29/07/2008 by nicola.

Been thinking about this a lot over the last week, whilst starting Kiwanja volunteering and looking at FrontlineSMS, also all the mobsessed stuff I’ve been looking at. So the focus of this post is about ways of looking at SMS that may be used by anyone regardless of where they are and what kind of devices, connectivity they have.

Don’t know if the whole learning technology world has been having these conversations for several years and I’ve just not noticed but - thought I’d write a post about what options I think could work, not work and some of the why. This is not going to be a short and to the point post so I’d escape now if you’re short of time.

How does SMS work?

*Once you press send on your phone, an SMS message flies off to an SMS center which sends it onto its intended recipient. If the recipient is unavailable it will be temporarily stored in the center and re-sent later. On its journey it may have to go through gateways which allow different SMS centers to talk to each other. The storage capability means unlike the web, you don’t have to be connected in order to receive it, which in bandwidth-challenged environments is a communication / conversation enabler. So if you are in a rural area as soon as you come back in range, you can pick it up, without having to connect to anything, it will connect to you.

Sending SMS using a modem

or using your phone/blackberry as a modem, an SMS message follows the same journey off to another phone, except that you can send lots of messages in one go or one message to lots of people (although you will not be able to send lots of messages per minute with a phone acting as a modem).

What can you send with an SMS apart from text?

You can send binary (data disguised as groups of 0s and 1s) files with an SMS (e.g. settings for your phone sent by the operator or manufacturer), multimedia with an MMS message (some limitations currently if trying to do bulk MMS) EMS enhanced messages e.g. messages with pictures, ringtones etc or audio messages e.g you could record your voice and send a message that way. MMS, EMS and audio messages may not be compatible with older phones and MMS will have increased costs per message than a regular SMS text message.

What can you do with SMS messages and where can you send them?

A very good matrix has been compiled by Katrin Verclas at Mobile Active. You can send SMS messages to email inboxes, send SMS messages to talk to web databases using SQL and HTTP queries such as POST**. You can also use SMS with a script of some kind to allow an SMS message to display as a microblog post on a web page, e.g. DIY options on a microblogging thread. There are tools appearing that will allow you to post to more than one microblog.

Now there is a new concept with a web server sitting on your mobile phone, as previously posted.
Mobile Ministry Magazine have recently experimented to see if they could replace a community reaching website with the Nokia mobile web server.

With the webserver on your phone, it has a messaging inbox where you can access all the SMS messages on your phone and you can also send them. It was great seeing all my text messages on a web page though - because it means they are sitting there in html which means I can hopefully do some web magic with them if I can get my hands on the source code ! Not available on older phone models and relies on web connectivity to view on the web.

What can you do with SMS messages in learning that doesn’t involve a technical explanation?

Ok you can have one paragraph off. Note: by technical explanation I didn’t necessarily mean a good one

SMS quizzes - send out questions to groups of people, they send their answers back via SMS
SMS hints, tips, lists revision - sending out key terms via SMS
SMS language exchange - use of SMS messages in the language being learnt, as a conversation. A social-linguistics experiment in Norway has been documented.
SMS collaborative or personal writing - of documents, books etc Also reading - stories like Twittories concept or similar, with SMS ‘updates’ fed through from time to time.

There are many others - John Traxler is an expert in this area and has written loads of papers and articles about using SMS in an innovative way with older phone models. In a recent article he mentioned MobilED project too which uses SMS to help create a mobile wiki - where you can search by sending an SMS message and the server will send back audio results which you can listen to on your phone.

Using SMS for games is possible too, if you can have a text-only conversation, you can easily turn it into something which has a mission or goal.

Can you use SMS to organise your learning?

Txttools provide plugins that work with virtual learning environments. If you are organising your learning in a more personal way, RSS to SMS applications have been around for a few years, one of the more recent and ridiculously named but also looks easy to use is Pingie With things like MobileWebServer and SMS inboxes, I guess its possible to create a mobile widget that could show these (similar to a Pageflakes flake).

