Via experientia.com an excellent article from Adam Greenfield which analyses differences between location and context, with resulting interaction design based on this understanding of environment, the devices used within it and the interactions between a human, devices and the environment itself.

He refers back to his previous post defining

“a mobile device’s capabilities and available interface modalities at any given moment are largely if not entirely determined by the other networked objects around it…..the device is of almost no importance in and of itself, that its importance to the person using it lies in the fact that it’s a convenient aperture to the open services available in the environment, locally as well as globally.”

I believe this is related to the extended mind concept too. I recently read the Andy Clark and David Chalmers extended mind essay which looks at the extension of cognitive processes into the environment and how the mind could exist in an external environment. The Guardian has also recently asked if an iPod is part of the mind.

I don’t think it is but then at the moment I have a very limited understanding of how the mind works. I read the extended mind essay as the mind literally extended into the environment, not into a device as such. There are comparisons between an advanced GPS enabled mobile device such as a smartphone and a notebook with information written in which can be accessed, but is it the connectivity / interaction / relationship between the device and the environment which is actually where the processes are ‘ignited’; i.e when you listen to the radio and a song comes on which invokes a good / bad memory, it is not the physical radio which is connected to your mind, it is just the enabler ?

So if you have a smartphone which can access information whilst you are mobile, wandering around an environment such as a city, with the variety of connections that will soon be available through GPS, Wifi, possibly SMS, I think it would be the combination of - how you are feeling whilst you are freely wandering around, any sounds, sights, smells or something you can touch etc that might be affecting your memory and then with a possible connection to a specific activity/interaction such as RFID / NFC sending information on an exhibition / museum to your phone through a networked tag in the environment, which could all be part of an extended mind, not just the device which could be in your hand, on your wrist, around your neck, on your clothing ?

Maybe…

Forgot to mention, Digital Encounters is another good read around this topic.

See Ignatia’s great learning list and also Clark Quinn’s Top 10 mobile from earlier this year. If you have never visited Jane’s amazing site of top tools for learning technology, its worth a look - it has saved me - I don’t know how many hours - but a lot !

So, this is the challenge, if you work or interested and blogging about mobile technology and haven’t already done this - out your apps, if you don’t want to blog them, you can contribute them anonymously via C4LPT tools..

My top 10
Utterz - voice blogging on the go with publishing options on the spot.

Screenshot - taking still screenshots from a s60 phone, using one of the phone cameras - I use it to show shots for experimenting and for showing how to do things. There are others available for windows mobile devices and others

Find.mobi - brilliant mobile search. Provides web and mobile web-friendly page searches (Mobile web friendly pages = less time to download and display properly on your mobile device). To find flight status, select Travel from the tag cloud below the search box, then select Flight Status - you will then see various options - if you are a frequent traveller or organising conferences / events, this is such a useful mobile tool.

Other mobile search tools incl Yahoo Go, Google mobile, Kooaba also have a brilliant visual search/image recognition tool

Mobile flickr - upload photos quickly

Nokia Maps used this in Switzerland last week, it told me I was in Germany and France before I knew I was and scarily quickly finding you via GPS. I use it all the time. I think some phones are now coming bundled with Europe maps or similar / Google Mobile maps is good too (I like both equally at the moment). UPDATE - just saw a post today that can now purchase and use Lonely Planet guides from Guides-Extras menu directly within Nokia maps app.

Fring - Skype,AIM,GoogleTalk,MSN,SIP - see contacts all in one place and who is online, with options to chat/call/send files. Skype now appearing on more phones, you can Skype chat out okish from Fring, haven’t tried Skype calling (for VOIP anything charges, check operator package). I used this quite a bit when Surrey email crashed and I was more mobile for a few days, it was great. However, Twitter / Jaiku would still also be as useful and as quick !

Nokia mobile Web Server & extensions - starting to play with but finding useful, can blog, upload, IM, chat and manage a mobile site from the phone (have to pay data fees for transfer, according to your operator package).

Adobe mobile pdf reader - mostly using for work files and articles I’ve bookmarked on del.icio.us which can be read on the go.

Mobiseer - mobile bookmarking, tagging, sharing pages. Don’t find it easy to bookmark pages whilst on mobile though. Currently using this whilst mobile delicious - which found out last week, is being developed . I can currently use delicious via my webkit browser when using an N82, can edit, share, delete bookmarks but can’t bookmark pages. Can’t wait for mobile delicious - oh and a mashup with find.mobi so you could get delicious for mobile friendly pages would be awesome.

OperaMini browser - free download and works on loads of phones/devices - I also use it as a backup for any browsers I have on an older phone which for whatever reason may format pages strangely (hasn’t happened with webkit but earlier browsers on older phones). I think Opera are likely to be the first to bring out a voice-friendly browser too - they appear to be leading the way with voice at the moment. Another cool browser in beta at the moment is Skyfire.

