MASHe

I was looking for resources for a potential mobile workshop and came across the slides below from Judy Brown.

There were some resources I wasn’t aware of and others so good I thought it would be useful to extract these here:

• Judy’s existing list of authoring tools, polls and quizzes, and miscellaneous tools services – published Jan ‘09 but still relevant
• Mobile Learning Engine (MLE) for Moodle – “MLE-Moodle is a plugin for Moodle, which adds mLearning functionality to this open-source eLearning system. The mobile learning area can be accessed with the mobile phone browser or with a special mobile phone application, which is designed for mobile Learning.”
• Opera Online Mobile simulator
• mobiReady mobile site testing tool
• Educate iPhone/iPod Touch App – Calendar/timetabling, attendance and grade marking database, stopwatch, voice recorder, images, reference area, link to Moodle

Ever wondered what devices students are carrying around with them? On last site which might give you an indication is GetJar.com’s mobile market share stats. According to GetJar data Nokia and Sony-Ericsson have almost 60% market share, Nokia having three different models of phone is the top 5. More information on how these stats are derived is here.

Manufactures	Market Share
Nokia	28.96%
Sony-Ericsson	28.5%
Samsung	13.98%
LG	8.4%
INQ	4.13%

UK Manufacture market share December 2009

Devices	Market Share
Nokia E71	6.23%
Nokia N95	4.76%
LG KU990 Viewty	4.23%
Nokia E63	3.05%
Samsung GT S5600 Preston/Hailey	2.84%
Total market share	21.11%

UK Device market share December 2009

If you would like to see an example of an institution embracing mobile technology, Judy highlights Abilene Christian University’s ACU mobile site. Using this and a number of applications specifically developed for iPhone/iTouch ACU students have access to a range of tools and resources including learning content, classroom communication (including a virtual EVS/clicker), ebooks, podcasts, notetaking tools, and gradebooks.

If you are wondering why ACU are only catering for one platform they gave out free iPhones and Ipod Touches. Some might see this as a marketing gimmick but if you start looking at the University’s Vision for Mobile Learning, it looks like they are embarking on a very serious endeavour. In particularly I liked this statement:

It’s not about technology; it’s about communication. It’s not about control; it’s about convergence. Social learning theory tells us that humans learn best in community – when they feel connected to others. And community forms when people explore and collaborate together, connecting their experiences – convergence. Any technological solution aimed at increased learning must enhance communication and convergence. If it doesn’t, it’s likely to be pedagogically irrelevant. ACU Convergence and the 21st-Century Classroom

In this second MASHe review I’m going to look back at some of my posts on mobile technology. This is obviously a very broad topic, elements of which were covered in the first review on electronic voting systems, but I’ve identified some specific areas including mobile connectivity; and mobile hardware (phones and netbooks) to theme this post. 

Mobile connectivity

Connectivity is tied to the hardware you use to connect. Broadly mobile connectivity is being achieved through phones or dongles. In September 2008 I posted ‘I don’t need your network, I’ve got Mobile Broadband’, which highlighted that students were potentially less reliant on wireless networks provided by institutions, instead using either their phone or mobile broadband dongle.

Since then networks are beginning to show the strain as they start reaching capacity, not helped by the popularity of streamed media like on demand TV. Interestingly whilst mobile data usage is up it is thanks to the phone and dongle and not, as highlighted in my original post, built-in to laptops which are still the domain of the ‘pro-user’.

One device which wasn’t around back then was mobile wireless routers such as Mi-Fi. These make it possible to create your own wireless network using mobile networks for the data connection. So if you were worried about students accessing dubious content whilst on campus via their phone, now they can do this and share the Internet connection with their friends (hopefully this will mean institutions will focus on e-safety rather than relying on blocking sites).

Mobile and VLEs

A couple of months later I revisited this topic with the post Mobile Internet, Mobile Life, Mobile Learning. This post highlighted the increasing popularity of accessing the Internet through mobile phones. This is further evidence that staying connected is increasing important particularly as we require more ‘on-demand’ access to media, our social networks and data we store ‘in the cloud’.