So these are just some thoughts about where/when/how SMS could be used within mobile learning. If it fits? Depends partly what you are hoping to achieve, but if you have limited resources, you want to join a larger community of learning now and you don’t have access to a pc, then why not?

*based on the tutorial I’ve been following of late
**POST is a command used to send some information to a web database via a webserver.

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25/07/2008 by nicola.

Damaris B. Sarria has had her astronaut application received by NASA on her How I am becoming an astronaut blog which is full of inspiration with every post, what an incredible journey she has started!

Dizzy Dee mentions if life gives you lemons, organise a festival, amazing photos of lemon statues etc

Beth Kanter has loads of female bloggers on her Blogher post and add this to Janet Clarey’s list its a fantastic group who are sharing thoughts, ideas and inspiration across the web.

Finally, Maricela Morales on Society’s Backbone blog writes about the Isabel Allende Tales of Passion talk from TED this year. I remember this video coming out but never made time to watch until Maricela’s post. I love Isabel Allende - I first came across a copy of Eva Luna, which a lovely girl gave to me in Bodrum, about 12 yrs ago and I have been completely enchanted with her writing ever since.

This video is as amazing as her writing. I don’t agree with all her statements (there are some older and younger men that I would happily pack in a box and mail to another planet but not all) What a deeply passionate, funny and caring communicator she is, entertaining her audience whether writing or speaking, you can see how much she cares in the warmth of her eyes and hear it in the emotion of her voice, telling horrific stories in a calm but strong beautiful way, with so much hope.

And the women in the stories, just….batting back whatever life throws at them, continually defying their challenging circumstances, how tiring that must be…by believing in themselves, turning positive action into changes for themselves and others around them - how courageous:

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23/07/2008 by nicola.

I’ve been following a series of great posts on Tom Haskin’s blog including stress-induced breakdowns, if stressors could speak, putting learners in danger , immersed in consensual torment , circumstantial or chronic anxiety etc I like his ideas of pro and anti-learning ecologies in the workplace.

I was working with one of my colleagues at Surrey in Health and Social Care today, looking at some redesign of modules for the next semester and we were reviewing experiences of the students over the past year. Often the students that sign up and pay for the modules are mature students, maybe never been to university or completed ‘formal’ education for maybe 20+ years, often not used a computer at all before. So they have a lot to absorb all at once, not just the technology and being in the campus environment, but heightened concerns about how they might be seen to others - then after just a few days, they will go into ‘practice’ settings which will often be a hospice or similar health and social care setting.

So potential for stress increases further at this point too with emotions already potentially running higher than normal - and trying to adjust to a new study routine when they may have family at home to manage or other issues to sort. Sounds like possible alarm bells ringing already.

Not surprisingly in this situation, some students have shown signs of extreme stress and as a result of this particular colleague caring enough to try and help, she also changed her own routine, tried strategies for helping the student but if it didn’t appear to be helping, this resulted in higher level of stress for her too - so no one wins ?

Coincidentally yesterday I was at a breakfast session exploring the dark side of personality at work. Andy McBurnie explained about a number of personality tests then went on to explain the Hogan Development Survey which was developed by a couple of psychology professors in the US. It assesses these eleven tendencies that can cause people under stress to develop ‘derailing’ behavourial tendencies which under less stress, would not be an issue. For whatever reason e.g. change of routine, new ‘things’, increased workload etc can ‘trigger’ these derailing behaviour patterns. With people that care enough to help, it may be that even though the behaviour has been ‘triggered’, the person can still quickly return back to a more healthy behavioural ‘place’ where they feel more comfortable and able to cope.

