Mobile Learning

Research firm Gartner have reported a worldwide slow-down in the sale of PDAs, with global sales increasing only 5% in the last year, and Palm not bothering to release a new model in 2006 at all, according to a post on MobHappy.

Smartphones – devices which integrate the functionality of PDAs with mobile telephones – continue to boom in sales, with an increase of 75% in the last year, and a market now eclipsing PDAs 4-to-1.

This emulates my ideas on m-learning platforms – that connectivity is likely to become the “killer app” of m-learning, and connectivity options should be considered vital when choosing a PDA for teaching and learning. The Mobhappy post continues:

Next target for the mobile is the stand alone MP3 player, about to be consigned to a historical curiosity, as one of the fastest product life cycles – from launch to extinction -ever to be launched.

As the storage capacity in mobile phones continues to increase (20GB models are already slated for commercial launch early next year), and with just about every new mobile phone sold now incorporating a range of media capabilities, it may very well decrease the need to own an independant media player.

technorati tags:pda, smartphone, cellphone, mlearning, m-learning, mobilelearning, mobile-learning, clcommunity

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The Sydney Morning Herald (a reputable Australian newspaper) reports: “A 24-hour school with no traditional classrooms and where students use mobile phones and laptops to learn is being built in Sydney.”

The school will support 1700 pupils from kindergarten to Year 12 who will be able to attend flexibly between 6am and 10pm, access their work and lesson materials at any time via the internet, and access online tutorials between 8pm and 10pm.

“Students will come online and enter into a dialogue with their tutors,” said Greg Whitby, executive director of schools in the Parramatta diocese.

…The traditional classroom concept will disappear, replaced by “learning spaces”. The school will be referred to as a “learning community” and teachers will be known as “learning advisers”, Mr Whitby said. “The walls of a classroom become redundant because students are able to access real-time, any-time learning.”

Technology would be a major focus of the school that will boast a “meshed wireless environment”, he said. “It will be an e-learning environment using m-learning [mobile technology] tools.”

This could mean a student might be sitting in the playground carrying out school work via a mobile phone. Laptop computers will be another learning tool.

Is this the world’s first designer m-learning school? Is this a new way of learning that leads the way for teaching and learning? Are computer- and mobile- learning systems, pedagogies, and policies mature enough to support a fully-dependant school of some two thousand staff and students? Are kindergarten students ready to depend on and be supported by those systems?

My personal reaction is that this is a visionary and very brave venture. I believe that m-learning poses new opportunities for teaching and learning that can engage, immerse and empower learners, but I don’t think I ever would have dreamed of something like this coming happening so soon.

It seems an audacious move, but a brief web search shows that Greg Whitby has a track records as an outstanding and visionary educator; he has previously championed the cause of new learning principles and methodologies such as blogs and wikis, and his education office won a prestigious award last month for Business Excellence in Staff Training and Development. He certainly sounds like a good leader, and I hope to be able to report the success of his project in this blog in future.

Thanks my colleague Bec, who brought this news article to my attention!

technorati tags:m-learning, mlearning, mobile-learning, mobilelearning, school, flexible, learning, education, smh, technology, clcommunity, networkedlearning

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Pink Tentacle reports that Aimulet LA, a division of Japan’s Information Technology Research Institute, have developed a cheap, batteryless audio device – that could be used for situated learning.

You hold the small wafer, with an outer shell made from tough, renewable bamboo, to your ear like a cellphone. When you stand over special LED emitters in the ground, the unit receives light signals through special micro solar cells, and converts them into audio messages that are transmitted through a tiny speaker in the device.

The product has already been used at the 2005 World Expo, where Laurie Anderson’s Walk Project installation featured the Aimlet LA to allow visitors to wander through a Japanese-styled garden and listen to poems in four different languages.

The low cost and environmentally-friendly design of the device, which won the 2006 Good Design Award for Ecology Design, means that it could double up an entry ticket, pass or ID card.

technorati tags:aimulet, audio, m-learning, mlearning, mobile-learning, mobilelearning

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“InterLingua Educational Publishing today launched NotePods, its collection of audio downloads for iPods and other MP3 players designed to help students with exams as well as term papers… available for [US]$1.99 each.”  The guides also come with text versions, readable on an iPod as an iPod e-book, and will be accompanied by online content. Full article on the MacNN site.

You can also create your own iPod (text) e-books using this online tool, which takes a web page or text file and turns it into a properly coded iPod e-book, without requiring any programming knowledge on the part of a teacher.  (via Pod Pedagogy).

technorati tags:ipod, notepod, mlearning, m-learning, mobile-learning, mobilelearning, audio, mp3, education, clcommunity, networkedlearning

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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:

5.1.2 Exploit Device Capabilities
[CAPABILITIES] Exploit device capabilities to provide an enhanced user experience.

-W3C, Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0

Contrast this view with the concept of Usability, prevalent in web design philosophy of the mid-1990s – for example, see one of the leading proponents of the Usability Movement, Jakob Nielsen’s, website – which itself is an epitomisation of the principles of Usability. 1990′s proponents of Usability advocated that websites should be made to render simply , correctly, and consistently on the widest possible range of platforms and browsers, through simple and minimalist design that enhances the efficiency of user-computer interaction. For example:

Write your pages for multiple types of Web browsers–to provide trouble-free access to the widest possible audience. The World Wide Web is a multi-platform, non-browser specific medium. It should not matter whether people browse your Web pages using Netscape, Explorer, Opera, Lynx, WebTV, NetPhonic’s Web-On-Call, Mobile Telephones, or Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs, or palmtops, the little computers with screens the size of a credit card). Each browser ought to render your informational Web pages without problems. If a Web page is designed properly, blind individuals, or anyone using text-to-voice or Braille displays, can easily listen to and review your work.