The ‘on-demand’ culture is influencing education with flexible delivery and blended learning, but as I highlight in the ‘mobile internet’ post certain systems like the virtual learning environment seem ill prepared. There have been some developments in this area and Blackboards announcement last year of a mobile version of their system is probably evidence that manufacturers recognise that mobile optimisation is a must have feature.

Netbooks

I’m probably pushing the ‘mobile’ theme with the inclusion of netbooks, but for me it a very interesting market and one that I’m surprised hasn’t really taken off with students. For the uninformed netbooks are laptops which have been on a diet (slightly smaller, lighter, not as powerful). They first appeared on the market in November 2007 and now virtually every computer manufacturer has a netbook range.

I’ve visited netbooks twice on MASHe. First in September 2008 in Ultra mobile, ultra cheap – Netbooks and then again 6 months later in Ultra mobile, ultra cheap – Which netbook now?. If I was going a follow up post now it would probably be called ‘Ultra mobile, reasonably cheap – Which tablet netbook?’ and in 6 months it would be ‘Ultra mobile – Which tablet?’.

So why haven’t netbooks taken off as a student owned device? Probably because they can get a better spec’d laptop for a similar price and whilst student ownership of laptops is high very few bring them on campus (for various reasons including: storage, lack of desk space with power, using campus desktops instead, not part of teaching/learning).

So it appears manufacturers have realised there market is in the middle ground. Not the high-end titanium clad portable powerhouse  or the low-end portable and cheap, but a medium priced portable second PC which looks nice and has a touch screen. Gong by a recent consumer electronics fair (CES2010) manufacturers are betting on tablet netbooks as filling this market (which maybe of interest to academics looking to replace their conference PC ;)

So if netbooks and tablet netbooks are going to be of limited appeal to students what about ebook readers? Probably not for the foreseeable future. I would argue that the majority of students are looking for multi-function media rich devices like their phone or iPod. 

Phones

A potential challenger to Apples dominancy is the Google backed Android operating system. This is an open source project and the community is working hard to compete against iPhone/iPod Touch. Already a number of manufacturers have phones (and even tablets and netbooks) running Android and the platform potentially has a lot to offer. In August last year I wrote Android Mobile OS: Pandora’s box of accessibility opportunities, which gives an overview of the Android project and it’s philosophy highlighting what is already possible in terms of accessibility. Just as there have been a number of educational ‘apps’ for the iPhone, Android is already being used in this area (one use which I covered in the last review was for electronic voting).

Mobile futures

So what has this review shown? Mobile technology has been and will continue to be an important part of life and learning. This is highlighted in the recent Horizons Report, which reconfirmed mobile computing as having a large impact on teaching and learning and I’m sure it will be a topic I’ll revisiting again and again.

Just back from ALT-C 2009 having been asked to present a session with colleagues on EduApps (this resulted from JISC RSC UK’s donation of an EduApps stick to all conference delegates and ALT members). Over the next couple of days I’ll be making a series of posts to highlight some of the best bits.

For my first post in this series I’m going to highlight some of the ideas presented by my colleague Adam Blackwood at RSC South East. Adam, amongst other things, is a mobile guru and in his session he highlighted some interesting tools [Click here for a copy of Adam’s slides and his Mobile Technology Summary Sheet].

Proximity push using TextBlue

First there is TextBlue.This company specialises in ‘proximity marketing’, using Bluetooth to push information primarily to mobile devices. This company has a range of products from plugin dongles for your laptop to ‘broadcasters’ which can push content out for up to 1000 meters.

Adam demonstrated how this technology could be used to push learning content to student owned phones (or any Bluetooth enabled device). The only restriction you have on the file types you can use is what is viewable on the student’s device. You probably also want to keep file sizes down because of the transfer time so the 30 minute podcast might be out of the question, but this technology could be ideal for distributing quizzes etc (something you could easily create with Mobile Study, which is free).

There is nothing stopping you transfer files via bluetooth without TextBlue. Doing it this way is very cumbersome and the TextBlue software turns it into a one click solution. A demo version of TextBlue software is available on request – Contact TextBlue. 

SMS polling/voting

I’ve been aware of SMS polling/voting services for sometime. All the examples I’ve previously looked at use the model where the hosting/collation of votes has been handled by a 3rd party site. Adam highlighted a new model which puts the editing/collation software on your own phone, students responding to your mobile number, not one provided by a 3rd party.

