the field.

Using simple prompts and images, pupils of all ages (KS 2-4) can quickly learn to identify species and record their sightings. When collated in a systematic manner, yearly data provide a picture of how climate change may be affecting British wildlife. This enables pupils to understand why classification is important and allows schools to combine data with remote partners. WildKey thus has applications in both the Science and ICT subjects of the Curriculum.

Presentations

Lots of eLearning and educational technology groups are starting to discuss mobile learning as part of their offering. This recording from an American conference (I can’t figure out what this is from as I only bookmarked the mp3 file) discusses examples of pilot programs from nursing colleges and the military. Also “Learning for a New Information Society” by David Metcalfe from the Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning provides examples of recent projects as well as some great commentary on the benefits of mobile learning.

Development

I always enjoy finding practical material for teachers and developers. First, an article outlining guidelines for development of Flash applications for the Pocket PC. The article provides a nice mix of information including a primer on Flash vs Java, vector vs bitmap (always a popular subject for beginners :-) as well as a fairly in depth tutorial.

On a related note, I ran into these Pocket PC User Interface guidelines from Microsoft and of course the recent announcement of new Flash Lite 2.1 support for Windows Mobile 5.

“Paper Prototyping in a Design Framework for Professional Mobile Learning” (PDF) describes the advantages of paper prototyping in the development process and offers some basic guidelines useful in the development of learning materials.

“Prototyping mobile device screens with sticky notes is an extension of paper and pencil prototyping methods, so the same core activities apply to design workshops using this technique, namely: (1) identifying needs and establishing requirements, (2) developing alternative designs that meet those requirements, (3) building a conceptual design, (4) path determination, (5) accommodating for user error, and (6) prototype….”

We’ve recently taken to using pads of yellow 3M stickies when prototyping for the small screen. The small size of the paper forces you to think small and the ability to move the papers around yet have them stay put for later is really handy.

And finally, “Developing Courseware for Mobile Devices“—part of a larger series of presentations from the Asian Development Bank Institute—provides usability and content related guidelines useful in the development of mobile learning objects.

Non Literacy and Mobile Communication

Understanding Non-Literacy as a Barrier to Mobile Phone Communication is an excellent article by Jan Chipchase outlining the challenges and techniques devised by illiterate consumers who own or use mobile devices.

Two basic tasks were easy for almost all our participants to complete: turning on the phone and answering an incoming call. Beyond this, there were various degrees of success. Dialing a local phone number is relatively easy, but problems can occur when there are variations such as dialing a national or international number, or using IP telephone prefixes. Dialing an incorrect number may require starting from the beginning of the task since the cancel button is not always understood.

Our hypothesis is that once the non-literate user has learned how to make and receive phone calls to their close circle of contacts, their primary reason for owning a mobile phone has largely been met. There is, therefore, less motivation to spend additional time rote learning other features on the phone, unless someone can proactively demonstrate the worth of the features, and spends the time to teach them the steps required to complete the task.

Phone features that require text editing such as creating a contact, saving a text message, and creating a text message present too great a barrier to use.

Enjoy!

Computer and Handset Literacy Checklist

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I’ve been trying to formulate a reasonably plausible handset literacy checklist to inform some upcoming projects. Since a handset is the closest many people will come to owning a personal computer and may be used to accomplish similar tasks, I thought i’d start with a list for computer literacy and see how they compare.

