There’s a shiny new app for the iPhone, iPod and iPad that looks really promising: Dragon Dictation from Nuance Communications. In a nutshell, it’s a tool for dictating text which can be added to a document or linked to social networking accounts like Twitter or Facebook. It’s spookily reliable (unless you happen to be a five year old girl – it had difficulty picking up my daughter’s voice generating gobble-de-gook sentences which she found heeeeeelarious!).

Dragon Dictation in action

James Clay has done a really good post on it which you should read.

2 things really appeal to me about this app;

1. It’s reliable enough for people with motor function problems to be able to quickly create large amounts of text giving all sorts of benefits for accessibility, inclusion and social participation in education (and beyond).
2. It’s another tool that moves the smartphone away from being primarily a content delivery system. On devices like the iPhone, text entry on anything other than short snippets of information is tricky thanks to small buttons small buttons so Tweeting is fine but blogging or document writing can be quite tricky. With Dragon Dictation you can get round more of those shortcomings and contribute more.

I’m looking forward to using this in the future and it’s sister application Dragon Search.

Since we started playing around with Create-a-Scape at Sheffield East CLC, I’ve got a geeky thrill at the possibilities afforded by augmented reality. It combines 2 areas of interest for me; spatial awareness (or spatial literacy) and mobile technology. There’s something quite exciting about adding layers of meaning and interaction onto the real world to get people interacting with it and each other. Create-a-Scape was great but an idea ahead of its time. We never really found a mobile device that would host it reliably and the amount of time and effort we had to expend on getting it to work was immense. I remember one geography teacher in Sheffield who was desperate to try it but threw in the towel after the frustrations reached critical mass – a real disappointment for him and us.

Finally, though the technology is emerging into the light. It’s still early days though. I’ve been having a bit of a play with a number of apps for the iPhone;

• Junaio,
• Wikitude and
• Layar (in conjunction with the Hoppala developers’ tool).

They all provide a similar function – point the camera in different directions and you see icons attached to real world locations: points of interest or POIs. These can be clicked to link to web pages or media. This information can be viewed by channel so you can separate information according to theme (e.g. culture, architecture, shopping etc). Junaio has more of a social approach where you can add your own locations fairly easily and share them with a network of friends, announcing them via Twitter.

Junaio in Action

The other apps are more delivery platforms with less scope for creating your own content but using Hoppala was a reasonably easy first step in creating my own Layar layers (although, not for the feint-hearted).

They are worth a play with but I think the next generation of AR is going to be a lot more interesting.

I found the current crop of apps quite clunky to use. The main issue was overload of information. In a location that has many POIs it can be difficult to read all the text on them and selecting the desired one for viewing.  I had to spend a bit of time trimming out channels on Wikitude as it assumed I wanted to find a hotel room (of which there seem to be lots in Newcastle!)- personalising the POI’s shown was a repetitive task.

The other factor is that it’s difficult to relate what you are seeing in AR to the real world in dimensions other than distance. Also,  distance is represented still isn’t intuitive. I can grasp that a particular landmark is south from my position and it might tell me it’s 500m away but actually navigating towards that point is tricky and requires checking a traditional  map display.

As such, tools like Google and Bing Maps still have the edge for me.

Also, the actual response time of the phone when pointing in different directions leads to a slight lag in the POIs catching up which got a bit frustrating.

Plus, you do look a bit of an idiot waving the phone around at eye level!

Of more interest is the development of visual search with apps like Google Goggles (not available on the iPhone yet.) With this you can point your phone at certain objects and it will identify it and search for information. Link that with location-aware capabilities and that provides a much more useful form of AR.

I’m also intrigued by apps like the Museum of London’s Streetmuseum. This overlays historical images of London over your live view, giving you a window on how locations looked through in the past. I’ve not had a chance to try it out in London yet but I’m looking forward to it. It would be great if this sort of thing incorporated audio as well as visuals (something which Create-a-Scape was designed to do). Have a look at History Pin for a non-mobile, beyond London version of this.

