Hairdressing Training goes Mobile

I am very please to have taken a lead role in the development of Hairdressing Training for Mobiles. This is the first service of it's kind in the UK and is now freely available to the UK Further Education(FE) sector. This has been through my work with Mimas at The University of Manchester and is funded by the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) through JISC Collections.

It always struck me that Information Communication Technology (ICT) was a difficult area to engage Hairdressing students in but mobile device usage (e.g. phones especially) was very high amongst students and over the past few years I have been investigating methods of bring the Hairdressing Training service to mobile phones, so that students could have ready access to learning materials wherever they were including: home, the workplace and on the go. My early attempts are recorded in an Alt-N article and presented at Handheld Learning 2006 and I considered the use of mobile video, web pages and XML based ebooks on mobile phones.

That work focused on single learning objects, from there I went on to consider how we might effectively bring the learning content on to mobile devices with an interface that was fast loading and fit for purpose. I experimented with an separate mobile interface which used the same core content as the desktop service but left out additional features, in fashion similar to Flickr and mobile Flickr. This was presented at Handheld Learning 2007.

From there I went onto to bring the service into production and worked with the service developer to produce the service now available at htmob.mobi.

The service is optimised to work on any current mobile device with a Web browser from phones to PlayStation Portables and is being used to provide learning materials to students at Stockport and Trafford College as part of their Molenet Project - Learning on the Go.

Students of subscribing colleges should now be able to access these learning materials anywhere and at anytime. There is huge potential for work based learners and for informal learning and it would be great to hear from anyone about how they are using the service.

An official press release is available JISC Collections.