25/06/2008 by nicola.

Kiwanja.net and Ken Banks - originator of Frontline SMS concept have launched the latest version of the highly innovative Frontline SMS today.

FrontlineSMS is a text messaging platform using a laptop and phone. This concept has already worked in grassroots NGOs in developing countries allowing people with different versions of mobile phones to be able to communicate and work together. It’s a free opensource solution that works locally using a local SIM card to connect on a local GSM network whether large or small groups. An important factor in developing countries being internet access, bandwidth - not required for Frontline SMS - communication that works and doesn’t have to be expensive !

Can it be used for mobile learning and education ? A comprehensive list can be found on the Kiwanja.net mobile database One of the really exciting things about this solution is the speed of development - with low resources, putting it in the hands of people now - so they can do things to improve their lives - now .

Huge thanks to Ignatia without whom I would never have found Kiwanja.net in the first place !

Posted in opensource, Africa, mobile learning | Print | No Comments »

24/06/2008 by nicola.

Today’s announcements about Nokia buying remaining shares in Symbian and the creation of an open Symbian foundation, reported in various places, including Pocket Lint and TechCrunch It will include Symbian, S60, UIQ, MOAP(S).

According to the whitepaper released by the new foundation, it will have backwards compatibility to Symbian OS 9 and S60 3rd edition and will support environments including Symbian C++, POSIX C (whatever that is), C++, Python and Web. It also claims that it will provide integration for other environments including Java, FlashLite and Microsoft Silverlight.

Be interesting to see what happens over next year alongside Android development from the Open Handset Alliance. So what does this mean? Ajit’s post last year, about open source and open standards explains some of the issues including licensing and interoperability.

Posted in mobsessed, mproject, opensource, Mobile phones | Print | No Comments »

24/06/2008 by nicola.

3 blog posts in 24 hours, must be twitter withdrawal, I wonder if there’s patches…

No more emotional ranting here I think. What a difference a few days, a few contacts with a few people can make !

Also I joined this community yesterday - if ever needed an example of how technology can enable conversation around very ‘difficult issues’… I have a lot to understand about these issues and its nice to find somewhere away from BBC or Al-Jazeera too.

Visit mepeace.org

Posted in middleeast, Technology | Print | No Comments »

23/06/2008 by nicola.

Wonderful things on there including 100 ways to succeed and 50 Have Yous. There’s also a fantastic community - the conversations around posts are great and he has Cool Friends.

My favourite ones this year so far are Don’t know where you’re going, so what, get going anyway! , Get out (I like people telling me to get out of the office now) and this week’s All at once where he mentions getting going quickly and getting on with everything at once.

Posted in professional | Print | No Comments »

22/06/2008 by nicola.

SMS - found a brilliant SMS tutorial from developers home where I first learnt some xhtml-mp and basic when trying out mobile web coding last year. Understand some of the differences between how to send SMS between phones and pc, but have temporarily stalled - because in order to practice SMS commands - need to buy a GPRS modem and I’m still trying to find the right one I need.
Predictive text - still not got any answers, someone suggested something about using ’spell’ feature but I still can’t get it to recognise html tags etc

Priority is programming languages - attempting to learn at speed - in order to see if can do something with open source (Android, LiMo…) and / or standalone, downloadable app for mobile - so need python (S60s), Java and C++ (others) - have started learning python - using two great online tutorials/books:

Byte of Python
Learning to Program

Am not in a position to output anything much yet - do not think that realistically going to achieve python, java, c++ by September but will see. Going to Open Tech day soon, so will be attempting to look at linux too before then.

So in summary - still don’t know if can manage to ‘magic’ SMS message into a web page without resorting to having to do something via the web such as mobile ftp. Am currently trying to stay away from covering mobile & multimodal web yet i.e. if you want to do something on the mobile web, you need web connectivity, bandwidth and a compatible mobile device, so already you would not be designing an app accessible by everyone.

Links are scattered but everything so far related to this project can be found on this feed. Thanks to a great post on Ignatiawebs, about Zoho, have started trying to use that for this project but nothing of use to share from there yet.

Posted in mobsessed, mproject, mobile web design | Print | No Comments »

20/06/2008 by nicola.

Two situations have happened in the past couple of years where over enthusiasm has resulted in recklessly agreeing to do things which later leave me feeling embarassed and frustrated.
1. Last year - started having early discussions with a person about designing a website for a charity - via a social network, not through the UN online volunteering which is my usual ‘channel’. It all sounded ok at first, was approaching fairly cautiously but at some point I seemed to think it was ok. Hadn’t reached a point where actually agreed to start anything. Just one thing, can’t remember exactly what it was now, but it rang a faint alarm bell, so I decided to google the person and found some references to this particular person on some scam sites.
2. Yesterday met with 2 very nice people who are doing some research into collaboration / collaborative tools and we did have a really great chat. However later found out when got home that the company that they are doing the work for, a large company have previously had a commercial operation which involved staging events - legitimately - but during those events, the nature of those businesses / commercial activity being carried out is something that I personally don’t approve of - at all.

