The Australian Blogging Conference September 5, 2007
Posted by Leonard Low in Events, Moblogging.1 comment so far
This looks like a terrific opportunity to meet other edubloggers from across Australia, for an innovatively conceived and executed event. The Australian Blogging Conference will be held at the Queensland University of Technology on 28 September 2007, and will take on an informal approach, with discussions on various topics pertinent to edubloggers and edublogging.
With sufficient corporate sponsorship, the organisers are hoping to make the event free for participants - just as with blogging, a free and open sharing of ideas.
(via Learning Technologies)
technorati tags:m-learning, mlearning, mobile learning, mobile-learning, mobilelearning, education, teaching, learning, conference, australian, blogging, qut, queensland, university, of, technology, queensland university of technology, tertiary
An Introduction to Moblogs in Education September 3, 2007
Posted by Leonard Low in Applications, Mobile Phone, Moblogging.2 comments
Here’s my introductory presentation for today’s National Networks Elluminate session on Moblogs (12:00 noon AEST). If you’re not sure what a moblog is, or how they can be used to support and enhance learning, you can come and join the session here when I present it… otherwise, check out the slide show below. 
[slideshare id=102029&doc=an-introduction-to-moblogs-in-education2742&w=425]
technorati tags:m-learning, mlearning, mobile learning, mobilelearning, mobile-learning, moblogs, moblog, moblogging, education, teaching, mobile, learning, australian, flexible, framework, aflf
Could 3D GPS Enable Game-like Situated Learning? August 27, 2007
Posted by Leonard Low in Moblogging, Products, Situated, Social.4 comments
GPS (the Global Positioning System) uses satellites to help users to navigate, with accuracy as good as half a metre or so. But while most of us are happy to have a simple 2D or “tilted” fake 3D GPS display to guide us, Asia is developing GPS systems that look more like first-person video games:
If this technology becomes more widely available, it could be terrific for educators. Imagine being able to create virtual “learning checkpoints” which exist in a student’s GPS/cellphone/PDA that they can visit to “collect” learning experiences. These checkpoints could show up as different hovering icons in the 3D display, rather like this screenshot from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, where an “enterable doorway” icon is shown behind the character:
A learner could physically walk around locating checkpoints, which could trigger all kinds of activities on their mobile device: for example, a video or animation (e.g. explaining a feature of their physical location), a link to an internet resource, a discussion (perhaps using video or audio), or an assessment. A learner could also simulate walking around physically - it would be just like walking around in a video game - to visit or preview some of these resources without actually being there.
Even more exciting: perhaps GPS units could also upload location data for each student involved in a particular learning stream , so that you could see the avatar of other learners physically or virtually visiting various checkpoints on your GPS simulation. If you were physically at a site with other learners, you could identify them from their avatar, and could have a real-life discussion about the location you’re visiting; if you’re visiting virtually, you could ask questions of real-life people, actually at the scene, who could upload their own images, videos, or comments from the site to help other learners.
And unlike a video game, where you run around collecting fake points and accomplish made-up missions, imagine immersive, real-life games where students collect real and authentic learning towards actual qualifications…
technorati tags:mlearning, m-learning, mobilelearning, mobile-learning, mobile learning, gps, 3d, games, immersive, situated, learning, education, moblogging, teaching, virtual
Mobile Blogging + GPS data = Locoblog August 13, 2007
Posted by Leonard Low in Applications, Mobile Phone, Moblogging, Photo, Products, Web 2.0.1 comment so far
Further extending the concept of blogging beyond blogging mobile-ly (moblogging), Locoblog automatically uses embedded GPS data in uploaded images to associate each image with a location as soon as it is uploaded; these locations are then viewable on a Google Maps map embedded in a viewer’s web browser, where they can be browsed sequentially or visually (using the map).
It’s a pretty neat concept, although I’d like to see several few features added to make it a really *great* tool:
- The ability to add text to an uploaded image to provide commentary and context for the images
- The ability to add a textual description and sample image for each “journey” and display these chonologically, to allow the various journeys to be browsed like blog posts
- The ability to either personalise the presentation and content of each blog; or syndicate/embed the locoblog content in another, customisable blog (e.g. WordPress).
- RSS Syndication for each blog.