The software to do this currently only seems to be available for Android mobile devices. There are a couple of software applications that can do this but Adam was highlighting ‘Polls’ by Pollimath:

The concept is simple; draft the opinion poll on your phone, add your voters and open your poll. Your list of voters would receive an SMS and/or E-Mail notification. They vote via the Web or SMS Reply as per the options selected by the pollster. The pollster can see the poll statistics and the voting details (who voted for what choice).  

Pollimath Concept Diagram

There is a free ‘Lite’ version of Pollimath which is limited to 10 voters per poll, but at $3.95 the full version is very reasonably priced. Pollimath has some nice features like being able to send vote invitations via email as well as SMS, allowing you to use multiple input methods, and being able to view the results online. This is a relatively new application and some more work needs to be done to graphically represent poll results as well as an easier way to distribute polls links but so far it looks very promising.

An alternative to Pollimath is ‘Handy Poll’s’ by Marc Tan. This has a better graphical results view, but doesn’t have as many of the features of Pollimath.

Augmented reality

The final thing Adam showed us was some ‘augmented reality’. With this the camera on your phone is combined with your location and direction information so that additional information can be overlaid. One of the most popular working examples is Layar for Android, but the video below shows where the next generation of augmented reality is going:

[Update (21/10/09): Google have recently announced  more accessibility features in Android 1.6]

At the RSC we were fortunate to get our hands on one of the latest Android mobile phones, the HTC Hero. For the uninitiated Android is a Open Source mobile operating system originally developed by Google, but now maintained by the Open Handset Alliance. Android is very similar to the iPhone in terms of its multi-touch interface and drop-in add-ons. The real divergence between the two platforms probably lies in the openness.

With the iPhone, whilst it is easy for developers to code applications which use the functionality of the phone, Apple maintain a very strong control over which ones can be download from the ‘App Store’ and unless you are prepared to do some major tinkering to ‘jailbreak’ your phone you are locked in. Android is different because while they have a similar official ‘Market’ where you download approved applications, with one click you can install any 3rd party application. As David Flanders puts it “we as a global community decide what we want, NOT one where a company decides how we want it”.

So what does the community want? Well Google research scientist T.V. Raman and his colleague Charles Chen see Android as an opportunity to move assistive technology to the mobile world.  They have been working on the Eyes-Free project which has created a text-to-speech (TTS) library for android. This, like Android, is an Open Source project and already other developers have been using the TTS library in their own applications. A list of applications is available here. My particular favourites are:

Alchemy Clip – Cameraphone OCR to speech

Alchemy Clip (Web Link) | Alchemy Clip (Android Link)
Allows you to take a snapshot of a piece of text using the phones camera which is then OCR’d to be read-a-loud.

AutoTran iVoiceBrowserLite – Web browser with screen reader

iVoiceBrowserLite (Web Link) | iVoiceBrowserLite (Android Link)
Web browser with built in screen reader.

Eyes-Free Shell – eyes-free communication device

Eyes-Free Shell (Web Link) | Eyes-Free Shell (Android Link)
Turns your Android into an eyes-free communication device, providing one-touch access to Android applications, as well as useful mini-apps built into the Eyes-Free Shell. Move your finger over the screen to explore; lift your finger up to run what you stopped on. See also the Eyes-Free Config Manager (Android Link), which lists the applications from the Eyes-Free Project and enables you to set the Eyes-Free Shell as your default Home application.

Talking Dialer

Talking Dialer (Web Link) |Talking Dialer (Android Link)
Another Eyes-Free project application to help with dialling.

The vOICe – Seeing with sound

The vOICe (Web Link)
The vOICe for Android translates live camera views into sound, targeting augmented reality for the totally blind through sensory substitution and synthetic vision. Includes a talking colour identifier and talking compass.

Speaking Pad – Talking notepad

Speaking Pad (Web Link) | Speaking Pad (Android Link)
A talking notepad for Android. This notepad will speak what you type.

As you would expect with such a new platform some of these applications are still a little ragged around the edges, but I believe the Android platform has huge potential in making mobile technology inclusive, accessible and affordable.

