Mobile Learning

Most regular readers of this blog will be familiar with my interest in the use of 2D barcodes as a means of providing a link from a physical object or location to an online resource using an ordinary camera phone.

I’ve just found an open-source Google Code project called ZXing, which is an open-source project to build a cross-platform barcode reader library.  If it succeeds in its aims, it looks like it could become one of the best, most flexible readers available, and because it’s open source, it should be possible to incorporate it into related educational projects such as integration with augmented reality learning resources.

ZXing’s successful implementation to power the Facebook QR Codes application demonstrates its early potential. 

This is one project I’ll be following closely!

Tags: zxing, 2d barcodes, 2d barcode, qr code, qrcode, datamatrix, semacode, reader, 2dbarcode, mobile code, open source, project, opensource, m-learning, mlearning, mobile learning, mobilelearning, mobile-learning, google, barcode, barcodes, facebook

I’ve previously blogged about StudyTXT, a system deployed at a number of New Zealand educational institutions (to whom it is available for free), which allows students to send an SMS and receive on-demand learning and support information on their mobile phones.

It’s a terrific innovation which has plenty of potential in academic settings. Some educators have used StudyTXT to provide brief revision “flash cards” or notes for their students on-demand; but I can also see the possibility for this kind of system to be used to play educational games or mobile quizzes.

But what about the rest of us outside of New Zealand? It’s possible for us to set up customised SMS-response systems by working with a telecommunications services provider, but this can be a pricey or time-consuming exercise.

Which is why I’m delighted to be able to share this tool with you: BaselsReply (v2.0). It’s a small application that runs on an ordinary Windows Mobile smartphone and basically turns it into a message server, with the advantage of being, itself, mobile – you can just take your message server with you and modify it whenever (or wherever) you want to!

You configure your messages by running it in “server” mode, and specifying “commands” and corresponding “replies” in the software. An incoming message prefixed with “br command” (where command is a recognised command will automatically be replied to with the appropriate response.

Use Case Studies

1. Jane’s teacher uses an SMS reply system to provide a weekly summary of ten key terms or concepts learned during that week. Each week, Jane sends an SMS with the message “br vocab” to her teacher’s mobile. She immediately gets her weekly list of terms and concepts to aid her revision and vocabulary uptake.

   Because Jane is able to get this important information on her mobile, she can take it with her anywhere and can even reference it when she meets her classmates around the campus or if she meets her class friends off-campus for study or social time. Although each message is quite short, the cumulative effect over time is to build up a much longer list of vocabulary and concepts that Jane can both revise and reference, anywhere and any time, and she can even forward the messages to any classmates who missed a previous summary.

   Jane’s teacher Mary doesn’t need to send each individual request for the weekly list. Once she sets up the automated message on her smartphone, she can forget about it for the rest of the week while the 80 students taking her subject request the summary or forward it to each other – which ever they prefer. Mary also enjoys the convenience of being able to update the weekly summary anywhere and any time that’s convenient to her – all she has to do is pull out her smartphone and she has all the tools she needs.

2. Ethan is an science teacher who has set up an SMS game for his students. He begins the game by asking them a question, for example: “In scientific classification, to what Family does the cat belong?” The answer is one word, “Felidae”.

   Dylan is studying Ethan’s science course. He doesn’t know the answer right away, but looks it up online and finds the correct answer. He SMSes “br Felidae” to Ethan’s mobile phone, and gets the message “Correct! Where on a cat are the carpal whiskers located?” Dylan wants to find out right away, because his teacher Ethan has offered a cool prize to the first student to complete all of the quiz questions – an autographed copy of Ethan’s memoirs! (Or, y’know, maybe something cooler)…Ethan can set up a series of questions such that each correct answer provides the next question in the quiz. The same idea could be used to generate treasure hunts or physical and mobile learning games.

Download your very own free copy of BaselsReply v2.0 and try out your own SMS auto-reply learning activities with your students! Here are the details:

BaselsReply v2.0 (152kB, Freeware)
Size: 152 KB
Date: January 7, 2008 (Updated)
Type: Freeware
Requirements:
• Windows Mobile 5.0
• .NET CF v2.0 (install this first!)
Author: baselsw
Home: http://monkeyupdates.blogg.se
Email: monkeyupdates@gmail.com
Directions: First install the .NET CF v.2.0 on your Windows Mobile 5 (or better) device; then download and install the BaselsReply .CAB file, available here.