Computer Literacy

My list…in no particular order…

  1. Use of input device: Mouse, keyboard etc.
  2. Knowledge of working parts: This may sound silly but I still know lots of people who think the computer monitor is the actual computer. What they think the CPU is for is anybody’s guess. So this includes knowing how to turn the computer on, what each part does, how to restart etc.
  3. Knowledge of basic peripherals: Mostly a printer but possibly an external drive, Flash memory, thumb drive etc.
  4. File structure: Folders, directories, understanding where stuff lives on your drive(s), how to keep things organized.
  5. Menu system: How to find, install or uninstall an application, create shortcuts etc.
  6. Common UI elements, navigational elements and widgets: Discovering cues that define interactivity (ex. windows that are resizable or dragable,) closing or docking a window, menu or toolbar, scrolling, toggling, using sliders, understanding tabs and their relationship to content etc.
  7. Saving, Cut, Copy, Paste: Saving something somewhere then knowing how to find it again (!!), understanding the difference between save and ‘save as.’ Understanding how to duplicate and move data around.
  8. Data transfer: Getting stuff on and off your computer via email, USB, floppy, burning a CD, Bluetooth, maybe even FTP.
  9. Communication: How to use email, IM, VOIP, web mail etc. A few years ago this might have been considered a separate set of skills but I think they’re now just standard computer literacy requirements.
  10. Internet use and internet literacy: What is a browser? How does it work? What is a search engine? A blog? Also speaks to information literacy. How to search , how to evaluate search results, how to determine if a web site is a valid or reliable source of information (Wikipedia? blog? news portal?).
  11. Safety: Avoiding spam, viruses, staying safe on IM, blogs and in chatrooms, applying parental filters, safe online shopping etc.
  12. Etiquette: How to write a proper business email, how to comment or post to a list, how to use emoticons but also, how to use a laptop at meetings (how NOT to check mail and IM three different people while talking to a client :-) Is it proper to blog while listening to a speaker at a conference?
  13. Self-reliance, personalization, respect for the device, ability to troubleshoot: May be best illustrated with a story: Once upon a time my job was (amongst other things) to provide tech support for a small office of media sales people who spent their days on the computer inputting media data, cpm numbers etc. One day, a coworker called me complaining there was a CD ROM was stuck in her desktop computer drive. When I asked if she had tried re-starting her computer, she said yes and proceeded to flick her monitor on and off saying “See, it doesn’t help.” That was when I discovered that her computer had been on for several years as all she did each night was shut the monitor off. For arguments’ sake I then asked if she had tried anything else. She then responded “I shook it and held it upside down but that didn’t help either.” At some point computer literacy should translate into some sort of self-reliant yet appropriate behaviour or ability to care for the device—even in a very basic way. And somewhat related, it should also translate into an ability to personalize your device and/or applications while maintaining an understanding of what types of personalization are acceptable on a private vs public device (internet cafe, school library etc.)
  14. Software: Opens a big can of worms with the open source/Mac/PC community as to what is considered ‘standard’ software but really—you should be able to send an email to multiple parties with attachments, create a document, a spreadsheet, a short presentation and ideally; edit or manipulate simple graphics.

In case you’re wondering, I expected to find a whole bunch of lists like this on the web but ended up mostly finding definitions of the term or academic papers on the subject. I wonder if we’re not getting a bit complacent about this stuff with the assumption that it’s all common knowledge now?

Handset Literacy

Does the above list map to mobile? What are the differences?

  1. Use of input devices: Keys, navipad, joystick, sylus, QWERTY etc.
  2. Knowledge of working parts: A bit less relevant but could translate to a knowledge of the various ‘ports’ on your device (memory card, data synchronization cable, infra-red etc.) Could also include a general knowledge of standard device keys or controls like soft-keys or a navi-pad and how they vary from device to device (i.e. being able to successfully locate the equivalent key on a new device to make a call, send an SMS.)
  3. Knowledge of basic peripherals: Bluetooth headset, USB connector, USB keyboard etc.
  4. File structure: Folders, directories, understanding where stuff lives on your drive/memory card, how to keep things organized, how to access your drive via your computer (device and O/S dependant of course.)
  5. Menu system: How to find an application, install and uninstall, configure basic device settings etc.
  6. Common UI elements, navigational elements and widgets: Cues that identify interactivity (ex. tabs, scrolling, toggling, using sliders, collapsable lists etc.
  7. Saving, Cut, Copy, Paste: Saving something somewhere then knowing how to find it again. Understanding how to copy, duplicate or move data around. Obviously O/S dependant. I know how to do some of this in S60 but have no clue if it even maps over to my Sony Ericsson.
  8. Data transfer: Getting stuff on and off your device via USB, memory card, Bluetooth, responding to a WAP push (all somewhat operator and device dependant.). Could also include an understanding of data itself. Is 5kb bigger than 5MB?
  9. Communication: How to initiate a voice call, send an SMS or MMS (device and operator dependant of course.)
  10. Internet use and internet literacy: What is a mobile browser, how does it work? What is a WAP browser? What is an on-device-portal? Walled garden? What is a data connection? What are the costs involved in consuming data? How can you minimize them?
  11. Safety: Avoiding spam, staying safe on IM, using Bluetooth/LBS for social interaction, understanding your rights relative to mobile marketing and opt-in services, keeping your personal data safe etc.
  12. Etiquette: On a device, this goes way further than just knowing how to send a proper and polite SMS. What is the etiquette in various situations? When do you stop a conversation to take a call? When do you shut the phone off? On a date, in a meeting, at home? How does your ability to make good decisions regarding etiquette affect your dealings with others? How does carrying a mobile affect your ability to follow other types of etiquette?
  13. Self-reliance, personalization, respect for the device, ability to troubleshoot: A bit different here as a mobile is rarely a truly public device—rather a private device used in a public space. How does your ability to understand your device affect others around you (ex. the ability to quickly switch to vibrate mode in a meeting or place of worship.) How can you personalize the device it ways that reveal different personas to those around you? How can you maintain and safeguard personal data on the device (ex. the Paris Hilton address book theft via Bluetooth incident.)
  14. Software: Do we have ‘standard’ handset software at this stage? (Does S60 count?) Once you know how to send an SMS, take a picture (somewhat software related in my opinion) what else should you be able to do? What applications are we missing?