Just over 6 months ago I posted Ultra mobile, ultra cheap – Netbooks. I’ve been meaning to revisit this post for some time. Not only has the market moved on in terms of the range of netbooks available, but on reflection my advice was some what biased leaning towards a device for me and not the average student. This post hopes to readdresses this balance identifying what I would be looking for in a netbook if I was a student.

Operating system – go for Windows

I would still recommend going for Windows. A development worth keeping an eye on is the new Windows 7 operating system due out later in the year. Originally I would have recommended sticking with Windows XP, Vista being too resource intensive for less powerful netbooks. Having loaded a beta version of Windows 7 on a netbook I was impressed with the speedy performance. So avoid Vista, get XP and if you are reading this post in a couple of months look out for ‘7’.

Connectivity – wireless + Bluetooth

I wouldn’t change much of my advice here. In fact it very hard to find a netbook without both a wired and wireless connection. Again bluetooth is useful and becoming a standard feature.

Screen resolution – at least 1024×600 (with 10” screen)

I would still recommend 1024×600 as a minimum resolution. For comfort of viewing I would also recommend a 10” screen (don’t forget to play around with toolbars to get maximum space. For example in Firefox use the Compact Classic theme and Glazoom zoom extension.

Storage – 8Gb SSD 160GB HDD

I would recommend getting a decent sized hard drive. There’s nothing more frustrating than running out of space particularly if you have lots of media like photos and video to keep. Unfortunately solid state drives, which have the benefit of no moving parts are still too expensive for this sort of size and you’ll have to nurture a traditional spinning disk hard drive.

Size – keep it compact (225×165mm 260×180mm)

As an every day device a decent sized keyboard will be essential for comfort of use and productivity. This size of the keyboard impacts the minimum size of the netbook so use 260×180mm as a guidance.

Battery Life 6 hours+

A big oversight of my original post was to include criteria for battery life. New processors (namely the Intel Atom chip) mean it is possible to get a lot more usage between charges. It is now possible to get netbooks which easily go for 6 hours while still not adding too much weight.

Cost – less than £250 £300

Unfortunately the global recession and weakness of the pound is impacting how far you money can go. I would also recommend upping the budget slightly to get a device which is hopefully suitable and robust enough for every day use.

Which Netbook would I buy (now if I was a student)?

In my original post I mentioned retiring my original netbook, which I’ve never quite got around too (although the soon to be released ASUS T91 is getting my interest). In the intervening months I have however purchased a new netbook to replace a laptop which got drowned in gin. The criteria I used for selecting a replacement potentially maps closely for what a student might be looking for (everyday use, portable, decent battery life). The device I went for was the Samsung NC-10. This device regularly gets praised for it excellent keyboard and solid build quality. For me the NC-10’s specification strikes a very good balance between being portable and suitable for everyday use and with it easily getting 6-7 hours solid use you don’t have to constantly sit next to a power socket.

Here’s a list of 5 possible contenders compiled on PriceGrabber which broadly fit the specification outlined above (click here to view latest prices):

	Lenovo S10 Netbook from £259.99 (5 sellers) Compare Prices »
	MSI Wind U100-220UK Black Netbook from £259.99 (5 sellers) Compare Prices »
	Asus Eee PC 1000H Netbook from £272.01 (6 sellers) Compare Prices »
	Samsung NC10 Blue Netbook from £297.80 (8 sellers) Compare Prices »
	MSI Wind U100-221UK Black Netbook from £298.69 (7 sellers) Compare Prices »

Mobile phone ownership within the UK is regularly reported around 90% peaking to 95-97% for 16-24 year olds. While we know ownership is high, there is very little research on the type of phone young people have. Knowing the type of phone potentially allows us as educators to start tapping in to this resource. I’m particular interested in the data capabilities of mobile phones, previously posting on various topics including 3G usage. One area not to be overlooked is wi-fi access.

There is now a growing list of phones (see column) which can connect to wireless networks. Importantly, this list is not just limited to the business exec prousers with their iPhones and Blackberry’s, but also extends to free-on-contract phones which are already finding there way into students pockets. So assuming there will be a growing number of portable wi-fi devices knocking around campuses, which students are already prepared to carry with them on a day-to-day basis, how can we start utilising them?