Despite having some limitations, it’s worth checking out if you have a GPS-enabled mobile or an external Bluetooth GPS receiver.
technorati tags:locoblog, location, based, blogging, moblogging, photos, gps, m-learning, mlearning, mobile learning, mobilelearning, mobile-learning
Using a Mobile Phone as a Free, Wireless Webcam August 10, 2007
Posted by Leonard Low in Applications, Mobile Phone, Moblogging, Products, Video, Wireless.4 comments
If you own a Nokia mobile phone with a camera there’s a chance you might be carrying around a wireless webcam in your pocket. A free, newly released (beta) software bundle for Symbian 60 v.3.0 and v.2.0 mobile phones now allows you to use your mobile phone as a webcam for your laptop or personal computer.
Wwigo, from software developer Motvik, is a free application which turns your mobile phone camera into a wireless Bluetooth webcam. It installs a “receiver” application on your PC as well as a webcam application on your mobile phone, and the video captured by your mobile is wirelessly transmitted to your PC. The video that is transmitted to your PC can be used in Skype, Yahoo Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, YourTube and Grouper applications for vlogging or video chat, and the quality is as good as - or better - than any off-the-shelf dedicated webcam.
However, because there’s no wires attached to your mobile phone, you can use and move it within a 10m radius of your PC while capturing video to your PC the whole time. And because the video is being recorded on your computer - not on your mobile phone - it doesn’t matter how much memory you have on your mobile phone; the length of the video capture is only limited by the size of your computer’s hard drive - not your phone’s memory.
My phone, a Nokia 6110 Navigator, isn’t listed as a compatible phone model, but it worked fine with Wwigo. Video quality was first class: as good as my $190 dedicated, top-of-the-range webcam at home.
If you’ve been looking for a way to record your lectures or presentations using your organisation’s networked computers, this could be the solution for you. You don’t even need to carry a laptop with you around campus: just your mobile phone and a Bluetooth USB dongle to plug into your organisation’s computers, to save your recorded sessions directly to your computer or your network.
Here’s a test snippet captured using Wwigo; the quality is somewhat degrated by the conversion on YouTube:
technorati tags:Wwigo, Motvik, Bluetooth, Wireless, Video, Webcam, M-Learning, Mlearning, Mobile-Learning, mobilelearning, mobile learning, education, freeware
Trying out Global Positioning Systems (GPS) for M-Learning August 7, 2007
Posted by Leonard Low in Applications, Mobile Phone, Moblogging, Photo, Products, Record, Situated, Web 2.0.5 comments
Global Positioning Systems, or GPS, provide a means of determining a person’s location and altitude on earth to within a metre or so. They are commonly used in car navigation systems to allow the driver to receive instructions to a location, but they have other applications which are being pursued by other mobile device manufacturers such as camera makers (to enable photos to be tagged with location data about where the image was taken) and mobile phone manufactuers.
Nokia, in particular, has recently invested millions of dollars in GPS research as well as buying a number of companies associated with GPS technologies, and have started introducing GPS as a built-in feature in some of their handsets.
I recently acquired a Nokia 6110 Navigator - a slim slider phone with a large screen and built-in 2 megapixel digital camera - for free, when I renewed my A$49-a-month Optus contract, and having now used it for a month or so, it’s probably the best phone I’ve owned for years. This handset features a built-in GPS receiver, which allows me to get free voice directions when I’m driving, cycling, or walking around, as well as a full visual map display. It’s as good as many dedicated in-car GPS systems I’ve played with.
___
Because the GPS is built on the Symbian Operating System used in most Nokias, the GPS can also be extended to work with third-party applications… and this is where it starts to get interesting for m-learning. Applications can be developed for this phone which utilise the GPS system for recording location data.
One application I’ve played with is Sports Tracker, a free application from Nokia Research Labs. This allows me to record my workouts - walking, cycling, skiing or jogging, for example - and analyse the data later. The application also displays real-time performance graphs, such as my speed at various points in the route, in both numerical and graphical form. This requires surprisingly little memory to accomplish; a 1-hour session takes only 45kB of data to record on my phone.
___
An application like this would be immediately useful for learners in any field where analysing location, speed, or altitude over time would be useful; those involved in the Sports/Fitness industries, aviation, or delivery services, for example.
What makes the application even more useful, however, is that the data can be exported in various formats, including the industry-standard GPX format. This means that I can use the GPS data to accurately determine exactly where media I create has been created. For example, using the free progam GPicSync, from Google, I can determine the locations of my photos along my route, and view the context of the images using Google Earth’s 2D and 3D views, which allow panning, zooming, and rotation.
