Christian Glahn

Results of the UNESCO Mobile Learning Week Published

2012-02-12T19:22:15Z

A few weeks ago the mobile learning week was held at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. A couple of days ago the report of the results of the weeks have been published online. The report emphasizes the "access to education for all" theme of mobile learning. Certainly, this is one of the key challenges that mobile technologies can help. It is interesting that as a response to this focus, the main criticism and concerns mentioned in the report were of the types "technological limitations" or "organisational limitations" (from a teachers perspective).

It would be really interesting to have a concept mapping study on the statements collected from this event and compare the results to our previous expert study.

When did mobile learning start?

2011-11-18T14:59:19Z

Today I came across an interesting posting in a mobile learning forum on XING. The thread started with the question "When did mobile learning really start?". There was already a posting that claimed that Nokia started the mobile learning idea in 2001. I thought, "wait! 2001 is too late" and started some digging in my references. What I found there was interesting and enlightening.

]]> To answer the first question we need to understand that mobile learning is NOT about mobile devices.

Mobile learning is about emphasizing aspects of mobility in an educational concept. Besides mobility this includes situatedness, context dependency, the location of a learning environment etc.

So when did mobile learning really start. My little research puts the date around 1997. About a year later I had a very enlightening and inspiring discussion with Cathleen Norris and Elliot Soloway in Berlin. Back then they presented their early solutions from HI-CE for "handheld learning". The core difference to other handheld learning solutions of that time was that they discussed classroom applications that emphasised the mobility of the learners for making the applications valuable. Rather than "handheld devices for learning" they changed the view to "supporting learning on the go with handheld devices".

To embrace the difference one has to recall that until around 1997 handheld devices for learning were mostly of the kind of the Little Professor - some were more sophisticated some less. Basically these solutions were relatively small solutions of portable learning systems. With this respect they were very similar to books as the learning content was not affected by the mobility of the learners. Until 1997 mobile and handheld devices were technological extensions of the learning anytime and anywhere metaphor. The HI-CE stuff broke with this perspective. Suddenly learning was dependent on social interactions,movements, locations, and annotations. Instead of enforcing the right time and the right place, the new solutions were empowering learners to create and enrich their spatial learning environments with the new technology.

My quick research brought another interesting aspect to my attention. In 1998 Rainer Oppermann and Marcus Specht published a concept for a nomadic museum guide. This paper discusses explicitly the application for learning support. The interesting aspect of this paper is that it outlines the first application of Augmented Reality for Learning. This gets clearer with the follow-up publications from 1999 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6).

Therefore, the tipping point when solutions for learning changed towards what we now know as "mobile learning", was around 1997.

Google Scholar Citations

2011-11-17T10:01:25Z

Marco Kalz pointed me at a new beta service of Google Scholar: Citations. This service collects my scientific publications into a personal portfolio. This portfolio includes all resources with my name on it that Google finds on web-pages that are associated with research and development. Furthermore, this service also aggregates a few citation indices for me and provides a citation count per publication. The indices come in handy for benchmarking the personal performance. This is pretty awesome stuff if you publish, need to track your impact, and like to get a little dose of self-esteem boost ("oh my god, yeah I did all that work").

Interestingly Google collects publications more rigorously than I would personally do myself and includes unpublished project reports, software projects, and other stuff that I would not consider as relevant publications. The funniest thing is one paper among my most cited references that completely surpassed my radar. I definitely worked on that projects and wrote some stuff but I cannot recall that conference publication.

Check out my Google Scholar Citations profile.

Geo URI: location as a resource

2011-09-12T07:01:15Z

Just a bit than one year ago the Internet Engineering Task Force has released the RFC5870 that specifies how references to locations have to be written in the URI scheme. This basically provides a technical standard for sharing locations in a human and machine readable way. This is extremely cool because now you can embed references to locations in space just like you would link normal HTML documents.

This standard is an important step to move location-based services from prototypes to the mainstream. In this article I outline a few ideas how existing web-solutions can lead to new usages using this standard.

]]> Why are URIs so important?

URI is the acronym for Uniform Resource Identifier a slightly more general form of the famous URL (uniform resource locator). Everybody knows that URLs are basically the backbone of the Word Wide Web. Without a standardized format for defining the location of a document on the internet it would be impossible to create hyperlinks in the generic way as we got used to do today. Therefore both URIs and URLs are very important to identify and locate resources.