Collaborating with Surfaces sphere , Concept browsers of the future from Mozilla Labs, Eco phones, 100 days in China as a mobile nomad, an invitation to collaborate on understanding Islam through virtual worlds, thoughts on blogging in Iran blogging within HE, in Iran, an award winning Palestinian journalist arriving back and facing Israeli soldiers, Eight stages of social development, Enabling Personal Mobile Applications through Semantic Web Services, Nokia’s semantic applications toolkit, Adobe Mobile Demos, Digital Activism in action, online village volunteering education ideas in the Nabuur neighbourhoods, transforming a waste heap into a farm in Kenya.

A whole bunch of stuff on mobility - Michiel de Lange’s research writing, about mobility and nomadic projects, 2 posts on MAMK re the recent Economist mobility special report and Jan Chipchase digital nomad experiment, an article about IP mobility and the idea of seamless roaming, as opposed to connecting the dots (this article was written in 2003 but some of these issues still unresolved); and finally a green paper from the European Commission about migration, mobility and opportunities for EU education systems

Finally, a interesting discussion on which words to put as hyperlink text (it appears that even in 2008, those with different levels of web experience have different opinions) and 20 strategies to defeat the urge to do useless tasks.

Before I forget…

Carpentry videos - tried one with 3 mobile phones at 3 different angles showing various drilling ‘actions’ when making a DVD cabinet. The angles were fine and it all looked ok, but was unable to get a decent volume for both voice whilst drill was on and whilst talking ‘inside’ half a cabinet (if that makes sense) without a microphone and can’t think of a way in which to record with a separate microphone. If you hold one of the phones or even one phone close enough to get the ideal volume, then you can’t get the right angle for showing hands using a tool - it is too close. The plan was to use mobile phone for quick informal learning ‘pieces’ which this would not achieve, so putting videos on hold indefinitely for now.

Second Life presentation - a few weeks ago temporarily put some info up about a presentation from a student at Surrey who did a presentation of her machine ethics dissertation, in Second Life - to cut a long story short, we don’t have video / machinima footage due to total lack of notice and total lack of ever trying before on my part with a laptop that doesn’t have capability to do both Rather than put up bits and pieces which have since removed (e.g. the text chat with context of Anna answering the questions in Second Life is interesting but without real context), Anna VartapetianceSalmasi or Dr Lee Gillam - hopefully both, should be presenting this again at the Immersive Worlds workshop in Coventry in October and there is a possibility that Anna will be repeating the presentation in Second Life later this month.

In terms of saving something as a favourite, via a cookie downloaded to the device, it appears to depend on different devices and manufacturers, session cookies appear to work across all, but persistent cookies may disappear once phone is switched off.

In theory, it should be possible to create a series of voicexml forms referenced in an xhtml+voice page which allow someone to choose what type of web coding template they would like to receive and then when the final form is submitted, a mouseclick or spoken event should send a message to the server to deliver back the output of those choices.

Its similar in principle to any type of online shopping. Once you have completed payment an invoice is generated - either on the final ‘thank you’ page or a ‘confirmation that it has been emailed to you’ page. As with a milkshake order, it should be possible to return a receipt of your order as a text file after you have completed the order, so sending a text file back to the user with an xhtml, RSS, php or whatever type of coding template inside it, which can be then saved to the phone or device should be no different.

A guess of how to do it would be to put templates in a mysql database then add php to the original xhtml+voice page to tell the server to fetch the template and include it in an email/SMS back to the customer. I know php has code for email options and for attaching files, I just don’t know exactly how to do it myself…yet - anyone else out there using or developing an ecommerce site tried ?

If this is all possible, it also means that someone who wanted a template might not have to actually go online at all, they could just make a phone call, make their choice and receive the template back - i.e. they would be calling (just like telebanking). Hopefully….

Will return to this later - am SO not on track to complete everything by September (maybe end of) but its still been very useful exercise, uncovering increasingly complex layers of coding, media and to some extent - architecture, now starting to make some connections between some of these too.

There is definitely potential to create pages of code against the 5 original strands (sms,multimodal,standalone vs mobile web/widget, pc vs web, mobile opensource vs mobile proprietary) it is possible to create both stand alone and web applications to do this, will compare and review their efficiency against the other strands in terms of device independence in the final stages of this project. Will also compare and review as to what this could mean for any mobile learning development and if it is worthwhile being deployed.

Anyway, my online persona is going to have a break for a few days, not sure what the offline one is going to be doing yet

Is based around this text from post yesterday.