And what am I missing? How does my lack of device literacy affect the list i’ve created? :-)

Mobile Learning Reading List

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A collection of projects and resources i’ve found over the past few weeks. Most—but not all—are directly related to mobile. A few cover general uses of ICTs in learning. Enjoy!

MLearn

A collection of papers from the 2003, 2004 and 2005 MLearn conferences. Of particular interest are the “Book of Papers from MLearn 2003″ (3.5MB PDF) and “The Use of Computer and Video Games for Learning” (PDF) which outlines health and psycho-social issues surrounding games in schools, provides examples of existing games, discusses how students feel about this type of learning context; and provides recommendations for content creators.

The 2006MLearn conference is being held on October 22-25 in Banff, Alberta (Canada.)

EU M-Learning Project

“Mobile Technologies and Learning,” (PDF) provides a general overview of the European Commission’s m-Learning project. The project site also includes a good discussion of technologies and devices currently in use for learning as well as emulator-based examples (look for the links on the right nav) of some of their applications that target literacy skills. A great example of the work they’re doing is their Healthy for Life project:

“The materials were designed to provide accessible information and support to 40 pregnant teenagers, including those from ethnic minorities, to address their learning and support needs in a health education context, developing their self-confidence and motivation to learn. Close attention was paid to meeting the target group’s needs, following thorough user analysis, to ensure that only subjects of interest to them were dealt with (i.e. labour and birth, sexually transmitted diseases, nutrition, housing and benefits) using appropriate language and attractive illustrations (photo stories and cartoon graphics).”

MOBIlearn

“MOBIlearn is a worldwide European-led research and development project exploring context-sensitive approaches to informal, problem-based and workplace learning by using key advances in mobile technologies.” Of particular interest on their site is the Public Findings area which includes a variety of resources like “Guideline for Learning/Teaching/Tutoring in a Mobile Environment” and ” Best Practices for Instructional Design and Content Development for Mobile Learning.” The project seems (at first glance) to be a mobile version of the many internet based ‘Open Learning Object Repository’ specification projects.

“On these social and technological premises, the MOBIlearn project aims at improving access to knowledge for selected target users (such as mobile workers and learning citizens), giving them ubiquitous access to appropriate (conceptualized and personalized) learning objects, by linking to the Internet via mobile connections and devices, according to innovative paradigms and interfaces.”

Good luck to them. These projects are always very well meaning but tend to suffer from massive over-engineering of the learning object structure with little thought to the actual content creation or reuse by educators. [Some nice context on the learning object debate here from David Wiley]

Literacy, ICTs and Games

For information about ICT-related literacy and numeracy projects, check out the UK’s CTAD site. There’s also a good overview at “Can ICTs Help Increase Literacy?” with further links to a study by Vancouver based Commonwealth of Learning on ICT use in India and Zambia.

I also recently picked up “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy” by James Paul Gee which is so far excellent. Not as gimmicky as it many of these types of books can be. As a matter of fact—not gimmicky at all—and has some great discussion of the various types and contexts of literacy.

“When people learn to play video games, they are learning a new literacy. Of course, this is not the way the word “literacy” is normally used…in the modern world, language is not the only important communication system. Today, images, symbols, gra[hs, diagrams, artifacts, and many other visual symbols are particularily significant. Thus the idea of different types of "visual litercy" would sem to be an important one."

