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 - My Melting Brain - Att-NC-ND

I’ll say from the outset that I’m not going to answer the question in the title satisfactorily in this post. It’s just a something I’m asking myself at the moment.

I’m no web developer but it’s impossible to not notice the ding-dong between Apple and Adobe and how lots of people are pointing to HTML5 and saying that Flash video is doomed on mobile (and everywhere else).

I do wish they would sort it out. So undignified; like Colin Firth and Hugh Grant fighting in that film my wife made me watch.

A friend recently asked for my thoughts on what impact I thought HTML5 would have on Adobe and the quick answer is I haven’t the foggiest. I have, though been favouriting some blog posts and web stuff about it as I try to catch up with the rest of the world and I though I’d share some. It’s not comprehensive, but it’s a start.

• I liked this infographic from Focus.com (courtesy of the Guardian) as an easy route in to understanding the basics.
• This Minute Bio blog post is a bit more technical (it has a 45min video from Google which is heavy-going) but is a useful jumping off point to some other blog posts specifically…
• …this post on HTML5 competition with Flash and Silverlight from Infoworld.

On my basic, inexpert reading it looks like it would be too rash to say that HTML5 is going to kill Flash. Flash isn’t perfect but it is for the moment an integral part of the web and a key tool for many developers. It would be unrealistic to expect all those developers to down tools and switch to HTML5 when it comes out of beta. It also looks like a lot of the particularly rich web content will have to still be handled by Flash, Silverlight etc.

Implications for Education

I’d be interested to see how this pans out for our community. Further freeing up video on mobile devices can only be a good thing (although, how it all relates to H.264 I don’t yet know) and there are intriguing possibilities for how data can be presented and integrated with location information that may have implications for learning applications.

It will also be interesting to see how this affects web-numpties like me. Will we be presented with a whole new range of tools for sharing and collaborating and will it give non-experts new ways of presenting rich content for web applications? I do like that, from a learner’s perspective, having to rely less on plug ins for a lot of common content could make accessing information a lot easier, especially on mobile devices (although, as my colleague Carl pointed out just now this isn’t going to be some magic bullet that instantly makes all sites mobile friendly).

The consensus over a chat at coffee seemed to be that it’s unlikely to be a revolutionary step for us non-technical educators  but there will be benefits for the general web user-experience.

We’ll see.

What are your thoughts on HTML5′s implications for education technology? Have you come across any interesting articles that I should include?

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.

igot-U Tracker

It’s not often I write about bits of kit but I’ve been having a bit of fun with this wee gem for a few days now. The i-gotU tracker has been around for a little while and has previously featured on MerlinJohn but we got our grubby mitts on one last week.

Briefly, it’s a GPS tracker that is about the size of a memory stick that logs your position at roughly 6 second intervals while it’s running.  Get it back to a laptop, plug in the USB cable and with a few clicks it has mapped your route on a Google Maps background.

The really clever bit happens when you take a camera with you. As long as the clock in the camera is set correctly you can upload the pics to the @trip software at the same time as the GPS data and it will add the pics to your route. Text can be added later.

You can make your trips available online or save them in formats that can be viewed on Google Earth. Have a look at the @Trip site for more examples to download.

Shire Brook Valley

Have a look at this example I did last week. There’s a really good nature reserve near us that we have used for projects before (good for industrial heritage, geography, science) and I strapped my boots on, took our trusty EOS450D and pretended I knew what I was doing. Felt like a proper geographer for the first time since uni!

You can easily see applications for this. For starters…

• Field Trips – either you make one before you go to familiarise students with a location/topic or get them to make one after they’ve been.
• Science – Mapping specimens in an ecosystem (e.g. change in plant species on coasts)
• Local history projects
• Maths  – looking at speed, time and distance relationships. (Graphs are available in the @trip software although I don’t think you can export data).
• PE - tracking a cross-country runner or cyclist, comapring the difficulty of routes (it will also show elevation).
• Art - create a photography walk for an art project.

I had one or two little glitches running the software and lost data from one test trip completely but apart from that it’s a dream to use. I like the idea of any kit where the interface is 2 flashing lights and a dirty great button. After our previous nightmares with GPS it was a relief.

The ability to export to a Google Eart KMZ also means that you can combine it with GE’s audio tour function opening up a whole new avenue that I haven’t explored yet.

Have you used the igot-U? Share your experiences, good or bad…

It’s had a bit of interest mainly thanks to the current debate about whether the VLE is starting its death rattle (see Steve Wheeler’s blog for the start of hostilities!).

But I want to inaugurate the D-ed pool with one of our well-intentioned cul-de-sacs; the Siemens Fujitsu EDA.

Hopes were high for this device a few years back, a ruggedised PDA, preloaded with GPS and a host of education-friendly software. We bought a class set with European funding for a local history transition project to use with the excellent Mediascape.

The project was well planned by the local teachers and Sue Finnigan our assistant manager, and it was all going splendidly – until we tried using the EDA’s in the field…

As an idea they were great but design flaws and software problems meant they’ve stayed in the cupboard.  It was little things like:

• the promised class-set charging dock never materialised
• the rubber casing hides the charging light so you can’t see if they’ve charged
• GPS problems meant accurate fixes were just about impossible
• The camera and sound recorder was so poor quality they were unusable
• You could create slideshows in the EDA but they were impossible to export to view on a PC
• they used Windows Mobile 5 - eugh! Not good for education.

The overall feeling was of a device that despite some nice software ideas (Red Halo) they’d been bodged to fit a particular market niche without a huge amount of though or care. They were discontinued pretty soon after release.

I know Wolverhampton LA used them extensively but have moved on now. We just never had any joy out of them.

And they just weren’t cool enough.

Was your experience different?

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.

Plus: nobody cares enough about me to follow it!

So I refuse to feel guilty about not joining the throng. By all means use it as an educational tool but I’m removing it from my blog. So there!

Here’s the Daily Show’s take on the Twitter phenomenon.It made me giggle… 

KEEP UP!!

To claim that PDA’s are about to transform education is something that could have come from an article 3 years ago. I had to double check the year on the article.

They quite obviously haven’t for a number of reasons but PDA’s as a technology are dying a long, slow agonising death. Who would buy a PDA now, anyway? It’s all about smartphones and iPhones. PDA’s are expensive, difficult to use (thanks to Windows Mobile) and decidedly not sexy. Why should a school forkout  thousands of pounds to equip their students with soon-to-be-obsolete technology?

I can forgive the Indie this one discretion – probably wooed (as my boss pointed out) by a well timed press release from Wolverhampton. 

What is more disappointing is that I found it through a link from the BETT show website, THE premiere education technology show in the UK.

Come on, chaps. You’re supposed to be showcasing the future!

 (NOTE: Damn, can’t find the seminar page that linked to it now but it definitely was there!!)