There’s the whole other area of AR tagging of objects using QR codes to add extra layers to things like text books and museum exhibits but that’s something I hope to have a look at later.

The growth in location aware stuff is really exciting (and not without risks). I think the opportunities for informal learning, participation and breaking out of institutional walls could offer real educational benefits. It will be interesting to look back on this in a year’s time to see how much has changed.

Have a read of Nick Shackleton-Jones’ vision of the near future.

CC Image - Brendan Wilkinson - A-NC-ND

I’m going all gooey about AudioBoo at the moment. It’s sat around in the perpiphery of my vision for a while now but in the last month or so I’ve started to see it as a really useful addition to my network of tools, especially now I’m a JesusPhone user.

If you’re not familiar with AudioBoo have a look at their site and check out the video intro.

Here’s why I’m gushing:

It’s simple – Using the iPhone you can go from recording to publishing in a matter of clicks. The audio record function allows you to pause during recording and append. It won’t allow you to chop your audio around in an Audacity stylee but adding too much functionality would get in the way of the simplicity. I can live with that.

It’s social – There aren’t as many people using AudioBoo as Twitter, for example, but it still has the same mechanisms for following and you can also comment on Boos bringing your network in on the act.

It’s fun – Sound is overlooked, I think, but still plays a massive part in our lives. I love the idea of taking sound snapshots and sharing them. Listening forces you to take things more slowly and experience the world differently.

It’s mobile – I’m surprised by the quality of the audio you get from recording on an iPhone (none of that compressed MP3 gurgle you get with many online audio recorders). The fact that it’s mobile means that you can record your thoughts regardless of location and allows you to easily bring in other sounds and voices where hulking round large amounts of equipment or dragging someone near a laptop aren’t feasible. I find it really useful for reflecting on conferences or other events where I’m likely to be on the move or in a hotel room immediately after. The iPhoen’s great but trying to type an extended blog post on it would make me want to cry. It also helps you to capture serendipitous bits of discovery or random thought in awkward places bringing informal and formal learning together.

It’s personal – Hearing someone’s voice, especially when they’re speaking conversationally and not off a script is a great way of feeling your getting closer to someone. It gives you more clues about emotion and personality than you would get from written text.

It’s spatial – As a failed geographer I still love the idea of landscape and space and I’ve done work with schools before where students have captured sounds in a location and then mashed them together in Audacity to create soundscapes. AudioBoo geotags your recordings but it will also let you export your recordings as mp3 for use elsewhere (see handy tip)

It’s connected – Boos are public, sharable, embeddable and you can link to other apps like Twitter, Facebook to get your recordings out to your network quickly and easily. Adding a hashtag into an AudioBoo title when you’re linked to Twitter automatically hastags the Tweet which saves retweeting later.

Oh, yes. It’s free!

As a learning tool it’s something powerful to include in the arsenal for capturing formal and informal experiences and introducing a sense of play into things.n I’m going to be investigating more about the possible applications of digital storytelling in FE and HE soon and AudioBoo is likely to figure quite prominently.

You can listen to my Boos here. Also check out Doug Belshaw’s Thinking Digital conference chats here.

Right, I’m off to run through a sunny cornfield hand in hand with AudioBoo while recording the pretty birdsong.

Image by lanier67 Att-NC-ND

Last week Will , Steve and myself from Netskills went down to this year’s Eduserv Symposium in London. It was on the theme of The Mobile University and it was a thoroughly enjoyable learning experience.

The slides and videos are available here. Particularly worth a look are Paul Golding’s keynote and Christine Sexton’s presentations. They both give a great picture of how patterns of use are changing but from very different perspectives.

(Sorry about the wierd ratio. Best to click full screen anyway…)

Set aside a few hours if you can over the next few weeks to have a look.

