Handheld Learning Winner

Really pleased that Hairdressing Training for Mobiles (htmob.mobi), the service I have been designing and researching for Mimas at The University of Manchester over two years has received a prestigious award for Innovation in the Tertiary, FE, HE & Adult category of the Handheld Learning Awards 2008 against international competition.

The service has been widely used in the Molenet projects and I was consultant to Stockport and Trafford Colleges work in particular. It was really exciting to see the system in the hands of students and learners and seeing how it was helping their learning and relationships.

The award was presented by Johnny Ball at the start of the Handheld Learning conference 2008 and I was really glad to receive the award and attend the ceremony. Thanks to everyone who voted for this.

Attending the ceremony with me was the service manager at Mimas, Jackie Carter and Anna Vernon and Brian Mitchell from JISC Collections, both part of Lorraine Estelle's team and Simon Sanders, the content publisher's (Jordan Burr) web developer. These people represent just part of the teams from the organisations (not forgetting the LSC of course, who fund the service but sadly couldn't make the awards) that have gone into helping take this service from design to production.

My reflections on this blog tend to be fairly impersonal, looking at trends, debating issues and the like but I do want to take this chance to thank those who have supported the development of this service, which I am closely associated with and spent many hours developing. The team at Jordan Burr and JISC Collections have been great and in particular I want to thank Jackie Carter from Mimas for her personal encouragement to me and support during the development process.

Any readers wanting a more formal press release can find one on the Manchester web pages. Of course if you want to discuss this work more then please email me stuart.smith[at]manchester.ac.uk (replace [at] with @ in a vain attempt to stop spam :) or post comments here.

Widsets - Quick Win?

Widsets is a Nokia sponsored service that allows mobile content (usually via an RSS Feed) to be viewed on a compatible mobile phone. It is particularly useful for those wishing to keep up with news updates on the move.

An application has to be downloaded on to a mobile phone and when launched the various Widsets you are currently subscribed to are displayed. These can be added too or deleted. Not all the Widsets are RSS feeds some are applications or games.

Is it a quick win for mobilising a Web service? Not really, the Widesets are far more useful for promoting your mobile service, especially if it will not adapt well to a mobile phone but you still want an effective Mobile Web presence. Creating a Widset is straightforward and the application is bundled with many Nokia phones. So it's there ready and waiting!

I've created a couple for people to try out relating to my work with Mimas, at The University of Manchester.

One is for Hairdressing Training, which was recently launched as a full mobile service but those interested only in new updates can try this Widset widget out - .

The other is for the JISC Information Governance Gateway. This lists the latest news feeds on the site, on the most popular elements of the service -

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.

Do Bunfights need authentication?

I enjoyed reading Andy Powell's reflections on Bunfight at the Athens/Shibboleth gateway, which reflected on the problems being faced by Eduserve and JISC as they confront issues surrounding the changes currently faced by the UK educational sector concerning authenticated access to online services and resources.

It got me to wondering (as I do from time-to-time) do we actually need all the authentication that we actually put up in UK education? The National Library of Congress in the US has made a range of image resources available via Flickr, a Web 2.o image sharing site which is often blocked by many educational institutions in the UK. If resources need to be kept 'UK' only then the BBC has demonstrated that content can be made accessible to the UK only by various negotiations with various ISPs . One argument that is used is that the UK taxpayer cannot fund educational access for the whole world but the Congress/Flickr project shows a different approach to how content can be shared but costs can be kept low since Flickr is the host but the Library controls the content. In the content sharing of world of Web 2.0 are we in danger of creating 'content silos' with a large scale use of authentication, which are isolated islands of useful but difficult to reach resources and consequently limiting learners, tutors and researchers? Instead we could see content being used in all sorts of places on the Web by learners that are currently out of reach.

Some authentication is needed if we want personalisation, for example although I can browse National Library of Congress images on Flickr I need an account to bookmark them as favourites etc. This level of authentication makes sense but in terms of publicly funded resources maybe it is time for wider debate of not which system of authentication should be used but whether it should be there at all?

Review - Innovative e-Learning with Mobile and Wireless Technologies

This event took me from Manchester over to Cardiff. The event was organised by the JISC funded RSC Wales and led by David Sugden, John Traxler and John Whalley, all respected characters on the m-learning circuit.

A large part of the day was taken with reflections on the lessons learned from the JISC publication "In Their Own Words - Exploring the learner's perspective on e-learning" with focus on the mobile aspects of that report. The report was published this year and so remains current. It essentially concludes that 'personal technologies' like mobile phones and Ipods and systems like online social networks offer the opportunity to engage students in new ways and gives learners advantages, such as making better use of dead time such as sitting on buses etc.. It does also suggest that institutions will still remain the focus for learning.

The themes of this publication formed the bedrock of the day as well as exploring these themes in their own presentations and issues such as accessibility the presenters were joined by Fatma Elsayed Meawad, who looked at a J2ME interface she had designed to work with Moodle and John Alcock who discussed a voting systems with students. Both these presentations were very interesting. The principles discussed by Meawad are very similar to those I apply to the development of Hairdressing Training for mobile devices. So it was personally interesting to see similar conclusions about approaches to mobilisation of learning materials are being reached independently. The voting system used by Alcock is becoming increasingly common and essentially allows anonymous electronic polling of groups using infra-red devices. The real challenge with this system is not the technology but the development of well constructed poll questions, since respondants must always choose from a list.

The workshop was supplemented by one group sessions, where divided up, the attendees took different scenarios and looked at how mobile solutions might help in learning outcomes. This provoked some interesting discussions.

Overall the day was very interesting and useful (if a long trek from home!) I think my biggest concern is that m-learning might become compartmentalised by these events whereas I think it should only be seen as on tool in a kit of learning approaches.