Prensky on Mobile

A nice down to earth discussion of mobile devices for learning from Mark Prensky in "What Can You Learn from a Cell Phone." (PDF)

"Can cell phones really provide their owners with the knowledge, skills, behaviors and attitudes that will help them succeed in their schools, their jobs and their lives? I maintain the only correct answer to the “What can they learn” question is “ANYTHING, if we design it right.” There are many different kinds of learning and many processes that we use to learn, but among the most frequent, time-tested, and effective of these are listening, observing, imitating, questioning, reflecting, trying, estimating, predicting, “what-if”-ing and practicing. All of these learning processes can be done through our cell phones. In addition, the phones compliment the short-burst, casual, multi-tasking style of today’s “Digital Native” (PDF) learners."

A great article for any educator, parent or administrator trying to justify the use of technology in the classroom. There's more on Mark's site including a link to "Mobile Phone Imagination" (look for issues #14) from the Vodaphone Reciever magazine.
For those interested in some of the issues facing teachers who are currently using handhelds in the classroom, check out Learning at Hand, a resource blog for teachers using PDAs and Treos in the classroom. [I always forget that there are lots of teachers doing this. There are also lots of small (sometimes clunky but functional) learning applications for Palm and Pocket PC that help kids simulate scenarios in science, English and maths.]

Blogs

Some of my favourites include Leonard Low’s Mobile Learning blog (“101 Ideas for Mobile Learning“,) the Finnish MobileED initiative (check out their great examples of students scenarios from South Africa) and Ewan McIntosh who spends his days helping students use technology (including iPods) in the classroom. [Note some recent discussions as well on QR-code usage in education.]

More…

I recently ran into a wonderful research group in the UK by the name of Futurelab.

“A not-for-profit organization, Futurelab is committed to sharing the lessons learnt from our research and development in order to inform positive change to educational policy and practice.”

They do all sorts of interesting stuff (well worth a look!) but in the area of mobile learning they recently published a “Literature Review in Mobile Technologies and Learning” which outlines the key findings of a larger study by the MLearning group at the University of Birmingham.

“learning is mobile in terms of space, ie it happens at the workplace, at home, and at places of leisure; it is mobile between different areas of life, ie it may relate to work demands, self-improvement, or leisure; and it is mobile with respect to time, ie it happens at different times during the day, on working days or on weekends”

Also of interest by FutureLab, “A comparison of young people’s home and school ICT use.” (PDF)

I also bumped into “Language E-Learning on the Move” today from Japan Review

“In Japan, where more people own cell phones than PCs and language education is a huge industry, there is potential for a booming market in mobile e-learning. While education sites aren’t currently moneymakers, more sophisticated content may allow providers to charge more for bite-sized learning.”

The Review incidentally has several other mobile articles including an excerpt from Mimi Ito’s Personal, Portable, Pedestrian and and overview of Japanese mobile media services for journalism students.

And finally, a reading list within a reading list :-) From Learning Light in the UK, a large page of mobile learning resources.

Enjoy! And please let me know if i’m missing something of note. I’ll try to update this list periodically.

[Addendum: As it happens, i'm going to be speaking to a group of Australian teachers about mobile learning next month in an online presentation with Leigh Blackhall for the Australian Flexible Learning Framwork group. They have a very good (and active) mobile learning mailing list (via Moodle.) Education Australia also has quite a few resources on their site.

And a few more resources from the UK. BECTA's Emerging Technologies for Learning PDF, and this video and PDF presentation from Geoff Stead of CTAD (mentioned earlier) entitled Benefits and Hazards of Teaching with Mobile Devices.]

Handset Literacy ‘a la’ Bubble Pop

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Mobile Bubble PopI ran into a lady from Motorola in Boston who told me her friend’s 4 year old has been playing our Mobile Bubble Pop game. Obsessively.

I first found this neat. Then somewhat disturbing (especially the obsessive part.) We never expected someone so young to play the game. Not that it’s a bad game for a child. It’s simple. Repetitive. Provides a certain sense of accomplishment. Has some auditory stimuli, but doesn’t over-stimulate. Not sure what a 4-year old thinks of the Einstein and Mark Twain quotations at the end of the game however…

But had we known, could we have done something to make it a more fun or meaningful experience for a 4 year old? A few thoughts below.

