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)
The iPhone iPod Touch Platform and education
Now that the App Store has been launched for the iPhone and iPod Touch these devices must go down as the easiest devices ever made for purchasing and installing software on.
The App Store makes it so easy to install software on these devices in a couple of clicks, and if you need to pay for it - well you just use the same payment method you use for buying music amazing.
No other company / device has the infrastructure and user trust in place to emulate this (and for competition reasons I wish they did).
So what does this have to do with education? Well once you get over the ease of installation - the apps are great - the feel and way they work is so simple they look like they have been designed for a 4 year old - but lets be honest that is what we all want - simple and elegant. I hope that Apple have style guidelines and that they are insisting on developers keeping to them before then can have a place in the App Store.
Yes OK, but what does this have to do with education? Well easy to use and easy to get hold of applications that are engaging and accessible and on devices that students can fit in their pocket have never been available before. Technically all this has been possible, but not on a real device that is being purchased by real students, and working in such an easy elegant way.
So let’s start getting content on to these devices - and find out what works and what doesn’t - this method of easy installation and easy to use apps is the future on this device or others - we can only learn from here on in.
We (Luzia) missed the boat with these devices and I wish we were on the App Store today - but we plan to start work in August rectifying that!
Tags: education, iphone, mobilelearning
16.Jul.08 education, mobile development Comments (2)
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)