A particular area I’m interested in is students response systems (also known as audience response systems, electronic voting systems, clickers …). Prior to joining the RSC I worked at the University of Strathclyde, arguably the first UK institution to integrate this technology as part of active collaborative learning. Having seen these systems in practice, particularly when combined with Peer Instruction (developed by Professor Eric Mazur), you cannot but be impressed with the level of engagement and learning gains students experience. [Here is a paper and video case study of what is done at Strathclyde and Mazur's Peer Instruction site]

A number of response system manufactures supply ‘virtual’ versions of their handsets. The solutions tend to be either purely web based or an application add-on. Web-based is the most flexible as it only needs a device with an Internet connection and Internet browser with basic JavaScript support (theoretically you could use anything from a Nintendo DS to a laptop). Application based requires a small application to be installed on the users device. This can be more limiting and unless the manufacturer has been incredibility busy developing different versions of their software for different platforms (you have the added complication of distributing the right software to your students).

There is also a cost associated with using a response system manufactures solution. If your institution is already using physical handsets it however might be possible that a set number of ‘virtual’ licences come as part of the package.

If you are looking for free solutions one option is ClassInHand (CIH). CIH was developed by Wake Forest University and basically turns a Windows Mobile device into "a web server, a presentation controller, and a quizzing and feedback device for a classroom instructor". Turning the Windows Mobile device into a web server means that any device with a web browser and a wi-fi connection can be used (again, anything from a Nintendo DS to a laptop). Unfortunately development of CIH appears to have ceased in 2003 and when I recently tried the software on my Windows Mobile 6 device it kept crashing :-(

One other big limitation of CIH, apart from it not working, is the reliance on the web server being hosted on a mobile device. Not every member of staff will have access to one of these and with tight budgets a purchase might be hard to justify. An equally, if not more, portable solution would be to run a response system from a USB pendrive. To my knowledge no one has done this but all the components are potentially already out there.

Similar to CIH, for a core you would want to run a portable local web server. There are a number of projects which already allow you to do this. I use XAMPP which, at the the danger of completely loosing you non-techies, creates a integrated server package of Apache, mySQL, PHP and Perl. The bits I’m interested in are: Apache – the bit which can serve web pages; PHP – which allows you programme the pages to do clever stuff; and mySQL – a database which allows you to store and retrieve information.

So a rainy weekend later here’s what I’ve come up with:

DIY wireless student response system from Martin Hawksey on Vimeo.

Here are links to the components I’ve pulled together for this example:

• XAMPP – Portable web server
• PHP Libchart – Simple PHP chart drawing library
• LiveWeb – insert and view live web pages in PowerPoint

and here’s my DIY code:

• Bare bones – 3 php files and mySQL script (you’ll need to download Libchart)
• The works – a compiled version of XAMPP including ‘bare bones’ and Libchart (Instructions and disclaimer here)

If you’ve found this post useful you might also be interested in the JISC funded ‘EVAF4All: Electronic Voting Analysis and Feedback For All’ project being led by Simon Bates at the University of Edinburgh. More information on the project including the original proposal is available here.

Last month I commented on the growth in the Mobile Internet. More evidence of this was revealed on Monday (24th Nov ‘08) when Neilson Online published the first results from Mobile Media View (full press release available here). They are reporting a 25% growth in the use of mobile Internet from 5.8 to 7.3 million users. More shocking is the fact that this surge in uptake occurred in one quarter (Q2 to Q3 2008). It is probably not surprising that just over 50% of mobile Internet users are aged 15-34.

So what is this mobile generation surfing for? Kent Ferguson, Nielsen Senior Analyst comments that:

It’s interesting to see that BBC Weather, Sky Sports and Gmail are amongst the few sites that have a greater reach on the mobile Internet than the PC-based Internet. This highlights the advantage of mobile when it comes to immediacy; people often need fast, instant access to weather or sports news and mobile can obviously satisfy this, wherever they are.

For me ‘immediacy’ will continue to grow increasingly important for 21st century learners. A common system found in probably all institutions is a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). VLEs are incredibly cumbersome and largely unusable on a mobile device, an issue which developers like Blackboard seem to continue to ignore. In particular Blackboard cannot be used on the very popular mobile web browsers Opera Mini and Opera Mobile because of the reliance on cookies.