I set out what I wanted to get from the conference in an AudioBoo.

What I found most interesting was that I had a bit of a reality check and had to reframe my expectations for what students were demanding from the university in terms of mobile learning.

I love using my phone for learning and reflection. I’ve got relatively easy access to my blog dashboard, I’m using AudioBoo more regularly and all the usual stuff like Tweetdeck, DropBox, capturing images and video etc. I find the idea of using my mobile to break my learning out of the training room or lecture theatre and to bring my daily experience into my learning world. Although devices like the iPhone are designed mainly for accessing and consuming media the most exciting aspects are the ones where learners can particpate in, explore and discover the world around them.

What surprised me (and I know this makes me look naive) was that it seems most students don’t view their technology in the same way.

Both Chris Sexton and Simon Marsden’s talks highlighted that students wanted something altogether more functional.

What they wanted was information. The things that are important to a student are things like where is my next lecture, can I view my library record, can I easily access my email, can I see maps of the campus.

This leaves me with one or two unresolved questions in my head:

• Do students partition their use of mobile technology? i.e. This is my social fun time and my learning time is different.
• If they were encouraged to use their mobile devices as a creative learning tool would this actually appeal to many of them?
• Should it be down to teaching staff to lead students towards this sort of use or should students be given the freedom to explore themselves? Will it happen anyway as mobile use increases?

I hope I don’t sound dismissive of student’s expectations of mobile learning. I was just one of those moments where you find your own perspective unexpectedly shifted for you. I realised that the majority of my use of my own device was for routine information purposes. The app I used most often over the few days I was in London was Tube Exits, helping my provincial self navigate the Underground. I highly recommend it by the way – well worth the money.

Ironically, this reframing was helped by a conversation I was having on the conference backchannel with Carl and Chris back at the office.

I still want to explore the use of mobile technology for creative uses but I think it’s important for me to keep my pragmatic hat on as well.

Image - gordon2208 cc on Flickr

It struck me earlier this week how much of a role technology has played in helping us with our move to new jobs in Newcastle. Some aspects were fairly bland but others have been a little more interesting. I thought I’d itemise the different ways and then draw some tenuous conclusion as I usually do. I’ll try to keep it brief.

Getting a job

Using Google Reader to keep tack of job adverts from various sources – There was a lot of irrelevant stuff to wade through but that may be down to how well I configured my searches. I didn’t want to narrow this down too much in case something came out of leftfield that looked interesting. It was the rss feed from Newcastle Uni that threw up the Netskills job.

Twitter - part of researching the role and the organisation was to start with the website and read around it but more useful was actually following the Netskills employees on Twitter. This did feel a bit like stalking initially and I was a bit cautious about what impression I was giving through my own Tweets when they started following back. One of the most important things about jobs for me is the people I’d be working with so this was an opportunity to see whether I thought I would fit with the general feel of the place. It have me a window on Netskills that more traditional research methods couldn’t have done. Twitter was also useful for getting my networks opinions on the topic I was given for the presentation.

Blogging - Candidates were asked to provide a sample of their work as part of the interview process and to bring it along to the interview. My work at the CLC involved only a little bit of materials writing and I didn’t think this gave a good account of what I was capable of. I had a few videos I’d produced, a podcast or two and actually the blog itself is a good representation of me as a learner. So I created a showcase page on this blog and embedded the various bits of meida hoping that it demonstrated I was at least competent with the technology. It was like making a mini e-portfolio.

Prezi - oh Prezi, how do I love thee. Let me count the ways… Both my wife and I had to do interviews with presentations, both of us used Prezi and both got the jobs. See my effort here – obviously you miss out on the sparkling repartee that went with it (and the grilling I got from the Netskills audience afterwards) but it’s a flavour.

Finding a house

So you can search for properties on the internet. Yada yada, so far so normal.