(via Pocket Picks)

Tags: baselsreplybasels reply sms auto response responder studytxt study text studytext mobile learning m-learning mlearning mobilelearning mobile-learning “mobile learning” freeware education e-learning elearning educational technology revision teaching

TechSmith, who are still giving out copies of Camtasia Studio for free, are now also giving away another of their premium products, SnagIt.

Like Camtasia, SnagIt allows you to capture anything you see on your screen and save it and edit it for creating small instructional resources. However, SnagIt can be configured for “one-clicK” access on your computer, and allows you to capture high-quality still images as well as video. You can add effects and instructional text and graphics, and even make your tutorial interactive with clickable areas and text.

Click here to download SnagIt 7.2.5 (English)
Click here to download SnagIt 7.2.5 (German)
Click here to download SnagIt 7.2.5 (French)

Click here for a key to register SnagIt 7.2.5 demo as a fully licensed version.

Because SnagIt outputs interactive Flash files as well as images and video files, it can be used in a number of ways to create mobile learning content for PDAs, mobile phones and media players. It could also be used by learners to document their mastery of a computer-based process or to create content for sharing with other learners.

(via Freebies Blog)

Tags: snagit, camtasia, techsmith, flash, free, video, screen, capture, image, interactive, m-learning, mlearning, mobilelearning, mobile-learning, mobile learning, education, resources, tools

The mainstream media is just starting to get hold of Telstra Australia’s plans for the use of QR Codes to provide links to mobile web content from printed and screen-based media.

According to this article from The Age, the primary driver behind this particular trial is Australian marketing company QMCODES, who hold the exclusive Australian license to the I-nigma reader – the most widely used QR Code reader application used In Japan, where QR Codes are already almost universally used already.

While the write-up focusses on the commercial marketing and advertising potential of QR Codes, it also hints at the social applications of QR Codes to “link” with users’ MySpace or Facebook pages. However, unfortunately, it looks like neither QMCODES nor Telstra have yet realised the enormous potential of QR Codes in education – to link students with mobile-web resources and activities that relate to their physical location or current physical context.

Hmm. I think I’ll try to get in touch with both organisations to see if they’d like to work in partnership with educational technologists to develop solutions for education and training…

UPDATE (14 Dec 2007): I’ve been contacted by Telstra, who’ve clarified that they are aware of the educational potential of QR Codes, but they do not have a partnership with QMCODES. It’s gratifying to know that there are a number of organisations in Australia working on innovating with 2D barcode technology!

Tags: i-nigma, inigma, qmcodes, qrcodes, qr code, qr codes, 2d barcode, 2dbarcode, telstra, nextg, next g, education, technology, m-learning, mlearning, mobile learning, mobilelearning, mobile-learning

This video demonstrates what can be achieved by the convergence of mobile and virtual technologies. Created as a promotion for Wellington Zoo (New Zealand), it allows printed codes to “come to life” using a mobile phone. As you move your mobile phone camera around the code, a virtual 3D model rotates, pans and zooms as if it were an invisible spectre standing on the surface, viewable only through the camera lens:

Download (FLV)

While this demonstration uses a proprietary format for the printed tags, it’s quite possible for other optical symbologies (such as QR Code tags) to be used for exactly the same purpose, since they incorporate orientation information in the tags themselves (the three large squares in the corners of each code), as well as data-link information.

This use of mobile devices also points to the use of mobile devices as future platforms for virtual worlds and educational simulations using tools such as SecondLife and the (open-source) Croquet (and its educational variant, EduSim). In my opinion, we should see touchscreen-interactive virtual worlds appearing on mainstream mobile devices within the next two years – with the corresponding ability for all of us to merge a mobile, virtual existence with our mobile, real one.

The potential applications of such a technology in education could be enormous!

(via Mobhappy)

Tags: qrcode, qr code, edusim, secondlife, croquet, virtual worlds, vr, virtual reality, mobile, phone, cellphone, m-learning, mlearning, mobile learning, mobilelearning, mobile-learning, interactive

I’ve just done the briefest of brief surveys of the web, and documented the mobile phone models supported by the major QR Code reader developers. Together, these free-to-download readers provide QR Code support for almost 1000 different phone models across all of the major phone manufacturers (and many smaller ones).

Download: Free QR Code Readers (2 Nov 2007)

This week, Australia’s largest mobile phone carrier, Telstra, announced that they would be trialling the use of QR Code reader software on mobile phones using their ultra-high-speed Next-G network.

