I'll Shozu

Shozu is a curious little mobile application that promises big things. Basically once installed on a mobile phone and an account and settings have been established it promises to allow the fast uploading of photo's and video's and text into applications like Flickr , You Tube, various blogs and etc..

I've been trying it out on a Nokia N95 8Gb, mainly with Flickr and it pretty much does what it says on the tin, which is allowing fairly quick uploads to multiple destinations. For older phones (and the application is available on a lot of models) there is an MultiMedia Service (MMS) alternative. So instead of a direct upload the upload occurs via an MMS from your phone to Shozu.

So any interesting opportunities for using in this education? Loads, if the institution firewalls allow. It is quite feasible for someone to post to, for example, Facebook etc and also to an FTP account on a Virtual Learning Environment. Or for a more informal approach to upload to shared class Blog space for example. So it could be quite quick for a group of field based students to post to shared blog and for other students around the world to comment whilst they are still in situ.

However, there is a catch Shozu tries to be all things to all men - kind of one upload application to rule them all. There in lies the rub it becomes complicated, to post to lots of spaces, lots of accounts and settings are needed, it's time consuming and dull . Conversely if you only use one or two accounts e.g. Flickr then there are quite few upload applications already in existance for mobile phones, so why bother?

Shozu is for those that want to push boundaries at the moment, it's well worth educational technologists looking at it becuase in a few years we may well see a version which doesn't rely on multiple logins to be managed on it and the FTP facility is interesting. However for large scale educational it problem still requires to much tinkering! Be interested to hear what others think.