Mobile Learning

Here’s a cool idea that may be too late for most people to use as a gift before Christmas, but could also have some applications in education.  Remember flick books?  Those little books you flicked through to re-create an animated sequence?

Well, FlipClips is a service that can convert your short movie clips into full colour flick books.  There’s a range of sizes, with the “greeting card” size (4.25″w x 3.25″h x 50 pages) currently going for just US$6.99 each (although shipping internationally makes these considerably more expensive for those of us outside the USA… )

Apart from the sheer coolness of the concept, I suppose this idea could be used as a mobile learning resource – a means of providing a short burst of video or animation when and where it’s needed – without a media player (or even a power source)!

technorati tags:flipclips, animation, video, flick, book

The internationally popular MobileCrunch blog speculates it may be the “ultimate mobile media platform,” and it’s the innovation of one of our own, Australian entrepreneur Ben Keighran.

Bluepulse is a free Mobile Web 2.0 application that installs easily on almost any mobile phone (you don’t even need to know what kind of phone you have), and promises the ultimate in mobile multitasking through the innovative use of widgets running within the Bluepulse application. This makes it quick to switch between widgets without losing any data, and the widgets themselves are more functional and powerful than most stand-alone mobile web applications.  There are all the usual suspects: MSN or Yahoo messengers, Flickr, Blogger blogging tools, GMail, Email, chat and weather.  Some others I’ve never seen on any other mobile platform before include traffic camera locations, and a blood alcohol tester.

MobileCrunch has the scoop:

Looking at bluepulse 2.0 in its totality you’re really facing a pretty significant leap forward in mobile application platforms. And make no mistake about it, this is a full fledged mobile multimedia platform that allows users to create a detailed user profile including photos and videos, an ever growing array of mobile widgets that helpyou do everything from checking the traffic or surf to planning what you’re going to watch on the tele tonight (plus digg, flickr, gmail and more), as well as chat in various chat rooms while browsing your new friends “places” while chatting, and last but not least, bluepulse has its own built in messaging application that allows you to text friends AND broadcast messages.

I’ve seen quite a number of mobile applications in the last twelve months and many have been very comprehensive but I do not believe thatI’ve seen a single platform that had as many different functions as bluepulse 2.0; especially not one with the diversity of widgets or the ability to run on so many phones.

You can get Bluepulse on your mobile by browsing to http://get.bluepulse.com/. 

The included widgets already have great potential for use in the delivery of mobile learning strategies, but Bluepulse is also similar to a mobile learning platform for mobile devices I’m currently developing, in terms of its widget-based architecture to enable seamless data sharing between applications such as QR-Code reader, browser, progress/gradebook and learning content. I’ve felt such an m-learning platform needs to be developed, as there’s no existing software out there that’s actually designed specifically for enabling a broad, integrated range of m-learning opportunities.

technorati tags:bluepulse, widget, mobile, mobile phone, cellphone, m-learning, mlearning, mobile-learning, mobilelearning, mobile learning, education, technology, educational, edutech, web2.0, mobile2.0