It is quite similar to a familiar Xhtml page except that it has slightly different DOCTYPE and namespaces to be declared. Another difference is use of time - which you can declare in seconds or milliseconds, you also should provide script so that the browser reading it, knows that you’re finished / stops listening. You also use scripting (JavaScript) to manage events such as prompts, speech input and branching etc I’m not entirely sure I’ve got my “elements by ID” in the right sequence to fit with the branching at the moment, but will inspect in more detail tomorrow

You can put the voicexml directly into the Xhtml coding or reference it as an external voicexml file (based on everything I’ve understood so far, external is better because you can reuse it, even within the same document). You set up grammar files to help with understanding i.e. a file will include typical words that you might expect to hear in response to a prompt/question.

Tomorrow’s task is to reference this unfinished version against the W3 guidelines Then put together an aural stylesheet. Another option is to record the prompts and save as audio files which you can then reference within the forms, so might do this too.

“…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”

Have deliberately not done much with due to other more intense programming bits but thought it was about time to post something. Prior to May, had not attempted to write/code anything related to voice before, although wrote an audio stylesheet about 2 /3 years ago.

Trying to think this along the lines of:

1. Should it be a mobile web page with a basic form ? This would not appear to be what xhtml+voice forms have already been designed for (e.g. examples so far seem to be things like using a form to find something or order pizza etc), but was wondering whether you could create a basic mobile web page, with options when selected by voice input would return a web page template as a file, to the user either via SMS or the web. If you’re going to be online anyway, would using voice add any value in terms of speeding up the process, so you could edit / create mobile web pages on the go ? Hmmm, not sure, but having both a visual and voice form would make it more accessible.

2.If not a whole mobile web page, could it be a regular web page with voice annotated ‘elements’ on the page that could produce a similar result ? Would it be better than a mobile web form ? Don’t know yet until try.

3. Due to limits of connectivity / bandwidth / cost / time, would it be more useful just to provide a standalone mobile voice application that could produce a set of templates and is it possible ? Could any files or the code be generated by a form similar to the above to generate either a voice or text SMS? (As above, re using voiceSMS - from an accessibility point of view - is better to have both a text and voice option?) Also don’t know yet until try. (Will return to this in a future post).

Will not be starting with an example of a mobile-friendly web page just yet because as per mobile web experimenting, haven’t done that yet - however will be bringing into this project later on.

In order to accept user input i.e. someone saying something, this is coded on a web page in a similar way to inputting text, using a form. So just as each text box would appear on a page, there can be an equivalent set of code to allow for speech. The examples provided by others would be things like - ordering food or drink, so if you were using your mobile phone and wanted to quickly order something like a milkshake (why you would be ordering one via the web, but off the top of my head…) your order would be a set of speech ‘events’.

So, am wandering around in Bournemouth, UK, its a lovely sunny day and I want a milkshake - so decide to order from Shakeaway (if you are ever in Bournemouth….) so a form would include questions like

Would you like a milkshake with:
Chocolate bar
Cake
Biscuits
Cereal
etc

Would you like anything else with it?
(note - if it was Shakeaway then a mobile web form would be totally inappropriate because there are hundreds of combinations)
Strawberry
Cherry
Lime
Kiwi
Melon
etc

Dairy or alternative?
Dairy
Soya

Any extras?
No thanks
Extra icecream
bran
protein
etc

Finished?
Yes
No

Would you like to save this as a favourite?
Yes
No

All of the above could also branch out - imagine if you were standing at the counter and being asked what you wanted, with lots of choices to look at, you might need several decisions or you might have a favourite - mine is chocolate & cherry with soya - so on the form I would be saying chocolate then selecting cherry then soya, no thanks then yes to finish. However if you would like anything else (question 2) you could potentially have additional sub branches e.g. 2a being lists of chocolate bars, 2b being cake options etc etc, depending on how many flavours you wanted.

In voicexml forms, each question would be treated as its own ‘block’ so you would need to add in extra code to tell the form to go to other blocks. No idea exactly at this point how to code the cookie bit (i.e. would you like to save as a favourite, am assuming that you can save cookies on a form on mobile device in same way as pc, but haven’t looked into as yet), but it would be useful seeing as you are using a phone and want to save time being online.

What does this look like in voicexml?
Will try and post tomorrow. Am hoping that same principle of menu items would apply for this project i.e.
What kind of page do you want to create?
xhtml
RSS
php
etc

Then a branch if selected Xhtml:
What type of Xhtml?
Strict
Transitional
etc

or if selected RSS -
Is this for a podcast?
Yes
No

(If select yes, this would be telling the server that you want RSS 2.0 and automatically bring in a template with itunes, encl and other media-specific tags)

This is about as far as I have got in terms of thinking it through. There are a whole bunch of resources available and I spent (productively going round in circles) several hours trying to work out how it was possible to test anything without having access to your own voice server. I have signed up to Voxeo because you can test anything you create using Skype which sounds useful. You can also enable voice if you download Opera browser (Voice is not on Opera mini yet.)

Refs and sources for this post on delicious with voicexml tag

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.

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:

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.

“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 !