Would like to think that have enough on and offline life experience to stop making bad judgements, but apparently not.

Has 1) made me want to stop volunteering online ? NO WAY. Could 1) ever occur again ? hope not.
What about 2) ?

We have been doing some very experimental stuff with second life at work and one of the students has been researching ethics in second life. We have been discussing how easy it would be have discussions / do stuff with no-one being able to really trace back what was either discussed or done. I am definitely one of the web / online collaboration fans and actively promote this but the reality is that more online collaboration can make it easier for people with crappy motives to carry out their crappy ideas.

I decided to delete my twitter account last night - I will miss the interaction with a mostly amazing bunch of people but there are also a whole bunch of people in my network that I have got no clue about and the idea that even one of them could do something awful makes me feel sick. I don’t know whether I would restart with twitter or not. At one point last night, I was questioning my entire ‘web / online’ use and networks I am in - whether to stay in them or not, whether to shut down the website, this blog etc

I don’t think that would be a sensible approach. There is no doubt that widening access to information and people is of greater benefit - providing networks where people can find, talk, share with others is a great thing and there is the bad side, but hopefully sharing these kinds of things online can lessen the impact of bad stuff being carried out too.

Had a nice ending to this day at least - doing some web2 stuff at work and just asked around our regular VLE user mailing list (we don’t have a formal learning technologies network group ‘online’ formally yet at Surrey, but on its way) if anyone using blogs for either personal or in their teaching / learning and have been flooded with enthusiastic emails from people who have thought about, really want to find out more or have made a start - this was totally unexpected and very cool

Posted in media, Technology, eLearning | Print | No Comments »

16/06/2008 by nicola.

Learning Circuits Big Q for June is Second Life Training?

This video shows an example of problem based learning in Second Life. For more details of the PREVIEW project, there is a blog available which has more videos, screenshots etc. Professor Maggi Savin-Baden at Coventry University is directing the project.

Posted in virtual world, eLearning | Print | No Comments »

07/06/2008 by nicola.

This is probably going to be a very boring post but I have various strands of thoughts which are circling in my brain kind of randomly, am going to attempt to connect and explain so if you did want to, could hopefully follow my train of thoughts so far.

Background / context:
Jan 2005 When I decided to start my web design qualification - why - was doing eStuff (incl eLearning), knew some but not enough about tech side, was more interested in mStuff (incl mLearning) and how things were changing with the web - i.e. more of web2 apps seemed to appear then. I decided back then I wanted to try and do something interesting with mobile web and mLearning at the end of it. So decided to do a web qualification i.e. computer foundation / some Internet architecture / eCommerce / web design & little bit web dev, so planned path was web - mobile web - mobile learning.

Also during some of 2005/06 was in an eGov role in Poole - this role was about helping people working in the council to eEnable / transform (seeing as its now called Transformational Government) front end and back end of creating, processing and publishing of information and advice to the public. UK central government had provided a grant to all local councils to help them ‘digitise’ and there were 54 different ‘projects’ to be achieved. eLearning was not one of these but I was following some of the developments through reports like Becta’s emerging technologies series which had very useful information about trends.

Accessibility was a key issue then too because by enabling information in digital / electronic formats - i.e. information and interactions being available to everyone is a good thing, not to mention the legal implications being a public sector organisation. The key being people want choices about how they access information which may depend on context, purpose, location etc.I was spending a lot of time having lots of interesting discussions with people across the council, about different types of information and on devices that it could possibly be displayed.

Some of these discussions were with Poole Forum which was a group set up for people in Poole with learning disabilities and we were talking about various different devices and ways of accessing information. So kind of areas thinking about then were device independent web access and learning - was it possible to design and publish information that could be displayed on as many appropriate devices as possible, using just one method of development. Not sure that it is actually possible to do with one method because mobile devices more complex now but will be finding out I guess….

So now - 5 strands of thoughts
1. Backwards compatibility - text, SMS messaging and SMS web as per previous post

2. Future proofing - multimodal web and multimodal messaging. There are some resources, around about multimodal learning Cisco paper , articles . As with the lovely “web2.0″ multimodal can mean different things to different people. My context for this being multimodal web & messaging only, so I understand it as….a future extension of mobile web and learning - giving people choice over how they interact and use information and for the purposes of this little project, looking at voice-text only.