Where Tom mentions about the ecology and environment, the design plays such an important part - for a long part of our conversation today, we were thinking about the design by looking at the emotional journeys that new learners and the tutors might follow over the sessions and thinking about potential trigger points, e.g. if you are a learner in the setting described above, just simply logging into remote email, using the web for the first time, - looking at windows popping up, getting random error messages - might be enough to ‘tip’ someone over the edge and any healthy excitement about starting the course could very quickly get replaced with something more ‘volatile’.

I love the idea of a healthy learning environment, especially for our learners who are themselves learning about working as healthcare professionals and the importance of having people care - in the design, delivery and then hopefully as a result of those, the community learning alongside them.

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22/07/2008 by nicola.

I have recently decided to spend a few hours a week volunteering with Kiwanja.net and Frontline SMS:

“FrontlineSMS is free software that turns a laptop and a mobile phone into a central communications hub. Once installed, the program enables users to send and receive text messages with large groups of people through mobile phones. What you communicate is up to you, making FrontlineSMS useful in many different ways.”

More info about the mobility project and plans for Frontline SMS

I am fairly new to this side of online volunteering, having only done website design / reports / publication work before so I do not have contacts with a lot of NGOs, although will be progressing this over next week or so. I wondered if you also may know of any who might be interested and/or you would like to join in too, please could you let me know via

n.avery@surrey.ac.uk

Thanks !

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21/07/2008 by nicola.

Saw yesterday that Sony Ericsson C905 due out this year will support DLNA. I think Nokia N95 8GB which came out earlier this year also supports it.

Digital Living Network Alliance began in 2003 and now has over 250 companies involved so that technology products can talk to each other. The implications for phones are that they can connect and discover other technological devices using wifi and because of the alliance, more devices will be more interoperable with other devices. You can already do some of this with bluetooth, infrared - I don’t know if anyone else has ever tried printing from a phone using bluetooth, I found the printer in an office, but getting the document sent to it was another matter.

It is aimed at streamlining a home entertainment network but I don’t see why it can’t go further than that - I wonder if you can set up small DLNA networks in education or institutions?

Mobile connectivity to other devices and the increase in gigabytes of memory cards means that you could take larger amounts of rich media content around with you and present or watch them as you need by connecting through wifi.

Why bother when you can put everything on a memory stick?

Suppose you arrive for a session you are presenting but as a result of a conversation with someone on the way or at the event, you suddenly have an idea about changing some of the media in your presentation, if you had a DLNA enabled network, you could quickly connect to the web and download whatever it was you wanted. Or you were having a conversation with somebody and wanted to show them something - you could connect to whatever device and/or the web and quickly demo it.

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20/07/2008 by nicola.

I had a mess around with the internet connection feature on the GPRS modem software - it gives you the option to set up e.g. a connection using Vodafone (i.e. I am with Vodafone) GPRS. Haven’t set one up yet because then had a thought - remembered that Nokia have released a web server recently.

Its available from mymobilesite.net and there are more details on their wiki. I’ve just installed a copy - this screenshot below is what you can see when you open the application.

You can also view options through a browser, this screenshot below is an example of my site which have just set up.

I’ve had a very quick skim through the guide, you can send SMS to the mobile server (although at first glance they appear to go directly to a mailbox) and it says you can create mobile content using html and python, so I will do a followup post once I’ve had a chance to look into further.

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20/07/2008 by nicola.

Its GSM / GPRS / EDGE modem (approx £170 - ouch !) so that I can send and receive SMS, MMS, email and connect to the internet using a SIM card with the modem on my laptop. I am using a great SMS tutorial on Developerhome website - this page explains the basics of sending, receiving SMS and pcs including the AT+ codes to use e.g. AT+CMGS for sending a message.

Hopefully this short video will explain further.

transcript.

I haven’t yet found a way of using SMS to connect to the internet in order to see if can use HTTP and FTP to send an SMS message as a text file to my web server, but without the modem, I don’t think there is another option. There may be a way using Python but in order to find that out, I need to know more Python than I currently do. You can use mobile phones, blackberries etc as modems but you have more limited options such as unlikely to be able to send MMS and concatenated SMS (i.e. when you type a long text message and it gets sent as 2 or 3 text messages).

