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 [1] 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 [2] 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 [3] 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 [4] post

2. Future proofing - [5] multimodal web and [6] multimodal messaging. There are some resources, around about multimodal learning [7] Cisco paper , [8] 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 [9] 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 [10] 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 [11] delicious or whatever , thanks !