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.

Hairdressing Training Finalist at HHL 08 Awards

I am really pleased to discover that Hairdressing Training for Mobiles is a nominated finalist at this years Handheld Learning Awards. The service is nominated in the Tertiary, FE, HE & Adult Category under the Innovation section. It's quite an exciting moment because the mobile aspect of the service is the result of research and development over two years. This has been presented on at the Handheld Learning conferences over recent years as well other international conferences.

The winners of this years awards will be decided by text message votes. So if any readers wish to vote for Hairdressing Training for Mobiles. They can do so by texting Hairdressing to : +447786203140 (standard rates apply).

My motivations for designing the service was to try to bring the learning materials to a wider audience in a more convenient format. When my research began learning materials in colleges were generally only available via desktop computers. For Hairdressing students this meant difficult access since college salons would often only have one PC at best, often not at all. With the development of the service via mobile access, which many students have access to then materials could be accessed anywhere or anytime.

The service has been supplying learning materials to the £6 million Government funded MoleNet project and is available to subscribing colleges free of charge. Readers can try out a demo version of the service by pointing their mobile browsers at htmob.mobi and selecting demo.