Text editor
I have found a python editor which is now installed on my phone. It is an application which has the kinds of features that I would like to create in a mobile text editing application, as per the pictures below. As far as I am aware you can’t type html code - its been written for people who wish to develop Python on the fly. In order to make the application work, install by downloading PythonS60 (am using 3rd edition on my phone) and the shell first, then download the python editor .

These three screenshots below show parts of the application. The first shows some of the editing options available on the application - common editing options that you would find in a text editing or coding application for a pc too.

The second screenshot shows options for tabs - with Python, tabs are important - when you are e.g. writing a list of statements / commands you want a pc or phone to perform and you want to write a sublist (e.g. if….else… type ones) it works in Python by using tabs and if you don’t use the right number of them, it will produce an error message. I guess it depends how complex the programming is, I’ve only had to use two tabs to indent so far.

The final screenshot shows how you can use the menu to insert your code into an SMS and send it in a variety of ways.

So, if you can insert text as a file in SMS, then surely there must be some way to send it via FTP once it has gone through to a pc…..I hope.
I haven’t had much of a chance to look at Android SDK yet but I saw they have a sample notepad application too which is cool. Maybe there will be an answer there.

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18/07/2008 by nicola.

Bit later than planned…

On Suzemuse, questioning why 58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school according to a survey and has 10 suggestions for inclusion in the curriculum.

Paula Odhiambo on Global Voices online has Summer Reflections (thoughts from mothers) in Africa about adopting children.

Maricela on Society’s Backbone has an interesting post about women journalists, parallels to women in technology and bridging gender gap issues

A trip to Richard and Judy and being on tv, from wife in the north

Finally, from the beautiful Musings of the Night, some thoughts about writing pages for a personal journal.

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11/07/2008 by nicola.

Good Morning ! Have decided to try a little experiment having recently uncovered an amazing world of blogging by women, which was both new to me and delightful! If there are any men who are already very offended, requests for ‘mazing or Magical Male Mondays will also be considered.

I would like to present a mini digest of some fairly recent, interesting posts written by women that have inspired, moved me and made me think.

In celebration of 60 years of the NHS, a post from Julie who writes about returning back from holiday to her work in the NHS.

Jenny B is blogging about her life as a widow in Oxfordshire and missing the sound of gulls.

Sara on Kitchen Sink Collective makes a timely point about consuming less rather than just reusing and recycling.

Karyn Romeis - whose blog is full of of great stories too, I just love the way she writes, a thought provoking post about gender equality and differences in treatment in the workplace.

Renata Vincoletto has some interesting photos of creatively designed phone booths around Brazil.

And finally, from the neurotic Iraqi wife who relates a story about the conflicts surrounding relationships, beliefs, culture, family…and smoking

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10/07/2008 by nicola.

Summary:

Thoughts from ALT Mobile Learning event in London yesterday - higher and further education colleges to come together and look at some of the mobile learning projects done in the last year or so.

From talking to colleagues there, some other options for using mobile phones beyond learning - e.g. social networking, an institution using bluetooth so when students first come on campus, they can use bluetooth to scan who else is around, networking. Re privacy - some people might hate the idea of turning on their bluetooth and lots of people finding them. So far, it seems to have been positive. Another university using bluetooth to find information as part of campus tours - could always use RFID - small cheap tags - can tag objects - stick them on - can link phone to tag and pull down information onto the phone.

Some institutions in remote areas, looking at SMS - even in areas with mobile broadband, amount of time during day when can actually connect….can’t really connect with either laptop or phone for long periods of time because bandwidth not sufficient or ‘drops’; so looking at SMS

Session - language learning pilot - with mostly Nokia N95s - mobile quizzes, mms, cameraphones, iPOD audiobooks, personal tours, mobile interactive learning objects - created mostly with Flashlite and used Adobe Device Central emulators to test them. Note about emulators - they do not always display on computer as you expect to see, so essential to test with real phones - sometimes you can put together a page of html and it doesn’t display in emulator but does on a real phone.