  • Popping the bubbles reveals an animal. A voice provides additional information (“cat, mouse, bear”)
  • Twenty-six bubbles. Each one reveals a letter of the alphabet. A voice provides additional information (“B is for bear”)
  • Ten bubbles. Each one reveals a number and a series of objects (“4 bears, 3 fish etc.”)
  • Multiple editions of bubble pop could provide even more opportunities. “This mobile bubble pop is brought to you by the letter F” (“frog, family, friend etc.” throughout the game)
  • Bubble pop matching game. Basic matching game concept but with the added auditory fun of bubble popping.
  • Pop all the bubbles and reveal a pattern or shape below (elephant, fish, happy face—something easily recognizable ) .
  • Different levels allow you to pop bubbles in different ways (using different keys or a different online ‘cursor’ shape.)

The last one seems a bit problematic—especially for someone who can’t read basic instructions to understand differences in functionality or interaction. Still there’s something to be said for a game (or maybe a bunch of games) designed to teach device literacy. The handset equivalent of learning how to use a mouse and basic keyboard input—through games.

I also haven’t yet decided whether I think we should be encouraging a 4 year old to use a smartphone. Four seems really young. Not that we have much choice. If mum and dad have one—it’ll inevitably end up in their child’s hands. Why not make it a positive experience. Maybe every smartphone should have at least a few applications pre-installed for younger children (call it a productivity enhancer or ‘time-out’ for tired parents :-) .

“The “pass-back” was first coined by mobile video mongols who see short cartoon kid-like mobile video’s as the perfect thing a mother can use to occupy a cranky kid in the back seat. Mom is driving. Kid in the back seat is crying, cranky, bored, whatever. Mom picks up her cell phone and turns on or tunes into some kind of kid-oriented mobile video and passes it back to her kid. Kid shuts up and is entertained (or throws the mobile phone out the window)…(via moPocket)”

A recent BBC article on cyber-literacy offers these thoughts on computer use by youngsters.

“…by the age of four, 45% of children have used a mouse to point and click, 27% have used a computer on their own at home, rising to 53% for six-year-olds, and 30% have looked at websites for children at home…BBC Cbeebies online producer Olivia Dickinson says: “They use fine motor skills when they use the mouse or keyboard. So they can go up to using the spacebar, to using the arrow keys, to using the mouse.”

“They also learn some gross motor skills, in terms of some of the bigger movements of the mouse, but also in terms of physical development, when we give them activities to do in front of the computer, like dance and music. We’ve got a few games where if you keep hitting the spacebar the Teletubbies appear, and that just gets them into what a computer is.”

With more handphones on the planet than computers, and many of them in kids’ hands, maybe content to promote handset literacy should be on the program for kids too.

Flash Lite – Marketing and Beyond

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I’ve read a few posts lately that talk about Flash Lite as a killer marketing tool on mobile devices. The most often noted reasons are:

  • ease and speed of development and testing,
  • the rich UI and design capabilities
  • the ubiquity of the platform (ubiquity’s is not here yet, but it finally seems to be well on its way)

I totally agree with all the above but I think the promise of Flash is more multi layered than just marketing. If through high adoption Flash Lite turns into a ubiquitous mobile publishing platform—it opens up a whole other list of possibilities.

(I hate generalizations so all examples below are of products or services that I think would have been of use in places i’ve worked or situations i’ve encountered over the years.)

Training and Orientation

Company ‘x’ operates concession retail stores within a major department store chain and has thousands of employees scattered around the country. District managers travel to each location on a weekly basis but this is often the extent of the employees’ contact with the corporate office. The company chooses to use Flash Lite to deliver short reference and learning applications to their staff. Topics cover internal policies and procedures such as expense report submission, health insurance cover, directory of key representative by region, corporate acronym guides and part number decoders.

Why Flash? Easy to update and allows them to present these somewhat boring or arcane bits of information in a fun way and at low cost.

B2B Support

Company ‘x’ is a mid-sized manufacturer with a small number of big-ticket industrial products. These products are sold and serviced through a large distribution base that spans North America. The most common requests to their customer service are the faxing (or snail mailing) of service bulletins and technical sheets for 5-6 popular products. As many distributors work in the field, there is often no way for them to request a copy of these bulletins when they actually need them. Some carry them around in binders but they often get wet, greasy or forgotten on-site. The company decides to offer mobile versions of these bulletins that can be downloaded free of charge and stored on your device.

Why Flash? Vector line art is perfect to represent technical documents—all-be-it on a small screen. Each technical bulletin is only 50-100k making it easy to download and store, even on devices with no memory card.