The best thing about these identifiers is that the format is standardized. Thanks to the WWW this format got so common that most people can understand the basic information when they see it. Even more importantly, information systems can provide generic "parsers" that can read the information and connect appropriate activities to them. This enables to build complex systems based on the same technological principles.

For example, all web-browsers allow users to enter URLs in the location bar. Commonly, such a URL starts with http: (unsecured hypertext protocol) or https: (secured hypertext protocol) followed by a reference to the location of the resource. The first bit is important, because it tells the browser that the requested information is something it should handle itself. Alternatively and also very common is the ftp: prefix. This tells the web-browser that the information is not on the Web but in a file repository. Today this is often handled by your browsers as well, but not too long ago one needed a different program for accessing file repositories using the file transfer protocol (FTP). Through the ftp:-prefix in a link your web-browser can identify if it is able to handle a link or if it needs to start a different software. In order to do so your FTP software tells web-browsers that it can handle a certain type of links associated to a specific prefix.

Skype uses a similar trick for linking Skype information into web-pages. It informs the web-browsers that it can handle the skype: prefix. If you visit a web-page with a skype link from a device with skype installed, you will find that your skype client pops up and tries to call the linked contact when you click on the link.

However, with standardized URI formats you do not only gain flexibility over choosing capable software for link handling, but you also get precise details how to interpret the rest of the information that is provided in the link (which is not the case for skype links, for instance).

Locations as resources

While it is possible to link to resources, such as documents, audio-files, or videos, or to services, such as Google maps, twitter, or delicious, it was not possible to link locations in a generic way, compact and machine-readable manner.

The common approach for linking to locations is to link to a Mapping service. The main drawback is that no two of these services share the same format for referring to locations. Therefore, using link to a mapping service is not really a reference to a location, rather than to the information of that mapping service for that location. Furthermore, the format for linking locations is bound to the data-formats and protocols of the underlying service - are typically not compact and easy to understand, as the geo URI RFC points out in its introduction.

However, locations share many characteristics with resources, such as documents or videos.

First of all, locations refer to resources in a physical way. For example, if you visit the Eifel Tower in Paris, the Funkturm in Berlin, or the Golden Gate Bridge in SF, you will experience the presence of the resource steel in its functional industrialized form.

Secondly, locations have functions. All culturally related locations are functional. A bio-technology laboratory offers different functions and acting opportunities than a open space office, a Garden allows different kinds of actions than they are possible at gas-station, or a restaurant serves a different function than a factory.

Thirdly, locations serve as information resources. In the most basic sense this means that certain things can be observed at specific locations. For example, cave drawings can be best observed in their original location such as the Chauvet Cave (although the access is limited) or the Louvre for studying the Mona Lisa. Another view on locations as information resources is described already in the classic rhetoric. In this context, locations are anchors for other information - that are made available through the location (or referring to the location). In terms of contemporary technology this would be called "augmented reality".

Finally, locations are identifiable through reference systems. For identifying locations, we use reference systems. This could be linear or spherical coordinate systems. Geographic locations refer usually to the spherical system of longitude and latitude. With these two dimensions it is possible to identify places on the surface of our planet. When you include the third parameter altitude you can describe every location on our globe. Altitude can be important if you need to differentiate locations at street level from locations on the 25th floor in a Manhattan Skyscraper.

How does geo URI work?

The idea of geo URI is that we need a simple and compact way to pass around references to locations that plays along nicely with other references, namely URLs. Such a reference form was missing, because other semantics for geo-spacial information is not suitable for using them with HTML href-attributes or XML's XLink syntax. Therefore, geo URI aims for a compact pointer to geo-locations that is as simple as a reference to any other resource on the web.

The first part of geo URI is the geo prefix. This allows a software to recognize that the following information is related to a geographic location.

The prefix is followed by the coordinates of the location separated by commas. The first coordinate refers to the latitude, the second coordinate to the longitude and the third coordinate to the meters above sea level (altitude). Additionally, geo URIs can have additional parameters. These parameters are separated with semicolons from the location. geo URI reserves the parameters 'u' (uncertainty) and 'crs' (coordinate reference system). crs parameter is only of interest if you visit different planets, so in most cases this can be ignored. the u parameter describes the radius of a circle around the point mentioned. This allows to describe the area around a point or to indicate the uncertainty of a measuring instrument (like my iPhone that hardly ever gets better than 10m). An application may decide to use additional parameters in a geo URI to provide additional information to the application. However, because this information is outside of the specification this information might be ignored.

