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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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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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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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 !

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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 !

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20/04/2008 by nicola.

Some interesting points on a TED talk by Yochai Benkler - Open Source Economics

Information produced traditionally - market based or government owned. Enter 2002, lots of publicity surrounding commercial supercomputing e.g. IBM - but lesser known, 4.5 million users contributing to sharing resources to power a supercomputer for NASA to analyse data coming from radio telescopes. Information not less capital intensive or even less expensive but difference in way capital is distributed. With a computer information production, knowledge and exchange is in the hands of up to a billion users, (how about phones with 3 billion ?)

Free or opensource software (e.g. LAMP - Linux (operating system), Apache (webserver), MySQL (Database), PHP (server-side script), visible because its measurable - many examples now across the web. How is relevance as well as content produced - e.g. Open Directory project has 60,000 volunteers - no one owns, free to use, output of sociological & psychological motivations to do something good, Wikipedia another example.

Wireless - traditionally owned by one person, had to be licensed or based on property, now people can own wifi devices with sharing protocol to allow people to build their own network, when they are not using, resources can be used across the network.

So no longer just market based or centralised or decentralised production, emergence of social sharing and exchange but now is having major economic impact - no centralised authority, open to everyone to innovate, now takes less time because tasks are spread amongst larger user/contributor base. Acting as a new form of competition - making inroads into or taking traditional market shares, new opportunities for people to create tools and software, building platforms as a model.

BUT - it is threatened by current commercial infrastructure with IP issues etc. I am interested in this, because I was about to launch a personal project creating an open source mobile application - a week ago, now I’m still no further on in answering questions from a previous post about mobile phones, application development as a way out of poverty. So I guess, the only answer for now is to go ahead - try and create the app and see what distribution issues I run into along the way.

Based on everything I understand about open source models - via some great info from Harold Jarche’s blog and Ajit’s models from Open Gardens, which have referred to in a previous post. Is it producing an economic shift or revolution and if so, what are current market competitors doing about it ? Another question to add to the ever growing pile - if anyone has an answers, would love to hear from you?

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15/04/2008 by nicola.

George Siemens post & Stephen Downes comment made me think - they both refer to the need for a shift in thinking and that coverage - e.g. the article in NY Times about Jan Chipchase’s research, is distracting wider issue of this need. I think I have missed or misunderstood what both George and Stephen are referring to in terms of shift in thinking because I feel depressed now.

I have been following Jan’s research and blog for some time, he has been touring various parts of the world, taking loads of photos, meeting loads of people and looking at their behaviour, wishes and use of mobile phone devices. He mentions many ideas that he has discovered in Asia and some of Middle East, that are familiar to me from living in Turkey and mobile phone usage from my in-laws (2000+) who are scattered around various bits of Turkey. They have mixed levels of income, mixed levels of network coverage but a shared fascination with a device that allows them to chat to each other - sometimes without actually talking - for example - they often ring once then ring off - this is a way of saying ‘hello’ and ‘I’m thinking about you’ - but they don’t have to spend any money doing it (i.e. no call charge). This appears to be similar in other parts of Asia mentioned in Jan’s blog. Also anyone who has been to Turkey will know that the concept of ‘fake’ may be viewed differently to how it is viewed e.g. in the UK (am not talking about judgement of the ethical issue - more around economic conditions and issues that mean ‘fake’ products are in existence).

I’m unsure about the shift that is needed in how we interact with developing nations. From what I understand, mobile phones are working well in terms of helping people e.g. start a business, reporting on something good or bad that is happening - because they don’t have / can’t afford another device, bandwidth, connectivity to try anything else. I can see benefits in moving money around using a mobile phone and I can see how useful that it can be to make a Remade phone: in some ways it is similar to FairTrade except that you are ‘growing your phone’ from materials that may or may not have been purchased in traditional (legitimate? depends who is judging / legislating ?) ways, and that the phone can be sold based on the labour and skill involved in creating a phone from these materials.

However mobile phones are primarily helping in terms of improving people’s circumstances including their personal financial ones because they are a portable communication device - they allow people to carry out business using voice and text. Mobile activism is driving changes, mobile citizen journalism is presenting different insights into how people are living, working and the good & bad stuff that is happening around them. For example in Turkey, as mobile phone device ownership increased, there appeared to be a radical shift in thinking - people no longer felt that their problems were unique and isolating - by finally being able to chat with others for extended periods of time (a luxury not previously granted due to telephone landlines). So there is already a shift in thinking.

I seem to have more questions than I have answers e.g

With ownership of devices, finding out local information that can improve a business locally, perhaps transferring money using phones and potentially selling ‘green’ phones to the developed nations - does that help people find a way out of poverty ?

Is the focus on mobile phones just presenting opportunities for healthy, developed, multinational companies to invest in businesses in developing nations and increase their billion dollar profits further ?

Is the huge growth of mobile device ownership and mobile services allowing network operators in developing nations to become small empires and form partnerships with other mobile network operator or manufacturing multinational ‘giants’ and therefore benefitting the shareholders but perhaps not the overall users to share the same amount of personal ‘wealth’ ?

Does the implementation of the web accessible via mobile phones - put a stranglehold on local innovation and development in order to sell their services or applications - i.e. we are replicating current commercial, copyright & IP issues but on a smaller device ?

Are the advantages of using mobile phones for communication including voice calls, text/SMS, VOIP and a variety of mobile social networks and social media benefitting the richer inhabitants of this planet as much as the others - so actually not changing anything at all ?

Up until this moment I really believed that mobile phones are the best way that I have come across for helping inhabitants of developing nations find ways of improving their circumstances - as opposed to other technology tools (although sites like AfriGadget are also highlighting fantastic examples of innovation from a range of both original and recycled materials); because I do not see another solution such as pc internet connectivity for all being implemented in the short term - although again web usage in developing nations is increasing hugely. I also thought that mobile learning was a way of promoting wider access to learning that could be implemented now, but maybe doing that does just allow circumstances to stay as they are.

I don’t have answers and I don’t get it.

Posted in mobsessed, mproject, Mobile phones, mobile learning, Uncategorised | Print | 2 Comments »

07/04/2008 by nicola.

Removing the need to scream your way through designing something that can be used / viewed on a mobile device, Little Springs have put together a brilliant resource wiki
The Little Springs page on producing multimedia content for mobile distribution on their main website, provides a great overview of considerations for anyone thinking of incorporating it into mLearning.

Also some interesting thoughts on mobile multimedia twitter on the Open Gardens blog

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29/03/2008 by nicola.

We tell stories Digital writing with a difference from Penguin books and Six to Start.

First week was 21 steps using Google Maps - fun way of tracing 21 steps and also gives a great sense that you may not get from images and text in a paper book.
next up was Slice - using blogs and twitter, by following both the girl and her parents separately on twitter, you get an interesting sense of how they all felt.

Remaining week’s classics to be adapted are Fairy Tales, Thérèse Raquin, Hard Times, 1001 Nights.

If that isn’t enough, you have the chance to win 25 metres of Penguin books

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29/02/2008 by nicola.

As seen on Julia Roy’s blog - Wow

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