This application makes GPS useful for many other areas of learning, including sciences such as forestry, botany, zoology, biology, environmental science and forensics; as well as some you might not immediately think of such as marketing and advertising (taking pictures of advertisements and their locations), architecture, and logistics.
2D view in Google Earth, showing my walking route and the locations of the photos I took. Other data can be superimposed such as roads, points of interest, and other locations in Google Earth:
3D view in Google Earth. 3D is activated using the controls visible in the top right corner of this image. You can pan, zoom, and rotate the image to see “around” 3D objects.
If a number of photos are taken in one location (or close to each other) they can overlap; Google Earth “splits” these when you click on the overlapping icons to make selecting the phto you’re interested in easy:
Clicking on a photo icon brings up a view of the photo taken at a location:
Update: You can now download a demo of a Google Earth KML file with GPS-tagged photos in my file-sharing box in the right margin: the file is called “Mogo Zoo Google Earth Demo.zip”
technorati tags:nokia, sportstracker, gps, 6110, navigator, mobile, phone, cellphone, gpicsync, google earth, geolocation, m-learning, mlearning, mobile learning, mobilelearning, mobile-learning, gpx, photo
Paper Blogging - more ideas! April 30, 2007
Posted by Leonard Low in Applications, Moblogging, Pedagogy, Record, Relate, Social.6 comments
Sue Rockwood at the “No Matter, There” blog has had a go at the paper blogging activity, adding her own ideas to the activity such as a “blog board” which makes for a colourful and interactive display. Her own insights into why paper-based simulations serve as a useful tool in demonstrating and explaining technology concepts, and her own ideas (e.g. for a paper-based “safe chat” simulation), are worth reading, and it’s great to hear her feedback on how the activity went for her classes.
Great stuff, Sue! If anyone else is interested in having a go at a paper based simulation of social software, you might like to read Sue’s posts for some great ideas.
(Image: 
Sue Rockwood, some rights reserved)
technorati tags:paper blogging, simulation, education, blog, moblog, moblogging, blogging, m-learning, mlearning, mobile-learning, mobile learning, mobilelearning, social, web 2.0, social web
Workshop Activity: Paper Blogs March 16, 2007
Posted by Leonard Low in Moblogging, Pedagogy, Resources, Social, Web 2.0.23 comments
I came up with this activity to demonstrate to teachers what (mo)blogs are, how they work, and why they can be such a powerful strategy for empowering and engaging learners. I’ve used it on a number of occasions - first for a Social Web Professional Development Day in July 2006, and most recently, last Friday, at a Professional Development workshop on M-Learning, for the University of Canberra. I’m pleased to see it has also been used by others I’ve taught it to, as a fun and accurate way to explain blogging - and it doesn’t even need a computer!
Objective:
To provide a hands-on, interactive explanation of (mo)blogging, and the way that blogs can be used in education as powerful learning tools.
Participants:
For a group of 6 or more workshop participants. The bigger the group, the better and more fun.
Materials:
- A5 sheets of Paper - one per participant, and preferably in many colours
- Writing implements - lots of colours of ballpoint pens and/or colourful textas
- Post-It Notes - I use 47.6 x 73mm ones. If you can find some colourful ones around this size, so much the better.
Procedure:
- Place the Materials (listed above) in the middle of the activity space. Explain that this represents a Blogging Site: a place that provides you with all of the tools you need to set up and publish a blog.
- Invite participants to choose a sheet of Paper for themselves in any colour, as well as a pad of Post-It Notes and some Writing Implements. Explain that this represents how blogging sites allow users to customise the appearance of their own blogs, and personalise them.
- Tell the participants that they are about to write their very first blog post. (I like to get participants to blog about “Food and Drink” for this activity, because everyone has their own favourites, and it makes this exercise more fun; but you might have your own topic in mind). Ask them to write a paragraph or so about their favourite food or drink, and to draw a picture of it.
- Ask participants to also “tag” their post, by adding some summary information at the bottom: for example, whether this item is served hot or cold; whether it is a food or a drink; or whether it is served as an entree, main course, or dessert.
- Now everyone puts their posts back in the middle, and you invite participants to each take someone else’s post. Ask them to comment on the content, by writing their comments on Post-It Notes and sticking them onto the original post: for example, do they agree or disagree with the original poster’s favourite food? Do they like the picture that the original poster drew? Tell them that blogs allow this kind of commenting” by readers, which can help learners to consider new ideas and reflect on their own in new ways.
