Throwing SMS into the learning mix, where/when/how/if it really fits?

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.

This entry was posted on 29/07/2008 at 11:54 pm and is filed under Mobile phones, mobile learning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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