Walled Gardens and Mobile Learning January 17, 2007
Posted by Leonard Low in Applications, Mobile Phone, Pedagogy, Products, Standards.1 comment so far
In educational technology circles, there’s been much debate in recent times over the relative merits and drawbacks of controlled, predictable, but limiting teaching and learning environments (e.g. Learning Management Systems), coined “walled gardens” - versus open, creative environments with rather less individual or proprietary control (e.g. social software), coined “open gardens”.
The issue of walled vs open gardens has also been hotly discussed by the mobile device industry, which even features some excellent blogs dedicated to open gardens. In the mobile phone industry the walls around developing and accessing content seemed to be lowering, but, it seems, there are other barriers to surmount in the pursuit of more open access to content and functionality. Doug T writes:
“The new walled garden is not the content you can view on your phone, but rather the applications that you can install on your phone.”
For example, as Sam pointed out in his comments on my iPhone article, the new Apple iPhone will limit the applications (”widgets”) that users can install on it, possibly incurring the wrath of users who seek the freedom to customise their mobile phones however they wish:
“This is a quote from Jobs in the NYTimes:
‘We define everything that is on the phone,” he said. “You don’t want
your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded
three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t
work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.’ “
This definitely dampens my enthusiasm for the iPhone as a potential educational tool; if the latest innovations such as QR Code readers or 3rd party mobile applications can’t be integrated with this new portable digital environment, it makes it considerably less useful for facilitating new, innovative learning experiences. The problem with walled gardens on mobile phones, like this, is that it makes it very difficult to establish new boundaries for a device - to “shape” it to meet our needs. The iPhone currently only has two widgets, for weather and stock prices, both pretty useless for the needs of the average educator or learner (unless, perhaps, you’re studying meteorology or economics!). An open architecture would enable the device to be customised to meet more diverse and relevant needs.
Apple’s products are always innovative, ground breaking, and trend-setting. but I certainly hope that this “walled gardens” approach is one of Apple’s trends that won’t be followed by other handset manufacturers.
(via C. Enrique Ortiz Mobility Weblog)
UPDATE: Darla Mack refers to a great article on “10 ways the Nokia N800 [handheld internet device] is better than Apple’s iPhone“. Leigh Blackall loved the Nokia N770; I reckon he’ll be rapt when he checks out the Nokia 800, which has a few extra goodies, including a built-in Skype video camera. Sweeet. 
technorati tags:open gardens, walled gardens, iphone, customisation, personalisation, m-learning, mlearning, mobile learning, mobilelearning, mobile-learning, open, architecture, widgets
Texts and Stories for Mobiles January 17, 2007
Posted by Leonard Low in Mobile LOs, Mobile Phone, Products, Web 2.0.add a comment
Wattpad have launched a site enabling users to create their own digital, text-based stories, and make them accessible to mobile devices. The text is compressed before being downloaded to the user’s phone, a few pages at a time - strategies designed to minimise waiting time for content.
The Wattpad reader allows users to search for and browse new stories, and download them remotely. Alternatively, stories can be downloaded to a PC and transferred to mobile phones using a cable or Bluetooth connection. Other services, such as Winksite, already allow users to create their own mobile web content, so I guess the particular attractions of Wattbook are the remote search/browse, and the “upload from PC” options that most other services lack.
This kind of service would be well suited to providing short-ish texts (for example stories, case studies, or references), since even with the free PC upload option, I’d imagine it would be cumbersome to read anything very lengthy on a mobile phone screen. However, I could conceivably be wrong in this assumption, as several users have uploaded the complete novel Eragon and other longish print books (e.g. A Short History of Nearly Everything, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Life of Pi) into Wattpad form.
With the PC upload option, it’d be more flexible and powerful if Wattpad were able to save images into their books (even if these could be configured to be stripped out of remotely downloaded books), but other educators may well find this a useful resource nonetheless.
(via Pocket Picks)
technorati tags:wattpad, stories, story, digital, storytelling, mobile web, mobile, web, m-learning, mlearning, mobile learning, mobile-learning, mobilelearning, cellphone, mobile phone, cellular