- Get participants to keep putting their commented posts back into the Blogging Site for others to read and comment. They are allowed to review their own blogs at any stage and remove comments they don’t think are useful, or comment on each others’ comments, too. When this has gone on for a little while, and all of the blogs have at least a couple of comments on them, get everyone to put all the blogs back in the middle and to find their own. The multicoloured paper helps to make this much simpler. They should have lots of fun reading their comments!
- Explain that this is what social software, such as blogs, is all about: sharing and exchanging ideas to build new ideas and new knowledge.
- Get everyone on their feet, and ask anyone whose food or drink is (or could be) served hot to stand on your left, and everyone else to stand on your right. Explain that this demonstrates how “tags” or “categories” are used to organise information in blogs, which are usually also searchable, to make it easy to discover new information in other people’s blogs.
- As a final (optional) activity, ask everyone to write another (brief) blog post on another favourite food or beverage, and to come and stand in front of you when they finish. Explain that most blogs allow readers to subscribe to them in various ways - with RSS being the most popular - which allows readers to be immediately informed if a blogger updates their blog, without having to visit each site.
You can certainly expand on and vary this activity to suit your participants, but this sequence communicates most of the important principles of blogging, without a computer in sight, and uses visual, auditory and kinaesthetic aspects to engage learners with all learning styles, which makes this a very fun activity for all.
technorati tags:workshop, activity, paper blog, exercise, moblog, moblogging, m-learning, mlearning, mobile learning, mobilelearning, mobile-learning, blog, blogs, bloggin, moblogs, education, teaching, learning, teachers, learners, students, university, training, tertiary, professional development, clcommunity, networkedlearning
Taking better pictures with camera phones March 15, 2007
Posted by Leonard Low in 2D Barcodes, Mobile Phone, Moblogging, Photo, Technical.1 comment so far
Flickr’s camera analysis pages (which uses embedded EXIF information from uploaded images to determine which devices users are taking photos with) have documented the surge in popularity of camera phones. Camera phones are rapidly improving in quality and functionality, and their ubiquity and capability are making them a popular device for capturing images, even amongst dedicated media afficionados.
In m-learning, camera phones provide a ubiquitous tool for capturing, sharing, and reflecting on learning experiences, using web 2.0 tools such as moblogs. They can be used to capture images or video for assessment purposes, or, beyond photography, camera phones can be used to access information and resources through 2D barcodes.
That’s why this article on taking better pictures with a camera phone, is useful for educators interested in utilising camera phones as a learning approach. Passing these ideas on to learners could help them to maximise the quality of the photos they take using the cameras they’re already carrying around in their pockets. In summary:
- use well-lit subjects;
- get in close;
- keep the phone still;
- take the best image first, and edit with special effects later;
- don’t throw away “mistakes”;
- avoid using digital zoom;
- experiment with White balance;
- take loads of shots and experiments;
- follow rules of composition - and then break them;
- keep your lens clean;
- observe camera phone ettiquette;
- rename your images; and
- use the highest available resolution on your camera phone.
Read more at the main article here.
(via SolSie.com)
technorati tags:mlearning, m-learning, mobilelearning, mobile-learning, mobile learning, camera phone, cameraphone, photography, moblogging
Latest Opera Mini Browser for Mobiles released January 9, 2007
Posted by Leonard Low in Applications, Mobile Phone, Moblogging, Products, Web 2.0.add a comment
So exciting! According to the Pocket Picks blog, Opera Mini, which I think is the best mobile internet browser around, just got better. Its latest release includes features such as RSS feed bookmarking/reading, photo blogging, email, and support for secure sites (e.g. internet banking and online stores).
Not only is Opera Mini the best browser for mobiles that I’m aware of, but it’s available for nix. You can download it for free via SMS, direct to your phone, from the product home page: http://www.operamini.com/, or via WAP or PC download here.
Fans of Samsung phones will also be delighted to know that Samsung and Opera recently signed a deal that will see Opera providing the web browser for Samsung phones. With Samsung already making groundbreaking innovations in mobile phone design and component development, Samsung are certainly attracting my attention - if they keep up the pace, Nokia will have to pick up the pace to stay ahead in the game.
technorati tags:opera, mini, mobile, web, browser, rss, reader, free, m-learning, mlearning, mobile learning, mobile-learning, mobilelearning