Google Streetview – as we’ve been moving to an area we’re not familiar with and that involves a 2.5 hour car drive to get there having Streetview as a way of getting a closer look at the outside of a property has been invaluable. I’ve always been frustrated that brochures for houses never give you an clear picture of the surroundings but with Google’s various mapping tools you can see how a house fits into the neighbourhood, proximity to services, noise sources etc.

iPhone/iPod Touch – I’ve jumped on the iPhone bandwagon the the last week but had access to an iPod Touch from work for the majority of time we were looking at properties. Aside from the fact that checking emails has been a cinch Rightmove have a nice app for doing quick property searches where you can see the pics of the property, find it on the map and request further details. Viewing a house yesterday having the iPhone to take pics and video of the rooms has been a useful aide memoire.

Choosing a school

Oh the shame of it. Most of our research on schools was done via the OFSTED site. I felt like a complete Judas! The schools’ websites varied so much in quality and content that it made it difficult to draw comparisons. A decent school website can give some indication of their approach to ICT and other things and for people coming into the area from outside with few contacts and local knowledge it’s a nice starting point.

Social Networking – On the subject of local knowledge using Twitter and Mumsnet to help us navigate the confusing set up for mid-year admissions in Newcastle City Council was a boon.

And so the the contrived moral of this tale…

Organising this move up to the North East would have been perfectly possible without all this technological input but having these tools at ones disposal can really improve the way you build connections,  the range of choices you have, remove some (not all, definitely not all) of the anxiety and also introduce a bit of fun into the proceedings.

…and that is one of the reasons why I think it’s worthwhile me helping people become more confident with technology.

CC Image - /Joe on Flickr

I have to be careful not to get too excited when a gizmo lands on the desk for us to evaluate at Sheffield East CLC. Having said that I was really looking forward to getting my hands on the iPod touch after hearing so much from other schools and CLC’s about using them.

I’ve had a few weeks to play with one now, although we haven’t used them with students yet, so I thought I’d capture my initial thoughts as an aide memoire for later. As with most things my opinion is likely to change but at least having this as something to refer back to might be useful.

What the iPod does is documented much better elsewhere so I’m not going to discuss that.My main point is a question, really, based on a conversation I’ve had with my boss. It’s this…

To what extent does the iPod Touch actually contribute to pedagogical change?

I start from the assumption that mobile learning is about transforming how learning happens as well as when and where.

The iPod is a great device for delivering content which is what it was designed for. It’s fun and a breeze to use for listening to podcasts, watching videos, looking at websites etc. It gets a lot harder when you try to actually create stuff and contribute.

Text input is fine for short spells but that gives quite a narrow field of ways of getting students to contribute to their own learning. If you want students to capture audio you’ll need to invest in earphones with built-in mic (which can cost up to £20). There are some nice audio apps (AudioBoo being one) but transferring sound out for use elsewhere can be a pain.

The lack of camera for stills and video is a big miss and would open up the door to myriad possibilities for developing visual literacy.

Also, a browse through the apps store for education titles is pretty uninspiring (although there are exceptions – I hope to do another blog post about some of my faves in the near future). Most are about drill-and-practice skill honing or showing information (sometimes in quite engaging and attractive ways, mind).

I don’t buy the idea that by giving a student a mobile device so they can access delivered content anytime and anywhere makes it a learner-centred experience. You need to maximise opportunities for  the learner to record and reflect on their own experiences and the iPod isn’t quite there yet although it’s a step in the right direction.

They key thing, though is that the device on it’s own isn’t going to be transformative other than perhaps adding novelty or increasing engagement. The learning culture around the device needs to find ways of using its capabilities to allow the learner to create and reflect more easily.

I’m not down on the iPod. I love it as a device. I just think that anyone investigating it as a learning tool should think as much about the environment the iPod will be used in as much as what the machine can do.

