More on the iPhone and iPod Touch in Education
If Apple hit their sale goals (and there is every indication they will) there will be another 10 million iPhones in circulation by the end of 2008. This will bring the total number worldwide to close to 14 million iPhones.
I can’t find detailed figures on the iPod Touch - but I have found references saying that the touch is now outselling the iPod Classic, and others saying that Apple is downgrading sales figures for the iPod Touch this year. (If someone can contact me with better figures I’d be grateful!). For the sake of this article let’s assume there are already 6 million iPod Touch devices and that these numbers will continue to increase at a pace similar to the iPhone.
This means that by the end of this year there will be at least 20 million iPhone/iPod Touch devices in the hand of real people.
The really important question is who are these people? I would like to get an idea of the demographics of iPhone and iPod Touch users. It would seem to me that the iPod Touch is more likely to be a school or university student from 15-21 and the iPhone is more likely to be a professional 25-35 - but that is purely gut feeling. At this high level it is clear to see that educational software would be different for those two audiences and gives an indication about what types of sftware would be useful to them.
Can anyone help me get better figures for the iPod Touch sales? I know that it has none of the country constraints of the iPhone and is available world-wide. Also how can we get to better understand the demographic - has anyone seen any research in this area?
The lack of a good input mechanism make both of these devices of less use in education for classroom work, but the multi-media capabilities are great. The Touch could do with a microphone and camera though so that in can capture in addition to play multi-media (lets hope both of these get announced with GPS for the iPod Touch in September).
Tags: education, handy education, iphone, mLearning, mobile-learning
18.Aug.08 
devices, education, handy education, luzia research, m-learning, mLearning, mobile phones, off-topic, tools, uHavePassed 
Comments (2)
Revision, Planning and Data capture
As we have become more experienced in what works and doesn’t work on mobile phone we have begun to focus our efforts in three specific areas when writing tools to support students - Revision, Planning and Data capture.
Why are we so focused only on these three areas? We believe that these are the areas where Handy Education (using convenient tools) is most useful and effective.
Revision / Practice
When revising the content of a course - most of your time is spent in one place with your text books (and other materials) around you - reviewing your notes and writing more concise notes. Of course not everyone revises in this way - but lets call this the most common approach. Is there a place for a mobile phone during these sessions? Maybe (I am sure the imaginative could crowbar in a way to include a phone in these sessions), but I think the phone comes into it’s own when away from these sessions.
We try to support students here by providing ways to do “micro-revision” to support these sessions - with Flashcards and quizzes to help practice recall of the ideas and concepts.
With process and technique based concepts like those of Mathematics the most effective way of learning the technique or process can be to repeat and practice it. There must be feedback to help the student understand where there are problems in the process, so the student learns to correct these problems.
We have been using mobile programs to help people work through mathematical problems, whilst providing immediate feedback with step by step instructions on how to correctly calculate the answers. These programs are less sophisticated than PC based equivalents - but the convenience of use means that they can be used many times to help build a students confidence in these problem areas.
Planning
Having convenient access to a list of outstanding work and upcoming deadlines is of great use to students (especially university students and adult learners who have to balance their studies with other parts of their life).
This data should be available to students in any way that they need to access it - via computer or phone or other device.
We are making sure this data is available in all these ways.
Data Capture
Capturing data about your workplace or work situations is very useful in a number of vocational courses these learning diaries are used as new skills are aquired and practised at work. Being able to capture - audio notes, videos, pictures, text and structured data that can be used later by a student to review their progress and used in write-ups - is very convenient when using a mobile phone.
As we continue to develop our platform for students we are making sure all of these areas are covered.
Tags: data capture, education, memory, mobile, mobile phone, planning, practice, revision
06.Aug.08 devices, education, handy education, luzia research, mobile development, mobile phones, tools, uHavePassed Comments (0)
Handy education - not mobile learning
When I first got involved with mobile phones and education - my first impressions of the usefulness of having support on your mobile phone were completely wrong.
The first tool I wrote was a tool to help me learn German vocabulary - I had a list of 1000 words that I wanted to be able to remember and I already had made a pile of flashcards for the first 100 words that I carried in my pocket. I wanted to stop having to remember to take carry the flashcards with me - so putting them on my mobile phone made a lot of sense. I purchased a Windows mobile and in a couple of days wrote a program to help me track and manage these virtual flashcards.
My vision was that I would use these flashcards in the same places I was using the real flashcards - whilst waiting for people, on a train etc. The idea for me was simple - the phone program would make life easier by tracking which vocabulary I knew already and which I didn’t and if I my memory for it was getting progressively better. The program would also mean I would not have to remember to take the flashcards with me.
What really happened though was that I started flicking through the cards in many places, taking 2 minutes here whilst waiting for the kettle to boil at work - another 2 minutes whilst on hold on a phone call etc. I would flick though the cards whilst sitting in front of the telly, lying in bed and in many other unexpected situations.
What became clear to me was that having the program on the mobile phone - did not only help me study outside of the house and office - where it was more difficult before, but it removed barriers to studying in those normal places also. Before I had to go and get the flashcards - organise them in piles, and then work through them - once finished I would have to make sure they were put away carefully and then return them to their place of origin. Now I had ot reach into my pocket and press 2 buttons - state was restored from my previous session and off I went, when finished - press one button - lock the phone and back in my pocket.
The realisation that my mobile program had reduced a barrier to me building my vocabulary, rather than just allow me a more convenient way to package a learning resource was key for me.
Indeed with uHavePassed we receive information back from our users about when they use the software (each time they synchronise with the server) - we can see what time they take tests and it turns out that very late in the evening is a very popular time. It is our assumption that our users are in bed at this time and taking practice tests. The motivation and effectiveness of studying before sleeping should be the subject of a separate debate, but I found this to be further evidence that programs on mobile phones do as much to encourage and support students in the house, school or place of work as they do outside of these places.
Whenever I talk to others about the tools we write for mobile phones - the picture they first create is of people on a bus or train etc. It takes some time to realise that mobile learning tools can be used anywhere (even infront of a computer) because they are designed for short interaction periods, focused only on specific tasks and give good continuity through start / resume functions.
For us the phrase mobile learning is a great way to first introduce the tools we create, but is highly inaccurate in detail - our tools can be used anywhere, but location is not key.
In German the word for mobile phone is Handy (just to prove that first program worked) and reflecting on the English meaning of this word, convenient, says to me it would be better if we thought of what we did as Handy Education - not mobile learning.
Tags: education, handy education, learning, mobile phone, mobile-learning, mobilelearning
04.Aug.08 devices, education, handy education, languages, luzia research, m-learning, mLearning, memory, mobile development, mobile phones, tools Comments (5)
What we’ve been up to?
This could be of those blog posts that explains why there has been a long absence of blog posts, then goes on to explain explain why there will be more in the future and is shortly followed by a lack of blog posts again.
I’ll try to make sure it is not!
So what have we been up to?
We have been increasing the number of users of uHavePassed and currently have just over 3,000 people who have used it to pass their UK driving theory test. We have worked a lot on compatibility of uHavePassed with various handsets and also the communications that are used from the handset to our synchronisation server. We are really pleased how this is helping people and each bit of feedback has been great to receive - both positive and negative, as the product has developed.
The memory training and flashcard concepts in getawayphrases are in the process of being incorporated into uHavePassed allowing users to train their memory in addition to doing formative assessment.
We are looking for content partners and institutions to be able to increase the scope of content on uHavePassed.com beyond the UK driving theory test - so please get in contact if you are interested. We are already working with Leeds University and the Open University on this. More news soon…
With uHavePassed we are also in the process of launching a service so that organisations can use it to provide any assessment content to their users via web and mobile phone. More news soon….
We have also continued to work with the Open University on a couple of ad-hoc projects. These projects have been done at a very low cost and the aim is to push forward ideas and techniques in reasearch of the applications of mobile phones in higer education. Again more to follow….
I (Al) am now going to commit more time also to this blog and try to start up more of a conversation about how mobile phones can (and are) being used in education.
So on with the conversation…
Tags: Driving theory test, education, getawayphrases, languages, luzia research, m-learning, memory, mLearning, mobile development, mobile-learning, mobilelearning, uHavePassed
14.Jul.08 Driving theory test, education, getawayphrases, luzia research, m-learning, mLearning, mobile development, uHavePassed Comments (0)
uHavePassed.com - Driving Theory Test Revision
We are proud to announce the launch of our new service - uHavePassed.com - a unique way to practice your driving theory test both on-line and on your mobile phone.
We have been developing this service over the last few months and just completed our beta testing which has given us great feedback.
Although we have many more plans for the service - we are proud to finally open up access to the service to the general public.
We believe we have created a new and engaging way to get students to interact with the core content of the driving theory test - and we are keen to help as many students as we can to pass the new Theory test that has been introduced this September.
Please visit the website for more information about practice the driving theory test
Tags: luzia research, mLearning, mobile-learning, uHavePassed
18.Sep.07 Driving theory test, education, luzia research, m-learning, mLearning, mobile development, uHavePassed Comments (0)
Open University explores the potential of m-learning
We’ve are working with The Open University, well-known for its commitment to educational technology, on a couple of projects looking into how mobile phones could be used by students to improve their learning experience.
One project we have teamed up to create is a mobile phone-based study support tool that helps people get to grips with key mathematical concepts like averages and statistics.
The interactive programme allows students to collect data on their phone, and then use a variety of tools and graphs to learn about interpreting that data.
The Open University have a similar approach to mobile phone support tools as we do. They recognise that tools aimed at busy OU students, will provide greater flexibility and easy access to study support and learning materials, by being optional support and not core activites.
Tags: luzia research, mLearning, mobile-learning, open university
08.Aug.07 education, luzia research, m-learning, mLearning, mobile development Comments (0)
UK Driving theory test - both on-line and on your phone
Well after a lot of hard work we have just started beta testing uHavePassed - which is our new driving theory test practice for mobile phones service.
It has taken a long time to develop as we have been developing a platform that will allow us to synchronise data between the website and the mobile phone. This may sound simple but can become quite complex quite quickly.
With our service you can practice mock driving theory tests both on-line at your computer and “offline” on your phone. We have spent a long time researching how people prepare for the UK drving theory test and this has shown us several things.
- Practice for this test really does make perfect. The official question bank is published by the Driving Standards Agency and if you practice all of those questions you can then guarantee that you will be seeing a question you know on the day. The question bank contains 1000+ questions though.
- Students take a range of different approaches to revising for the test - from the extreme of no preparation to the other end of the spectrum - reading the highway code and another book and practising all questions.
- Going through 1000+ questions can become quite tedious and boring. In the “real” test you get 50 minutes but most students will only take half of that time.
- If you only practice the tests it is quite hard to understand how you can improve your performance - and it is hard to track your progress and find your weak areas.
As a result of this we designed a service that allows you to take long tests in front of a computer to practice mock tests when that suits you - and to do shorter 2-10 minute tests on your phone. The complex part of designing this service has been making sure that the results of the on-line computer tests and the “off-line” phone based tests are combined.
We wanted to ensure that as students had reason to take both on-line and “off-line” tests - that they wouldn’t face duplicate questions on each platform. Also analysis of the results seemed to be key to providing a good service for students and we realised this analysis must cover all of the results.
There was also some technical reasons for developing our synchronisation platform, because phones are limited on their resources - we could not install all of the questions on the phone - 1000+ questions and 400+ images would exceed the storage on the phone.
As a final way of engaging the students we are creatign simple games to re-inforce various concepts that are important for the driving theory test.
We think that we have developed not only an interesting and engaging way for students to practice and prepare for the driving theory test, but also a great platform to build other mobile based assesents.
We are looking for students to sign up for our beta test - so if you are aware of anyone taking the driving theory test in the near future who would appreciate free access to the entire question bank in return for testing our software - please send them to http://uHavePassed.com/beta.
Tags: Driving theory test, luzia research, mLearning, mobile-learning, uHavePassed
30.Jul.07 Driving theory test, education, luzia research, m-learning, mLearning, uHavePassed Comment (1)
Finally launched getawayphrases
Well it has taken some time but we are finally there - getawayphrases our language tool for mobile phones has now been launched.
You can now learn German, French, Italian or Spanish - links in the sidebar!
Feedback welcome.
07.May.07 getawayphrases, luzia research, mLearning Comments (0)
The BBC - help or hinderance?
As we are analysing the market for mobile software we are looking at various angles - students motivations to use the software, parents desire to pay for software and teachers support for ideas and approach. Our research is also looking into competition and pricing for software and this has raised an interesting question - Is the BBC going to help or hinder us?
As UK residents we are all licence fee payers and therefore we fund the BBC, and on questions of the value we get for that licence fee we are happy with the TV and Radio broadcasts and the extensive access that the BBC has given us to news and all it’s other content via the BBC website.
