Welcome observations from Geoff at CTAD about learning content for the PSP.

I am just back from the handheld learning conference in London, where I showcased our content authoring, and in particular the PSP materials. It seems we have tapped into a latent, and unfulfilled need. We know that there are a lot of PSPs out there. What we didn’t know was that there were so many people interested in using them for learning. Fantastic news!…I have met a couple of people in the UK already looking to use the PSP as a glorified memory stick in education…This is a good idea, but seems like only the beginning. What we need is tools for educators to be able, more simply, to create more relevant, more meaningful content of their own – personalised to their learners. more..

The PSP is a highly underrated device. We discovered its appeal a last year when we made our JPG stacks. It has one of the crispest and clearest displays of any mobile device i’ve ever seen, very useable controls, a great image viewer (for image stacks) and easy content transfer capabilities. There was also something insanely enjoyable about holding it in your hands to browse through content. And back then, there wasn’t even a browser, wi-fi or RSS. The only hitch—as Geoff noted—is the lack of real content creation opportunities (other than video, blogs and images) for mobile devices in general—especially incorporating the type of interactivity that would make the content really useful for learning. [On a related note regarding easy authoring tools for content and widgets, see a recent post by Andrew Woolridge on Open Laszlo and widgets.]

The fish content above is one of our old stacks (still available on Flickr) but head over to Geoff’s site for screenshots of his learning content re-gigged to work on a PSP as well as screenshots of the PDA versions from CTAD’s m-learning site.

Simple. Colourful. Really nice work!