Customer Relationship Management/After Sales Support

Company ‘x’—a large handset manufacturer—begins to offer user guides pre-installed on their devices. Not meant to be a replacement for the O/S based help-system, these guides offer users tips on the most commonly requested problems logged by their customer service department. The guides also provide lifestyle tips for the device allowing the up-sell of peripherals, partner services and accessories. Some guides go a step further to reinforce brand perception or ensure users derive the most value from the product (ex. photography guide for camera phone with a Carl Zeiss lens, a ‘Discover Urban Jazz’ guide for a co-branded music phone etc.)

Why Flash? Allows the easy and economical creation of a multitude of mini-apps with different goals and demographics in mind.

Pre and Post-Sales Marketing and Value Added

Company ‘x’—a eco-travel company—begins to offer Flash based content to its audience. As a pre-sales tool, they offer mini trip guides and experiences. Audio clips, video and photography from real trips are incorporated into small content applications designed to entice prospective customers to make a booking. The content is fun and meant to be shared. Once a trip is booked, travelers receive a small set of cultural, historical or language guides to help pass the time at the airport or on those long bus rides.

Why Flash? Content can be updated relatively quickly to account for new trips and itineraries. Flash Lite 2 has good video and audio support which makes it ideal to deliver such a wide variety of content and media.

Ok, but what about J2ME, XHTML, mobile AJAX etc.?

I’m not trying to suggest that Flash is the only technology that can do all this. As a matter of fact, most of my examples don’t even begin to deal with content that requires large data updates or needs a more robust interaction with the handset itself. In some of those cases, another technology may make more sense. What i’m simply responding to is this:

  • Flash Lite applications are easy to develop
  • The content is self-contained
  • It can be shared (not so good if it’s being delivered as a licensed product but absolutely ideal for things that are meant to be shared)
  • Flash Lite offers rich UI and design capabilities as well as a strong existing developer base

All the above allows you to experiment, be creative and respond to user comments, industry trends or new services very quickly—whether you’re selling travel, industrial products or specialty natural food products at the local health store. And that’s part 2 of my point. Many of the above examples could be considered enterprise level (not a bad thing with Nokia’s new E Series devices—my E60 came pre-installed with Flash Lite) but the above could also easily apply to smaller specialty businesses, industry associations, non-profits etc. Any business that wants to add value for its stakeholders in a mobile context.

All you need is a ubiquitously installed run-time, creative ideas about what mobile content and applications can be, and an easy authoring platform.

(Many thanks to Carlo and all the folks at MobHappy for including this post in the 32nd edition of Carnival of the Mobilists) 

Digital Kits and Collections

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I was quite excited to find KitZu a few days back [via Dave Warlick. ] The brainchild of Hall Davidson, Kitzu provides digital kits for education which can include images, video, audio and (I assume) text—all in a convenient zipped format complete with source manifest.

We’ve been thinking about kits for a while. In fact, it was the concept of ‘openly-licensed content building blocks’ (kits?) that first got us thinking about starting Yiibu. One thing we specifically wanted to do was incorporate other people’s content into our own thereby increasing the value of the building block collection overall—especially if the collection was provided with a manifest. As a result, I spent quite a bit of time over the past few months scouring content repositories for specific types openly licensed content. Sadly, it was not an easy task.

A recent Creative Commons blog post mentioned there are now about 14 million links to Creative Commons licenses from pages on the internet. I have a PubSub feed that sends me links to posts that reference CC and it returns about 100 posts a day. Add to that my OurMedia feeds (about 300 posts a day,) and feeds linking to other types of open content (Project Gutenberg, Internet Archive etc.) and that’s a ton of openly licensed content. Dare I say…too much?

I can hear people screaming already. Open content is a fundamental freedom! We’ve worked hard to get here, how can there possibly be too much content?

So let me clarify. The problem is not lack of content. It’s findability—and more specifically, findability of relevant, useable stuff. Search for ‘Paris’ in the Creative Commons search utility to see what I mean . Google returns 778,000 results and Yahoo 223,000—the first several dozen of which are links to high traffic sites that mention Paris; not necessarily relevant reusable content (also not the most relevant search parameter but it’s the kind of search term a student might use.) Then there’s the Nutch search engine (on the same page) which allows you to specify images only. There I got slightly more manageable results—649 images. Then there’s Flickr—6873 results for one specific license (you have to search individually in each license category so it adds up quickly.) And as Flickr only offers a tag based search in the CC section, your search results are likely to contain everything from photos of vacationing couples having dinner, to photos of someone’s foot (in Paris.) And finally OurMedia, with 127 results which include something about Paris Hitlon along with footage from the Les Blogs conference in Paris.