Open source solutions provide a glimmer of hope because they can be customised and styled for mobile browsing. This is not to say there isn’t issues, for example,  Moodle will only work with Opera Mini if the installation has cookieless sessions enabled.

There have been some projects which specifically address a mobile VLE. Notably the Mobile Moodle (MOMO) project have gone beyond tweaking style sheets and looked at the fundamental features of a mobile VLE. In particular they have been looking at new scenarios which allow online and offline interaction with Moodle. They have achieved this by developing a small JAVA based application which is run on a students mobile phone. Using this students can login to the institution’s Moodle site download mobile elements, which can include quizzes, use these offline, then resynchronising with the central site.

While I see projects like MOMO as a positive development, at the back of my mind I have the nagging question is the growth in mobile Internet another nail in the institutional VLE. When I look at projects like OU’s SocialLearn (a previous post on SocialLearn is here), you can see the disaggregation of a central system into the integration of a personal system. The fact that many of the existing web applications being used by students in their social life are already optimised for mobile usage can only strengthen this argument.

Notetaking is an inevitable part of any students life. It might be taking notes from lectures or books, planning essay structures, to-do lists and much more. Arguably the most mobile notetaking form is pen and paper. While this medium has many affordances such as micro-mobility, read-write-rewrite and personalisation, there are a number of notable limitations. For example, written notes aren’t easy to index, organising them can be time consuming, sharing notes for collaboration is limited, transportation of large amounts can be troublesome. More students are using electronic devices to supplement  ‘traditional’ notetaking and there is a growing number of specialised notetaking software and web services. Many of these solutions also appear to dovetail nicely against new study styles and ways of working.

One such solution which I’ve been recently test driving is Evernote. Evernote is designed to allow you capture notes (including typed text, handwritten notes, web clippings,  photographs, sound recordings and much more) on a wide variety of devices and platforms, allowing you to synchronise with their online web service. The basic signup is free which gives you a 40MB monthly allowance, which is more than enough for me. Your notes remain private and there isn’t currently a system to share them with other users, you can however email them to friends or theoretically directly to other web services like Flickr and Google Docs (I was unable to directly email from Evernote to Google Docs. I think Evernote is struggling with the upload email address provided by Google).

It is possible to organise notes by tagging them and putting them in different notebooks. All of this information is accessible and searchable by any device with a browser and an Internet connection. Even text in images is indexed where possible making it searchable.

There are of course other note taking tools and other web services you could use. For example you could use a basic text editor and use your email inbox as a repository. There are also standalone packages like Microsoft’s OneNote which you can synchronise with a Window’s Mobile device. What I like about Evernote is they way they have tried to cater for multiple platforms and devices integrating it with an online service which gives me access to my notes anytime, anywhere.

3G mobile operators are experiencing boom time. Having spent billions on a network which was heavily under utilised they are finally witnessing strong growth in traffic. This growth is largely down to the emergence of the new mobile broadband market. Formerly the domain of the business exec and pro-user, mobile broadband is now being marketed to general consumers as an alternative to fixed line connections. This has been achieved by a big marketing push in USB dongles, a recent Ofcom report recording almost a doubling in sales. Up until now operators have tried to entice customers by bundling a ‘free’ laptop or netbook when they sign up for mobile broadband contracts. Its probably not surprising that with these synergistic relationships between operators and manufacturers that a consortium of companies have got together to promote and develop 3G technology integrated inside laptops and netbooks. This move is backed by a $1 billion war chest which will put a new Mobile Broadband logo on a range of devices appearing for Christmas. 

The implications of this are that more students will not be reliant on the network provision provided by their university. They will not be limited by an institution’s Internet filtering, port blocking or other constraints imposed by the institution. It is inevitable that some may abuse this privilege exposing an institution to the risk of students accessing inappropriate material while on university premises but it is hard to see how an institution might prevent this, instead policy will have to  robust enough to define acceptable behaviour and the processes for dealing with any abuses. 

Scare stories aside it looks like more students will be bringing the Internet with them when they come to college or university, and sure if anything institutions will be embracing it. I’m just waiting for the first laptop purchasing programme offered to students by an institution in collaboration with a mobile operator and computer manufacturer.