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.

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!

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.

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.