Ultimately, the technology will be used in conjunction with the Telstra website allowing users to share contact details, blogs and messages as part of a social networking system.

“Consumers will have fast one click access to mobile websites, rich streaming media from Bigpond and Foxtel, location based services and localised information from Sensis, all on Australia’s fastest and largest Next G network,” said Telstra group marketing director, consumer marketing and channels, David Moffatt.

(I’m definitely going to try to get in touch with David – the man’s obviously one of the bright sparks at Telstra… indeed, in the Australian telecommunications industry). David continued:

“Consumers could even wear their own barcodes on a t-shirt as a fashion statement which could then be scanned and linked to their personal BigBlog, Facebook or MySpace pages.”

What… like this you mean?

Check out the video of Telstra’s “mobile codes” in action: http://wotnext.com.au/link/direct.asp?id=24127

All in Australian accents.

Which is why it’s puzzling as to why Stephen Downes seems so dismissive of QR Codes! He makes a wild comparison of QR Codes with the proprietary hardware/proprietary encoding CueCat barcode scanner – which wasn’t even a mobile device, but one that was used connected to a PC! Compare this with QR Codes, which are a free (as in beer – and, as in speech) and open platform, work using ordinary camera phones (not CueCat’s laser scanner system), on mobile hardware (not connected to a PC), and I fail to see the connection.

Stephen: may I suggest you buy a mobile phone and try out the technology before you critique it? It seems to be the responsible thing to do if you’re going to post that kind of dismissive commentary on your widely-read blog; and if you’re so easily slating the technology for failure, you might want to research more widely: tens of millions of Japanese already use QR Codes “often” or “sometimes” and the technology is already used for informal learning and informational recall across their society. It would be enormously valuable to the international education community if you became a participant in the research and development of mobile learning, rather than a not-always-accurate onlooker.

(via All About Mobile Life)

Tags: qrcode, qr code, mobilecode, mobile code, telstra, 2dbarcode, 2d barcode, education, mobilelearning, mobile learning, m-learning, mlearning, mobile-learning, teaching, mobile, learning, proximal, situated, nextg, next-g, davidmoffatt

Hooray! Alan Levine (aka CogDog) has a QR Code (perhaps the online equivalent of getting microchipped? )! He’s had a look at Semapedia and now also sports a QR Code on his blog sidebar, which provides a handy link to a mobilised version of his blog feed.

It’s terrific to see other educators adopting and implementing QR Codes to make their own content more mobile and accessible!

Tags: cogdog, alanlevine, qrcode, qr-code, qr code, 2dbarcode, 2d barcode, kaywa, feed2mobile, semapedia

Simply brilliant. Brent Schlenker at the Corporate eLearning Strategies and Development blog has created his pocket version of the E-Learning Guild DevLearn conference guide, incorporating QR Code links. This innovation enables participants to check conference information on their mobile devices, schedule their personalised programs electronically, and annotate each session with brief notes.

The feedback on this simple system has been tremendous so far… Roger Fischer describes this as a “conference Killer App,” and I’m inclined to agree. If this concept was developed further – for example, to enable the attachment of media and longer notes to various conference sessions, and then, to be shared – I think it could become a conference m-learning system people would pay good money for. Which is good timing, since Nokia is willing to pay for great mobile technology business ideas at the moment, with their Mobile Rules competition (get your entry in soon).

Ahem… Handheld Learning 2008? M-Learn 2008? Are you listening???!!!

Tags: mlearn2008, m-learn2008, mlearn, m-learn, hhl08, hhl2008, mlearn08, qrcode, qr-code, qr code, 2008, mlearn 2008, handheldlearning, handheld learning, education, teaching, learning, conference, mobile, mobile learning, m-learning, mlearning, mobilelearning, education, mobile-learning, 2dbarcode, 2d barcode, mobilerules, mobile rules, nokia, event, management

Now I *really* like *this* presentation from Handheld Learning 2007.  Although it’s advocating a proprietary product, nevertheless, the paradigm of using a mobile phone as a creativity tool – and rewarding students for appropriate use of mobile phones as a means of capturing and sharing creative content – is brilliant, and clearly explained in this visual presentation (unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any accompanying audio).

Original video source here.

(via HHL07 Podcast)

Tags: creativity, mobile devices, mobile, learning, m-learning, mlearning, hhl07, handheld learning, handheldlearning, mobilelearning, mobile-learning, education, innovation, technology, apple, davidbaugh, chrismorley, conference, cellphone, mobile phone