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 Trainng for Mobiles Offical Launch

So that's it, it's been over two years of experimenting, researching, planning and persuasion but Hairdressing Training for Mobiles is offically launched :)

The event took place at the JISC Collections main offices in London and it was a packed house of tutors and e-learning support from a variety of colleges across the UK. Attendees were patient enough to listen my presentation on the new service and to hear my ideas about future Web 2.0 developments. We also had a great presentation from Jayne Salt, a Trafford College tutor and a student, they looked at how the mobile service will improve the learning experience. Jayne is a colleague in my Molenet work with Stockport and Trafford Colleges. Later after a good lunch networking we had a presentation from Glen Burr and Simon Sanders, one of the content publishers and web developer for Hairdressing Training respectively.

There was an incredible amount of interest in the mobile service from those present and most people had a go on their phones.

What particularly strikes me was the high level of interest from tutors. Hairdressing Training is traditionally under represented in ICT but today everyone saw the potential for mobile learning for students in the workplace and on the move. There is no other free service like this and Hairdressers are leading the way!

Of course now the service is launched it doesn't mean the work will end. I am already planning various enhancements to the service and am looking at how to use mobiles to deliver support information for the service. The lessons learned can be applied to a variety of subjects, so I am also looking for the next application!

Challenging Mobile Perceptions

A girl has recently been told that she may face a prison sentence for her part in using a mobile phone to video a horrific murder in the UK. The press has related this to incidents of 'happy slapping', where essentially common assaults are filmed with mobile phone, usually by teenagers and then shared with others.

For some this will no doubt add fuel to fire for the argument about how socially destructive mobile phones can be. However, for me this demonstrates the desperate need we have to continue to move towards accepting mobile devices in our classrooms and lecture theatres as part of our daily lives, because we need to create future generations who learn to use these tools in a socially acceptable fashion. 'Happy slapping' is the extreme demonstrative point of a group people who have no solid understanding of how the technology they use to enhance their daily life can be so socially destructive.

I have blogged before on how and why I disagree with Marc Prensky's 'Digital Native and Immigrant' definitions. I believe firmly that we are all journey men and women and we adopt technology at different points in our lives for different reasons but most usually because we believe it to be useful. My usual example is the digital programming of washing machines. Many parents will not struggle with this because the technology is useful and probably even considered essential. Yet the same parents may struggle with simple tasks on a mobile phone because it is not seen as essential. Conversely their children will have no problems with mobile phones because it is essential to maintaining their social life but will struggle with a washing machine because it is not something they need to deal with. Yet both require digital skills to use successfully. This generalisation (and I fully accept there will be exceptions on both sides :) illustrates why for me the Digital Natives concept does not work because life is more complicated that it allows for.

However, 'Digital Natives' is a potent image and is widely used and one result I feel is that mobile devices are sometimes seen as almost otherworldly by older generations. This is not true it's just that their useful has not been accepted. The result is these tools remain locked away and outside of classes. The result is not only is their power being kept out of the educational experience but the younger learners are not getting the experience of how to use these devices in socially acceptable way.

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.

Digital Divide - Mobile Conqueror?

It is well known that mobile phone usage is pretty much ubiquitious across large swathes of the world. However devices ever increasing in power and functionality can they help address the 'Digtial Divide'? A report, featured in BBC News, from the United Nations (UN) suggests so.

Mobile Phones have several distinct advantages as means of connectivity in parts of the world where fixed wire infrastructures might be hard to maintain because of issues such as: conflicts, environmental issues and poverty.

For education this might suggest several opportunities to make use of these in learning. Learners in remote communities might be able to make use of mobile connectivity to improve their learning by accessing tutors in larger cities or universities for example. Projects like the 'One Laptop Per Child' initiative already recognise this but mobile phones with improved computing power might also offer another alternative for consideration.

Nokia pushing N-Gage Games Platform

Readers may remember the Nokia N-Gage, which combined phone and portable games console, which was never a massive success. From a BBC report, Nokia have now refocused the brand as gaming platform aimed at wider number of Nokia devices, in particular the 'N' range.

Among the N series of phones are some of Nokia's more powerful devices and this will probably affect the quality games available (for the better). It also opens up the way for more education titles to become available. However, the N-Gage is still still platform specific (i.e. Nokia) so educators wishing to use the devices for learning will need to be aware that titles may not be available on other platforms

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.

Mobile Applications round-up

I've been looking at a lot of different mobile applications as part of my work at Mimas and as part of the mobile consultancy I've been involved as part of Stockport and Traffords Molenet project. It is a really exciting time for looking at how mobile devices might be used in learning. Until recently most UK projects centred around the the use of Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs, sometimes called EDAs in education, where the 'E' is unsurprisingly standing for Educational). However the mobile device world is changing and increasingly we see convergence and the emergence of devices such as 'smartphones' such as the HTC range or the business orientated Blackberry range. These devices combine the functions of PDAs with the mobile connectivity of a mobile phones. They will usually include cameras (still and video), voice recorders and some form of multi-media players with of course Internet access to the Web and Email etc.. Although smartphones are generally the domain of business users (mainly because of price and marketing), these features are increasingly available on consumer phones (the phones, which are most likely to be in student and lecturers pockets).

At the higher end of the price range are devices such as the Nokia 95i and Apple Iphone, with generous local storage, Wireless Access (good for saving on mobile bills) and big screens but even at the lower end of the cost range we are seeing mobile devices with at least 1 GigaByte of storage as standard and with 3.5G connectivity and associated costs falling the power of the device we all carry in our pockets is increasing and the applications available are increasing.

Over the next few weeks I'll be looking at some of them, such as: Mobile Flickr (photo sharing), Google Mobile, Yahoo Go, Widsets and Shozu. No doubt I' ll be adding more to the list and it will be very interesting to hear from others invovled in similar research.

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.