Mobile Learning

If you read my previous post on “Choosing a PDA for Teaching and Learning,” you’ll already be aware of the importance of ensuring a mobile device has a good, long-lasting power supply, even if it means buying an extra battery for a device. There’s nothing more inconvenient than running out of power when you’re in the middle of some work; and having students run out of power during a field trip or situated learning activity may not just be an inconvenience, but could waste a valuable learning opportunity.

Part of the power paradigm is how a device is recharged. Pretty much all mobile devices are charged by means of a cable, with power supplied by a mains power socket or a USB port. However, each device can have different voltage, current, and plug form factor requirements, and that means that for extended periods of mobility, it’s necessary to carry a charger for each item. Furthermore, in a classroom situation, it may be necessary to recharge or power several devices at once, requiring multiple chargers for each set of classroom PDAs or media players. It can add up to a lot of bulky, tangled cords.

This could all change from the first quarter of 2007. A new technology from Wildcharge is able to simultaneously recharge multiple electronic devices with different power requirements, just by placing them on a flat, tablet-like surface. Theoretically, that would mean that this could become the only item you would need to carry to charge all of your mobile devices. The recharging platform can be made as thin as a few millimeters in thickness, from both rigid and flexible materials.

Imagine being able to simultaneously recharge your phone, PDA, iPod, and digital camera just by placing them on your desk. It sounds like the stuff of science fiction; but if it lives up to the hype, it could significantly improve the usability of digital mobile devices, and further increase the practicality and potential of these devices for supporting teaching and learning.

The other kind of wireless power for mobile devices that’s planned for 2007 release is the use of fuel cells, running on methanol. My goodness. I can already see an ethanol-powered version becoming wildly popular with young university students, providing the ultimate convergence of a social, mobile tool and an equally social, mobile hip flask…

(via Gizmodo and Crunchgear and SlashPhone)

Update 4 Jan 2007: Visteon are releasing a wireless charger for cars next week.  Looks pretty cool:

technorati tags:power, recharging, recharge, charger, wildcharge, battery

Chirmside Derek at the Light in the Shadows blog recently reflected on mobile learning:

I’m interested in the open source options that allow you to text or pxt into your personal space.

Sakai is just one open source Learning Environment type product I have heard that has mobile connection for students: SMS (Texting) to and MMS (picture from cell phone) to a personal learning space. I’d be interested in anybody who has used this.

If this functionality in Sakai is indeed present, it’s an excellent innovation, and more interesting to me than the (still useful) Moodle for Mobiles extension, which allows mobile quizzes to be delivered to learners’ mobile phones.

I’m impressed that both of these Open Source initiatives already demonstrably exceed the innovation shown by any of the major commercial LMSes in the support of mobile learning. Blackboard’s support of “mobile learning” through its Backpack add-on is just a way to package content for off-line use on laptops, rather than engaging with the pedagogy of m-learning at all, while WebCT has no m-learning capability at all.

technorati tags:sakai, moodle, mms, sms, lmses, m-learning, mlearning, mobile-learning, mobile learning, mobilelearning, lms, education, vle, learning

Semapedia is a project to link the physical world to the digital one, through the use of 2D Barcodes. 2D barcodes are placed on physical objects, and decoding a 2D Barcode with a camera phone provides a user with the Wikipedia article on that object.

There are a number of 2D barcode “formats,” each with various strengths and weaknesses, (the major three being Semacode/Datamatrix, QR Code, and ShotCode). Semacode used to be based on the Semacode method for creating and decoding 2D barcodes; but it seems that the open Datamatrix standard, upon which Semacode is based, has not been developing and innovating as fast, and has not been adopted as quickly internationally, as the Quick Response (QR) Code format, which is widely used in Japan. As a result, Semapedia is shifting towards the use of QR Codes (although Semacodes/Datamatrix will always be supported):

We have changed our 2D code base to QR codes instead of Datamatrix codes so far. Of course, all Semapedia tags generated and distributed up to now STILL WORK and will always work. We consider experimenting with QR codes an interesting new approach because they offer several extended features than Datamatrix codes. Also, the adoption of QR codes with cellphone manufacturers and scanning software providers has increased dramatically in the past 6 months. Our goal is to connect  the real and the virtual in a meaningful and beautiful way. Going with QR codes from here inherits the promise to have more people being able to use Semapedia Tags much faster than if they were based on the Datamatrix standard.

With its obvious educational value, this move by Semapedia brings QR Code closer to becoming a de-facto standard for 2D Barcodes in education.

(via All About Mobile Life)

technorati tags:mlearning, shotcode, qrcode, qr code, qr-code, m-learning, mobile learning, mobile-learning, mobilelearning, datamatrix, data matrix, semacode, semapedia, 2d barcode, 2d-barcode