So now imagine you’re a teacher wanting to quickly put together a bunch of relevant photos for students working on a project. Sure the students could search all by themselves (it’s good learning experience) but it could well be an exercise in frustration. (What’s better, a frustrated teacher or student? Hopefully neither.) Wesley worries about providing cookie cutter resources that will result in all student projects looking the same and I agree that’s a risk, but 30 students individually wasting 3-4 hours each looking for two useable, openly licensed photos of Paris (let alone something really arcane like a portrait of Marie Antoinette and the Bastille) is equally wasteful (especially with all this open content around.)

Funny thing is, I found both of those while making Allo Paris—along with 30-40 really nice, very openly licensed Flickr photos of common travel attractions in Paris. I have them in folders, they’re all labeled, I even know the license, author, and URI. Now what if someone else had access to my collection? What if collections were stored online in content repositories and collection lists were shared (say in OPML format.) And what if communities managed their lists to keep them relevant? (a la Wikipedia)

Wouldn’t that be more useful than those 14 million links (and counting…) that Lawrence Lessig was talking about?

Podcast Over Coffee

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We have this bad habit of having breakfast while checking feeds and reading mail. (With two geeks in the family—what can you do?)

This morning we actually stopped and listened to last night’s informative and lively conversation between edu-tech-bloggers Wesley Fryer (Lubbock, Texas,) Darren Kuropatwa (Winnipeg, Canada,) Ewan McIntosh (Edinburgh, Scotland,) Miguel Guhlin (San Antonio, Texas.)

Considering Bryan spent yesterday morning listening to my chat with Leigh Blackall in Australia (thanks Leigh, you made me feel so welcome,) i’m thinking we should make this a morning habit!

Where is the Student Generated Mobile Content?

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A few days back, Alex Hayes posed some interesting thoughts and comments about mobile learning on the Teach and Learn Online group. In particular, this caught my eye…

Please tell me I’m wrong and that there are trials underway in 2006 that are examining and IMPLEMENTING curriculum using student generated re-purposed content – stuff that’s theirs, about them – all delivered episodically or on demand via wireless handhelds?

As a content developer, I thought i’d offer some comments. One of the biggest problems right now with mobile content is the astronomically high barrier to entry for small content producers (never mind schools or students.) I sat in on a mobile industry presentation this week where "kids and family content" was on the list as one of the ‘ things on the radar’ for 2006. Judging by the company names mentioned in passing (Disney, Sony, Fox et al.) this would likely be on-deck or on portal stuff (i.e. – heavily branded, DRM filled, advertising ridden, java games, pop-culture themed ebooks or videos; downloadable only from your carrier or content provider, and in a non-shareable format.) Just what education needs!

Alex speaks of "student generated re-purposed content" and i’m sure some companies are starting to pitch "solutions" to education in this vein but the bottom line is that, making mobile content right now is cost-prohibitive and available only to those with large budgets. Testing costs alone are ridiculous and usually involve creating variants of your content for dozens (if not hundreds) of handsets. And then we have distribution. Unless the content is likely to yield high returns and fits into one of their portal schemes; carriers don’t seem to want it on their networks.

What we need is an open network (the internet,) some open platforms and formats (HTML, CSS, JavaScript,) an ability to bypass carriers in the publishing and distribution process (publish on the web and/or share using MMC cards or bluetooth,) and an authoring process that mere mortals can beginning to participate in. Until that day speaking of personal publishing and content re-purposing for phones is sadly just not realistic.

And all that said—things are looking up and people are starting to talk about content for ‘the mobile web.’ We finally have a variety of portable devices that support wi-fi (i.e. an ability to by-pass the carrier-controlled data services), mobile browsers that are standards compliant (makes content creation and testing way easier) and all sorts of hybrid devices (PDA, iPod, Nokia 770, PSP..) and services (photo sharing , [mo]blogging, [mobile]RSS…) that students actively use and enable basic content creation and/or sharing. This mixture of devices, lack of complete dependency on carriers, and ability to publish and share your own stuff is where the user-generated mobile (learning) content will likely start—and where it will continue to flourish (all-be-it slowly.)

At the moment, it’s a bit of a hodge-podge, but by stringing all these "small pieces loosely joined" together, it is possible for students to begin to participate in mobile publishing.

(just a few examples…)

For a great series of articles that outline some of the technologies that will make this possible visit this site: