Nintendo - start addressing the challenge from Apple
Nintendo DSi
Nintendo have launched a new version of their handheld console (DS) called the DSi.
The two main features of the device are 2 built in 0.3 megapixel cameras and an SD card slot. There will be software for playing MP3 software included as default as well as camera software. The Gameboy cartridge interface has now been removed so it is no longer backward compatible with the Gameboy. There is a Nov 1st launch in Japan and Spring 2009 for Europe.
This is an interesting move - especially if this is part of an evolution for the DS. I hope Apple are paying attention to this - and not just because Nintendo have put an i in their product name. As I wrote a few weeks back - Apple have started to position the iPod Touch and iPhone in the gaming marketplace in addition to the MP3 market and phone market. The DS has always had Wifi - but in most cases this is under used by games and software - but it is slowly getting there. I think the DSi as a gaming and MP3 platform will be very attractive to younger children and it is a real pity that the DS doesn’t have an open way for 3rd parties to write and distribute software to compete with the iTouch/iPhone/iTunes model.
The addition of the SD card though removes a fundamental problem that the DS has and that was that games could not be downloaded because there was not enough writable storage to put them on - not any more.
I hope that this is the first step in the evolution of a great and innovative platform - and that it will be opened up in the same way that the Wii has - and gets a good delivery platform also. It will be interesting to see if they start making the OS updatable too.
Tags: ds-lite, handy education, iphone, iPod, iPod Touch, learning, mLearning, mobile-learning, nintendo
02.Oct.08 
devices, education, handy education, m-learning, mLearning 
Comment (1)
New York Times Article on iKnow initiative
Yesterday I mentioned the iKnow initiative at Freed-Hardeman University well today it is covered in more detail in the New York Times.
From the article:
The rush to distribute the devices worries some professors, who say that students are less likely to participate in class if they are multitasking. “I’m not someone who’s anti-technology, but I’m always worried that technology becomes an end in and of itself, and it replaces teaching or it replaces analysis,” said Ellen G. Millender, associate professor of classics at Reed College in Portland, Ore. (She added that she hoped to buy an iPhone for herself once prices fall.)
Tags: devices, iphone, mLearning, mobile-learning
21.Aug.08 devices, education, handy education, m-learning, mLearning, mobile development, mobile phones Comments (0)
iPhones in education? A US university is taking the initiative
I came across an initiative last week from from Freed-Hardeman University which is planning to give their students a uniform collection of technology including a macbook and either an iPod Touch or iPhone.
I think this is an interesting approach, because most other approaches focus on either a laptop or a PDA when looking to give equipement to students. When the focus is on just handheld computers then a lot of work must go into helping students create content using handhelds with creative tools. The small screen may be OK for creating small pieces of work - but is not suitable for essay writing or creating presentations (I know it is possible and is used for this - but my argument is that it is not really suitable).
As mentioned before we think the Mobile Phone or Handlheld is suitable for delivery of some content, revision, planning and a group of things we call Handy Education.
So to provide students with both devices seems to me to make a lot of sense - I am keen to find out the results of this initiative. One thing that concerns me is the lack of useful tools for the iPhone - iPod Touch platform - especially that synchronise data with a laptop (be it PC or mac).
Tags: handy education, iphone, mLearning, mobile-learning
20.Aug.08 devices, education, handy education, m-learning, mLearning, mobile phones, off-topic, tools Comment (1)
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 (0)
Impressive mobile solutions from the Polytechnical University in Valencia
Today I was visiting the Polytechic University of Valencia (La Universidad Politécnica de Valencia) and got to see some of the interesting work they are doing there with mobile phones and learning.
Within the DISCA department they teach two courses on programming mobile phones which are project based courses. I met Juan-Carlos Ruiz-Garcia who leads both of these courses and got to see some of the work they have done and are in the process of doing.
One tool allows a PDA or Windows Mobile Phone to take over a PC and has a simple custom controller for Powerpoint. The software can also be used to take control of another PDA or allow the screen from a PDA to be shown on a projector. The software works on bluetooth or over WiFi (I think the bluetooth is too slow to be useful) and can be installed on any windows device (PDA, phone, tablet PC etc). This was impressive software and will be used in anger in a trial of Tablet PCs that they will start using next year.
The second project I saw was a mobile learning platform for languages with really impressive facilities for loading up multi-media clips (both audio and video). I was shown an example of how it worked with “We are the champions” from Queen - the audio was loaded with two text files with the English and Spanish lyrics. The lyrics were automatically matched up so that each line in English was associated with the line in Spanish - but this could be edited allowing for translations that only work for double lines etc. The audio was then played using a neat flash control and the use just has to press the spacebar each time a new line of lyrics started in English. In the end an xml file was generated that could be used with their authoring tool to make up learning objects.
Using the authoring tool - a small course module was built using music, video and text which contained many exercises focused on the needs of the student. This was then shown to be in a web browser.
Where is the mobile stuff? OK the cherry on all of this was the Windows mobile client that allows a user to take the work offline on their phone and complete the assesment. The content was synchronised with the device and then a student can continue to revise offline. At the moment they have a few problems with synchronisation time (20 minutes), but these will be ironed out and I think it will make a nice piece of project work.
The approach is very similar to the uHavePassed system we have built, although their system can take much richer audio and video clips, this is only possible on a Windows device with Wifi - uHavePassed can support any Java based phone on any internet connection and with any QTI formatted data so any authoring platform can be used.
We plan to do some more work with the university and I will be interested to see how these projects move forward.
Tags: mLearning, mobile phones, mobile-learning, uHavePassed, upv
23.Jul.08 education, m-learning, mLearning, mobile development, mobile phones, tools, uHavePassed Comments (0)
Writing for the small screen
Working on the small screen is a different discipline and one with lots of new rules, over the past two years we have learnt many lessons about how to write content, manipulate images and design applications that work well on the small screen.
Differing screen sizes
Sizes of small screens vary from the practically unusable 96×96 pixels to what is now becoming quite common 240×320 pixels (see images below).
 An example 96x96 pixel canvas |
 An example 128x128 pixel canvas |
 An example 176x220 pixel canvas |
 An example 240x320 pixel canvas |
These canvases do not represent the physical size of the screen - just the amount of pixels that there are on a screen, the canvas that we can paint on.
Confusingly the physical size of phone screens is getting smaller (or staying the same but the canvas sizes are increasing) because new technology now provides better resolution.
Screen resolution of a screen is measured in Dots Per Inch - DPI (the terms dot and pixel are often interchanged), in recent years the number of dots (pixels) that can be fit into an inch of mobile screen has increased from 96dpi to 153dpi. You still see 96dpi screens with a 96×96 canvas which means that the screen is 1 inch by 1 inch (2.54cm x 2.54cm) because they are cheap to make, but phones like the Nokia N95 now have a 240×320 pixel canvas that is 1.56×2.09 inches (3.96cm x 5.3cm).
I may have confused things now, but what I want to make clear is that canvas size on a phone is not the same as physical screen size, writing in a font that is 20 pixels high will result in text of physically different heights on two different phones.
When we develop an application we only know the canvas size of the phone we are working on - not the actual physical size of a phone screen.
What is usable?
Well 96 x 96 pixels is our view is next to unusable, fonts on these screens mean that readable text is physically quite large and you can fit between 10-18 words on a screen, this means the user must do a lot of scrolling, and also there is little space on the screen to make the experience a little nicer using nicer graphics and borders.
We view the minimum usable screen size as 128 x128 and this works well for mostly text based applications, but if images are important in your application then you must move up one more notch to 176×220 as a minimum screen size. An example of this is that in uHavePassed for the UK driving theory test we need to show pictures of road scenes and in our testing with the content for the UK driving theory test - the image detail on a 128×128 canvas was not good enough (even using the tricks mentioned later).
What are the restrictions?
The first thing you need to review when designing a mobile application is how the lack of “spare” or “extra” space on the phone screen will restrict the design, a good analysis of these restrictions and proper understanding of them means that you can in most cases turn the understanding into a positive experience for the user.
Firstly you must look at which parts of the content are actually going to be relevant to the user and if the current organisation of the content is ideal - questions to ask for text based content:
- Should the content be reduced?
- Should the content be re-ordered?
- How should the content be grouped?
- Should it be accessible from different perspectives?
- Would some users prefer summary content and others the original? if so how will this be enabled?
- Should the text be hyperlinked to allow better navigation and accessibility?
- Is it really relevant to the user?
For image based content you might want to consider:
- Is the image needed?
- Could an image that is used elsewhere be reused?
- Would it be better to crop the image to remove extra irrelevant content or resize it for the phone?
- Would panning and or zooming on the image help the user, would it get in the way or is it over the top for the purpose?
- Should we rotate the image to use the screen better?
Then you have to start looking at what can be displayed together, do the text and images need to be displayed together, how to show a link?
New Interactions
All of this should lead to a cut down set of content and a cropped set of images perhaps even a library of images for each canvas size.
We firstly like to create mockups of our projects using index cards to mimic the canvas size of a 176×220 phone and try to work out how interactions will work with a brainstorm. I plan to cover intereactions in a follow up post.
UPDATE with iPhone canvas size:
An example 320x480 pixel canvas
Here is the iPhone canvas and to get some perspective on this - it has twice the number of pixels of the largest screen we have shown above.
Should we think of this as a small screen? I think so - even though it has more pixels than any of our other examples - the actual size of the screen is still fairly small at 51.42mm x 76.38mm (2″ x 3″).
iPhone applications don’t waste space and are very aware of the lack of spare screen - so it is generally designed for as a small screen.
In landscape mode this screen is the equivalent of two Nokia N95 phones side by side (casing not included).
Tags: development, mLearning, mobile development, mobile phones, mobile-learning, mobilelearning, small screens
16.Jul.08 m-learning, mLearning, mobile development, mobile phones Comment (1)
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)
Why mobile phone revision can be more effective than alternatives
We’ve just put up a page on uHavePassed.com that looks at some of the reasons that students find engaging with mobile phones more effect than other resources.
uhavepassed.com » Why mobile phone practice is more effective than alternatives
From the Article :
“To start revising on a computer or other resource generally involves moving to where the computer is located, once moved to the correct location it takes time to start up and begin revision. This change of location creates a barrier that stops students from revising.”
We believe there are 5 key reasons, of course this only works with suitable content and audiences and the type of revision activities must work on a phone.
Tags: Driving theory test, luzia research, mLearning, mobile-learning, uHavePassed
03.Oct.07 Driving theory test, education, m-learning, mLearning, 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)