What are your thoughts on the iPod? Put me straight if you disagree…

Travis Allen is an 18-year old student from Georgia, USA who has started something called the iSchool Initiative. In brief, he is an advocate for getting technology into the classroom in the shape of iPod Touches.

He makes the argument that if all students had the Apple devices running a collection of apps there would be considerable learning, cost-saving and environmental benefits for schools. Check out his manifesto on YouTube.

A few reflections:

• Firstly, I wish more students took such an interest in their learning. I vigorously applaud Travis’s efforts and I hope his school/college is taking him seriously.
• The benefits of using mobile tech on a one device per student basis are well documented and certainly Apple owns the market at the moment. No one else comes close yet.
• I do feel slightly uneasy about the exclusive Apple nature of the proposal, though. I admit there is a lack of credible alternatives right now but when you are beholden to one supplier for hardware and content there may be problems further down the line. What happens if Android really takes off in 24months time and has a killer education app?
• For me the ideal situation would be when these core apps are available cross platform (I don’t know enough about the market to know if developers are making apps available for Apple and Android etc). That would then free up the students/staff to choose a device tailored to their needs.
• Travis mentions a cost of $150 per student. Is this just his cost per device? Is it one off or per year? What about wireless infrastructure? Content creation and management? I’m sure he’s right about cost savings, but his headline figure looks too good to be true.
• Travis argues that there can be communication between staff and students “anytime, anywhere”. If you have the iPod device you need wireless internet access. Go out into the field and you lose connectivity. The iPhone brings all sorts of technical complications but is actually a more exciting device. Some of the augmented reality apps that are starting to surface could transform field trips and opportunities for informal learning.
• Lastly, the restriction on websites available to those “dedicated to eductaion” seems a little draconian. Where do you draw the line? Is Twitter educationally useful? YouTube? Facebook? It feels more like a proposal to calm the fears of worried parents and staff and is therefore a political rather than pedagogical move. If you lock down access to the internet you risk losing the benefits of collaboration and creativity using web2.0 apps.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have adowner on this. Travis’s idea is exciting and is a great vision for the future. Follow him on Twitter and give him feedback and encouragement.

Travis, if you’re reading this please comment back and keep us updated about your progress.

Image - Eddie Lawrance on Flickr

No  matter where you go on the internet, whatever you discover it is a safe bet that Stephen Fry has got there before you!

So it is with AudioBoo. Basically, it’s Twitter for audio.

I’ll start with the bad news, unless you have an iPhone you can’t upload stuff to it. It’s an iPhone app which allows you to record audio (max 5mins) using the in-built mic, tag it and publish it almost instantly along with a photo and your GPS location.

Without an iPhone you can still sign up and follow other people’s Boo’s but that limits the educational possibilities quite substantially. Much better if you can publish or have a “boo-versation” (I made that up, can you tell?).

As far as what to use it for, it extends podcasting by making collaboration, reflection and commenting a lot more immediate. The ability to geotag is really appealing, especially for fieldwork (for some reason, seeing where Stephen Fry had been when he recorded his Boos was eerie in the extreme).

What other iPhone apps have you come across that have great educational potential?

The basic idea is that students create a living map which is then downloaded onto a mobile device running windows and GPS. When the user walks around the location of the map they enter hotspots defined in the classroom which trigger simple bits of media to show on the mobile devices screen. Check the website for a better description.

With a bit of imagination the possibilities are endless.

The disappointment we’ve had is finding a mobile device that will work reliably in the field. We had bought a batch of Siemens Fujitsu EDA’s which were supposed to be the business but actually turned out to be a bit of a disaster. The GPS was unreliable and setting the devices up was time-consuming and erratic. Camera and sound quality are poor too. They were discontinued not long after release.

So, we’ve been searching for a decent device for a while now withe the basic spec of:

• reliable GPS (gets a quick, accurate fix and holds it for more than a gnat’s breath)
• reasonably tough
• bright, biggish screen
• wireless
• decent camera for taking stills and video