This page is the home for resources of a presentation that Jim Groom and I did at the ACCS 2009 conference. It refers to the tools and techniques used to produce websites that are customized for a handheld device such as a mobile phone (we use the iPhone as an example). Use it as a starting point for the conversation about mobile learning.
Inspiration
Small Pieces Presentation – D’Arcy Norman, Alan Levine, and Brian Lamb
Audio
Download/Play on iPhone Small Pieces To-Go
Presentation
Websites Referenced
Sue Fernsebner’s Toys As History site
Small Pieces To-Go
- After the presentation we discovered this plugin – WPTouch. It’s our new favorite!
- Google Apps – Reader (rss), Docs, Gmail, Calendar, Maps, Earth, More
- Twitteriffic App
- Google Tasks (create shortcut from website)
- Google Sync (not an app but an MS Exchange connection)
- Flickr Apps – Flickit (uploader – direct link to iTunes store), Darkslide (viewer), AirMe (camera/uploader) – ()
- iWPhone plugin & theme for WordPress
- MobilePress – WordPress plugin
- RSSPlayer – iPhone App ($2.99)
- WordPress App
- Wikiamo App
- Delicious Bookmarks App (direct link to iTunes store)
RSS Feed for ACCS 2009
Resources for Jim’s portion (slides 89-99)
The Mobile LMS?
Jon Mott’s “Blackboard & the Innovator’s Dilemma”
Blackboard is making it easier to add Web 2.0 content to course sites (e.g. easy insertion of YouTube videos, adding Facebook pages to student profile pages) and has promised innovations in the realm of mobile technologies
While I applaud these innovations as good steps in the right direction, there remain fundamental flaws with Blackboard’s (and virtually every other CMS provider’s) underlying infrastructure. For all of the new window dressing, Blackboard remains first and foremost a semester-based, content-delivery oriented, course management system. The software is not (at least noticeably) evolving to become a student-centered learning management system. And while the addition of wikis and blogs inside the Blackboard system is as welcome improvement, there is still little or no integration between student learning tools “inside the moat” and outside of it “in the cloud.
It is for these reasons that I don’t count Sakai, Moodle, D2L or Angel amongst the biggest, long-term threats to Blackboard. Disruption will, I believe, come from another direction.
What is that other direction?
Small Pieces Loosely Joined!
Image credit: Bionicteaching “Michael Chasen sits on edupunk Santa’s lap and hopes not to suck so much this Xmas”
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“This Time It’s Personal”
Image Credit: “Message for Obama”"
Mobile as a far more personal endeavor. It is like a paperback in many ways, you curl up with your mobile device, you can’t really do the same thing with a laptop, though I have tried.
Paraphrase of Brian Lamb
What is a PLN or a Personal Learning Network
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RSS
Stephen Downes’s “The Future of Online Learning: Ten Years On”
Probably the most significant development in the last ten years for the new direction of Personal Learning Networks has been the deployment of Really Simple Syndication (RSS) – that allowed content creators to syndicate their writings and other creations. Using RSS feed readers, web users do not go to web pages or search for content, but rather, subscribe to RSS feeds and let the content come to them.
Most educators, and most educational institutions, have not yet embraced the idea of flow and syndication in learning. They will – reluctantly – because it provides the learner with the means to manage and control his or her learning. They can keep unwanted content to a minimum (and this includes unwanted content from an institution). And they can manage many more sources – or content streams – using feed reader technology.
Image Credit: “Big Bear with Salmon”
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More on RSS, open source development, and Open Access
Brian Lamb’s “Coming out of the mobile closet… into what?”
And to be clear, while there are many free WordPress plugins and themes intended to enhance the mobile experience, as yet we have implemented none of them. We made no effort to develop a mobile platform. All we have is open access, clean HTML, and RSS.
Gotta love RSS! And I do…
Image Credit: “I Love RSS”
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Time, Space, and Device Independence
Dead iPhone: “Dead IPhone”
A series of factors converging in our moment: Not only bandwidth, a certain amount of time and space independence with computing this is unprecedented.
Cloud computing and mobile computing will offer a certain amount of independence from time and space. They can, indeed, be thought of as offering a third, equally important, form of independence: device independence.
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A Concluding Parable
Bryan Alexander’s
“Going Nomadic: Moile Learning in Higher Ed”
Image Credit: Kafka 2
I am reminded of Franz Kafka’s “An Old Manuscript,” an account of a nomadic army arriving in an imperial city. The nomads arrive suddenly, surprising the urban population and appearing without warning in city streets, markets, libraries, and homes. Kafka’s tale focuses on the incomprehension of the city-dwellers, as well as on their dogged willingness to attempt living life as if the nomads simply weren’t there. The story charts their progressive decay and their slipping grasp on reality while the nomads build a new civilization literally in their front yard. It’s a very funny story, in Kafka’s unique way, but of course it’s also a cautionary tale, especially for those of us in higher education. At colleges and universities around the world, the nomadic swarms are already arriving.
Are we becoming nomads? And if we are, doesn’t that challenge some of the foundations of our ideas about infrastructure, security, and sharing?
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