A multimodal browser will allow multiple types of input or output using a range of options - keyboard, touch, voice etc I will be looking at Xhtml + Voicexml (x+v) markup languages. I first heard about Voicexml from mobile design expert Barbara Ballard who has written lots about class based design and mobile usability - what kinds of apps are fit for what purposes and contexts etc I will be using her recent book on designing the mobile user experience to find out more.

More on multimodal to follow in next post.

3. Stand alone app vs web app - in 2008 which is going to be better and for what purpose in terms of creating, distributing and users accessing….who is the target audience for the app and who is creating it, using what device.
4. Mobile app vs pc app - is it needed at all - as above with multimodal what is the context and need.
5. Development of app - open source (Android) v …anything else which isn’t ! However can’t go near an open source community until have more web dev knowledge, I don’t think they’d appreciate someone coming along and saying what is linux all about then
6. If I had time would be looking at handwriting recognition - text but this is out of scope for now i.e I would like to finish what am doing by end of summer.

What I want to do
Create a couple of small mobile apps - bearing in mind the above 5 strands and document the process on here. I will not be documenting any other bits relating to any other learning technologies on here before September at earliest (except when I can’t help myself), its going to be tech and some random bits of carpentry stuff. First app as in previous posts is a mobile editor and depending on time, 2nd app would be a mobile screen capture app.

If anyone knows of any good resources on any of the above, would love to hear from you re delicious or whatever , thanks !

Posted in mobsessed, mproject, opensource, mobile learning, mobile web design | Print | No Comments »

02/06/2008 by nicola.

Decided to see if could happily write web pages using text messaging for initially three reasons:
a) If could put tags used regularly in predictive text it would mimic web editors already in existence on pcs
b) Templates - can easily save templates of familiar tags to save retyping each time and just delete any not needed. If a phone doesn’t have templates then can save in drafts each time and make a new message from it.
c) Ease of use on multiple handsets - different manufacturers

Why?
Still looking into options for writing web pages on the go - such as a notes editor but this will be better possibly. Some considerations of mobile web editing vs pc web editing that I discovered, below. Should also mention that had absolutely no knowledge of predictive text before this weekend, other than its existence.

Mobile
Tend to have creative thoughts on the go, do not always have laptop or pc near to hand so useful to record when thinking about them

Predictive text - entered loads of tags (can include up to approx 20 characters), don’t know if it can’t recognise words which start with symbols or its my own incompetence - but it would only pick up the words / letters inside tags so didn’t actually work. Am asking around various places to see if this is possible or not. It would be so useful to use predictive text in this way and I guess it can’t be too hard ?

Using a template and without predictive text was able to type around half a page of code before either pc or laptop had booted up

Some character limits for SMS messaging (depends on who SMS with etc) might mean paying for more than one SMS for a whole page.

When needed a bigger screen, was able to take advantage of a bigger screen than my monitor. Have looked into mobile projectors, found 3 companies but so far no definite news on release dates/pricing into models or as separate items for this year. So used TV out cable for phone and voila!

What I especially liked too, is that could mess around with colours / themes on phone to find ones that were more comfortable on my eyes, although the attached was fine too.

You can use on a digital tv if you have a DV IN socket or if like me you’ve got older tv with no DV IN; have DVD player/recorder/set top boxes all hooked up to a scart unit, can connect through the DVD player:

You may be able to do with other similar AV connection cables / stereo jacks too. TV out is a fairly new feature on phones - available on a few Nokias and have heard rumour that Sony Ericsson are putting as standard in all their new phones - don’t know for others. If anyone out there spending time right now, in hotel/BB rooms with tvs, would be interested to know if they have DV in ?

PC
There is a keyboard so fingers may be able to move more flexibly and enter coding more efficiently - also a range of sophisticated editors (e.g. highlighting rows and tags so can pinpoint errors etc) out there already.

Better for scrolling long rows of text if not using a tv screen or projector.

Getting it out there - SMS to web
Still trying to work out best way of sending SMS to web - at the moment, doesn’t appear to be an easy way of sending directly to my own webspace - many apps exist for sending from web to phone but not other way round.

SMS blogging is option because less likely to have character limits but then would have to cut and paste code into separate web page and upload into your own webspace - which is a pain. If you have set up your own SMS gateway there may be a way of avoiding this but I don’t know enough about the how, yet, to understand if it can be done.

Templates created so far (approx 15 mins to create)
XHTML transitional
CSS
RSS
These three include the most common tags that I have used when writing stuff.

Have done a PHP mini one but seeing that all I know is how to write Hello World - that is all there is in it.

Please let me know if you would like a copy of templates & provide cell/mob no - happy to SMS through if of use. Going to stick with this for now, could be very useful for snippets at least.

Posted in mobsessed, mproject, mobile web design, web design | Print | No Comments »