We have also read stories relating to complaints about the BBC and it’s effect on competition and innovation in certain markets - newspapers, television companies and publishers. The general feeling after reading these stories is that the BBC should continue to publish it’s content online and not hold content back. Holding content back would only mean that companies would sell similar content to us, even though we have already paid for it.
Our perspective has changed now we can see that the BBC is commissioning mobile content for education - and the question for us is how much will this impact on Luzia. If the BBC is giving software away for free - can we compete?
Will the BBC, by experiementing in this area, highlight to a wide audience the benefits of using these techniques? Will they take our ideas and their great resources and commission work with us? Will they encourage larger organisaitons into this area?
At the moment we are unable to see the effect the BBC is having, only over the next year will it become apparent, for the moment we welcome the BBCs work and hope it helps create demand for mobile educational tools. We hope this involvement is kept to a minimum and once they have helped promote this area, they make sure that their activities do not create an environment that stiffles innovation.
12.Apr.06 luzia research, mobile development, off-topic Comments (0)
A blog - where to begin?…An outline of our vision
So where to begin? - This is the blog for Luzia Research!. The thoughts behind this blog are to provide news on our upcoming products and post commentary and news about m-learning with a focus on mobile phones. As we have not yet agreed on content for our website - this blog is our first internet presence - we plan soon for a website also - www.luziaresearch.com.
Why only mobile phones? - We believe that mobile phones have changed their characteristics. For the first time students are now always carrying powerful computers that are capable of providing highly personal learning experiences.
It would be nice if we could say that this is the age of the “Personal Digital Assistant“, but John Sculley beat us to that 14 years ago. At that stage the PDA was a fairly small computer with handwriting recognition, not the intelligent assistant that today’s mobile phone is.
It is a shame that we can’t use that great label, the best we have at the moment is smartphone so lets stick with that!
So to the real nitty gritting, what’s so great about these smartphones? Well, they can run fairly complex programmes with good graphical capabilities. OK they are not fully functioning games consoles yet - but they have the power to manage adequate 2D and 3D graphics. Installing software on a smartphone is easy, in most cases, it is just a matter of sending a text message and getting the software as a reply.
If these smartphones have limitations, it is not really in computing power, the limitations are screen size and restricted input. However, when looked at carefully, these provide new opportunities.
The screen size means that software must be carefully designed to ensure that learning is enjoyable.This level of design can increase signficantly the challenges of designing for these platforms.
A consequence of the small screen is that only one person can review the content at a time, so learning is highly personal. For example, if a student makes a mistake whilst working on a problem, or takes longer to complete a problem than others, the mistakes are private, which can increase comfort for the student whilst learning. If a peers create stigma when studying, in this personal environment the student can keep their activities private, who knows what they are doing: revising, texting or playing a game. For this reason, as we’ll cover later, phones do not have a place in the classroom.
Restricted input means that input is restricted to numbers, movement and a few other buttons. For users, these restrictions mean usability is simple and this generally suits the environments in which the phone is used. It also means that existing or conventional software is not easily adaptable, but must be severely reworked or designed specifically for these devices. This is good as the restrictions cause the designer to really re-imagine and re-design how users interact with the software.
Completely new learning opportunities are created by these devices because they are with the student at all times. This allows mobile software to become pro-active in assisting the student, using artificial intelligence techniques our software assesses a student’s existing knowledge, the software can then provide optimised assistance at appropriate times to maximise the students ability to recall.
Ironically, the one place that the student will not have a mobile device available is probably the class room. In this setting mobile phone learning can be highly disruptive and the strengths of the personal learning environment are quickly eroded by the weaknesses. A problem for a tutor is to assess what a student is doing on their phone - even the most studious of students might prefer to respond to a message rather than complete an exercise on the phone. For these reasons it is our belief that educational tools on mobile phones will not have a place in the classroom, until there are methods that will allow tutors to overcome these issues.
Luzia Research was set up to discover ways to take the unique features of the modern mobile phone and create innovative software. We want our software to play to the strengths of these devices and allows us to compliment classroom learning in completely new ways.
We have much more to tell you about our vision for mobile educational tools, and that is what this blog is here to do.
Stay tuned!
05.Apr.06 luzia research, mLearning Comments (0)