Found navigation was biggest issue, looked at softkeys and used option menu on bottom left hand side of screen already used - so used it for the mobile learning too - more intuitive, frees up screen space because don’t have to put other navigation such as buttons/arrows that need to be clicked. Interesting !

They tried different options with mobile quizzes, mostly required to click on things on the screen - navigate around ’screen’ itself using trackwheel or similar, maybe hotkeys etc Unsure about whether drag and drop available or not on phones at moment, so mostly have to click ‘things’ rather than move ‘things’. Some examples from IgnatiaWebs, Niace and mLearnopedia. No branching in quizzes so have to go back to beginning of quiz each time, if get things wrong.

Evaluation of pilot - majority of students found it useful, students happy to use their own phones too. Students could have 1 or 2 hour journeys to travel into London, so could use the time for this which then frees up their time later, although some students enjoyed using whilst sprawled on sofa / bed. With some of the interactivity with the activities and quizzes, students wanted less of it, preferred more passive activity. Maybe sitting on a tube in London, can sit there in passive ‘fog-like’ state, maybe just ‘absorb’ stuff.

Carl Smith from Learning Technologies Research Institute presented, showed demo of Skyfire (in beta) mobile browser which can play Flash 9 (don’t know of any other phone browsers that do this). Can download Flashlite - which is different - available for some but not all smartphones. Showed mixed reality - putting content into your local context.

Is Flashlite going to stay or go - see previous post, some talk yesterday from couple of people about this, will probably be around for a while but Adobe looking at mobile options with AIR.

Pattern recognition - for visualisation - taking pictures with your cameraphones from which patterns can be analysed e.g. pixels, computer algorithms - also using to identify criminals using facial recognition- Showed Microsoft Photosynth video from TED talk, you can also see demo. Showed Nokia demo of someone in Stanford looking at building - pointing with phone and clicking - then receiving back a picture of cathedral with wireframe of original building on top. Also voice recognition, style, tone, emphasis, stress etc etc - don’t know of analysis but should be possible to collect from public voiceblogs etc

Afternoon sessions - more FE focused. Rebecca from MoleNet presented - a mobile learning project funded from Learning & Skills Council/Network - FE colleges and schools could either bid individually or as consortiums - for funding - used mostly to buy mobile devices. MoleNet provided device training, learning design support and evaluation. Three main strands to their research - impact on teaching & learning, impact on teachers / learners / institutions, impact on retention, achievement and progression. They are producing a big evaluation report for LSC in September but some early figures seem to indicate 75 % felt that using a mobile device had improved their learning, 87% would like to use in the future.

John from Joseph Priestley College presented, opportunity to use pdas and play with during the sessions - looked at activites, also developed with Flashlite - e.g. driving, health and safety, ECDL etc Some were similar to some page turning activities can find in eLearning completed on pc Some nice interactive elements - clicking on items on screen to create e’g road signs with instant feedback whether correct or not. Students reported that enjoyed very much an apparently two classes missed their smoking breaks because so engaged! Have found ways of increasing attendance e.g. SMS reminders to attend classes.

Other examples - construction, mechanics - often had to record portfolios by either writing by hand or pc - could use cameraphones to record pictures, video of what they had done, their ideas about them etc which they preferred. Some using ultraportable pcs to record their work, seemed to work ok in that noisier environment, allowed for more space too.

So overall - lots of opportunities there, issues for connecting people in remote areas, is it going to be mobile web, SMS etc Issues around the mobile device - what are you doing with it, how would you like to use it, what is it like in the environment you are moving around with. Maybe options for students creating content using phones (not just recording pictures, video) could bring in whole new dimension too.

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