- Goodpractices.com

Current mobile web practice standards encourage content providers to be sensitive to the needs of the “default” delivery context, but provide for an enhanced experience on more capable devices:

Develop sites that target the Default Delivery Context. In addition, where appropriate, use device capabilities to provide a better user experience on more capable devices.

-W3C, Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0

The clash between current mobile web design practices and “old school” usability principles is evident in a report by the Nielsen Norman consulting group, which did a study of mobile web usability and found striking resemblences with the state of the mid-1990s computer-based web (which corresponds with my own theories about strong parallels between Computer-based and current Mobile technologies).

Which brings me to the subject of Graceful Degradation.

Graceful degradation is a principle that has been around even longer than the Internet, and was always my preferred design philosophy over strict Jakob Nielsen-type minimalist usability. In this design philosophy, there is an inherent awareness of how content will change in the absence of device or software/browser capability; and content is designed so that it will render on a less capable device, but will deliver an enhanced experience on a more capable one. Graceful degradation seems to be at the heart of W3C’s Mobile Web Best Practices, but I am concerned that most teachers won’t have the technical skills and knowledge to design and implement gracefully degrading content, or worse, will misinterpret W3C’s guidelines and completely ignore concepts of designing for baseline (reduced capability/legacy) technologies.

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?

technorati tags:lcd, lowestcommondenominator, least, common, denominator, graceful, degradation, w3c, mobile, web, best, practice, mlearning, m-learning, mobilelearning, mobile-learning, usability, interface, design

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Levelator is a free program for Windows and Macintosh PCs to automatically adjust the volume of a podcast sound file to a normalised level. No more fiddling around in Audacity trying to get the volume normalised with your previous podcasts… Levelator will do it for you, saving you hours.

via Learning In Hand.

technorati tags:levelator, podcast, audio, mlearning, m-learning, mobile-learning, mobilelearning

An excellent vodcast (video blog post) by Sue Waters, in which she demonstrates the use of the free audio-editing software Audacity to record, mix and export podcasts (with many examples of her own podcasts throughout her blog site).

One of the things I particularly like about Sue’s blog are her practical demonstrations and interviews with m-learners and m-teachers. Her work experimenting with and documenting standards for educational podcasting (such as optimum quality settings) is also very useful. Well done, Sue!

technorati tags:audacity, mlearning, sue.waters, suewaters, podcast, m-learning, mobilelearning, mobile-learning

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Some recently published primary research papers that help to inform mobile learning approaches and mobile learning policy:

• From the E-Learning Guild, their report on m-learning, published in August this year. More than half of respondents reported that their organisations are using m-learning, and there are a number of other trends that demonstrate the increasing relevance and importance of mobile learning.
• Two reports on mobile life and mobile youth, from the UK (via All about Mobile Life). From the Mobile Youth report: the survey of over 1,250 young people found that 51% of 10 year olds, and 70% of 11 year olds own a mobile phone (with the majority on pre-paid plans), with Nokia, Motorola, and Samsung the three most popular brands among young people (aged 11-17).

technorati tags:mobilelife, mlearning, m-learning, mobile-learning, mobilelearning, mobile-life, e-learningguild, elearningguild

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Kaywa have just released a new beta service that sydicates RSS feeds to
mobile devices and makes then accessible via a QR-Code. Feed2Mobile
generates a unique QR-Code and even a preview of the RSS feed in its
mobile format. Here’s the generated results for this blog’s RSS feed, which I’ll also add to the Mobile page of this blog site.

20218134

technorati tags:RSS, 2dbarcode, qrcode, qr-code, mlearning, m-learning, mobilelearning, mobile-learning, clcommunity, networkedlearning, flexiblelearning

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From M-Learning World, in the footsteps of my previous post on “Why M-Learning is Cheap“, a series of posts on cheap and easy m-learning:

• How to create rapid and cheap mobile learning – text messaging provides advice on using SMS as a learning tool, such as message size, interactivity, and tracking; and provides example learning activities that capitalise on the strengths of text messaging.
• 20 Ideas: Getting students to use their mobile phones as learning tools refers to a blog post by Doug Belshaw, who regularly blogs on the use of mobile technology in primary school classrooms. Ideas include learning slideshows for mobile phones and iPods, educational blogging, podcasting and audio, and file sharing using Bluetooth. Best and happiest of all, Doug has caught on to the potential of QR Codes, via Ewan McIntosh’s blog which followed on from my original post on the potential of QR Codes in education – it seems the word is spreading.
• Finally, a blog post on one organisation who actually saved money by choosing an m-learning approach over a more “traditional” one, using iPods instead of binders to organise and disseminate learning materials.

technorati tags:mlearning, m-learning, mobilelearning, mobile-learning, cheap, easy, education, flexiblelearning, flexible-learning, iPod, cellphone, clcommunity

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