In the simplest form a geo URI contains only the latitude and the longitude.

geo:50.87783,5.958737

This URI points to the Chiba building of the Open University of the Netherlands.

You notice, that this URI lacks of a bunch of slashes that we are used to see in http URLs. The famous two slashes in an internet URL inform a browser that the following part refers to a location on a server on the internet using TCP/IP. Geographic coordinates have nothing to do with Internet protocols and therefore don't need the additional slashes.

Of course providing a single point is not really the best solution for describing a building, because a building takes space and is not a point. In order to indicate that something is around a certain point you can indicate that you really mean the space around a point by indicating the uncertainty in meters. Lets assume 40m uncertainty to match me within the building (and a bit around it).

geo:50.87783,5.958737;u=40

Given to the specification, this would mean that that I am on the earth's surface, which basically means 'street level'. In my case this is not entirely true, because I am usually on the first floor. So I should be more precise by adding the altitude of my location. The altitude however, is not the difference to the street level, but the hight above sea level. I found out that the OU is at 105m and therefore my office is about 108m above sea level (believe it or not, this is The Netherlands, too). The following URI describes more or less the CELSTEC laboratories.

geo:50.87783,5.958737,108;u=40

With this basic information I can do already quite some interesting things. However, by adding additional information I could provide additional information in a custom parameter to the application that could enrich the user experience.

geo:50.87783,5.958737,108;u=40;room=Chi-1.28

This really goes too far, because the truth is that this room does not help you a lot, because I don't have a fixed office in the first place.

Now I can use this nice URI to link the location of the CELSTEC laboratories just as I would link any other resource on the internet, as the following example shows.

href="geo:50.87783,5.958737,108;u=40">CELSTEC Laboratories

Conclusions

The geo URI specification is still fresh and so far not many applications provide native support for these URIs. However, the simple format allows to embed geo location information just as normal hyper-textual references. This provides the power to extend existing web-applications with location awareness without binding these applications to a specific geo information service.

Limitations of Awareness Support in Education and Learning

2011-09-04T19:26:20Z

Last week the SURF Academy organised a seminar on learning analytics. Hendrik nicely twittered from the event, so I was able to follow it. After he posted a comment about measuring the performance of teachers I needed to respond. My prime criticism is that the type of analytics that he describes is not learning analytics, but pretty boring performance benchmarking and that this if done by the wrong people might has legal implications that are beyond what Hendrik and Wolfgang outlined in their presentation.

I worked on the topic for several years, although I do not use the currently popular term "learning analytics" because it emphasizes the statistical procedures over the actual or potential use and usefulness of the resulting data. Instead, I prefer the term "awareness support" because it includes the purpose of how the data should be used and helps to focus on appropriate solutions. The entire topic is very new and needs some clarification. In this article I try to focus on my understanding of what "learning analytics" is about.

]]> What is Learning Analytics?

Learning analytics is a nice fuzzy new term that is currently in the making. I believe it is very important to define learning analytics very precisely in order to avoid confusion with other applications of analytics. I think Hendrik agrees.

My 140 character version of a learning analytics definition is

The prime task of #learninganalytics has to be the support of those who are directly involved in the learning process.

Ok, this is pretty fussy and so Wolfgang Reinhardt asks who are those directly involved actors. Interestingly, his comment describes a pretty old perspective of educational and learning processes that involve teachers and students (note: teachers first).

Consequently, it requires a better understanding of what learning processes are. For my Ph.D. thesis I used the following definition of learning processes:

Learning processes refer to those interactions of a person with an environment that result in changes of behaviour, knowledge, or attitude.

There are a few important things to remark about this tag line besides the fact that it describes learning without mentioning teachers.

Firstly, learning processes are interactive processes. Different to context-free stimulus-response sequences, interactive processes are context-sensitive action-feedback loops. This means the actions of a learner have an effect and that this effect is observable by the learner as a feedback on the initial action. Within this definition feedback is fundamental for learning.

Secondly, learning happens always in interaction with an environment. It can be a laboratory or a garden where the learning person works alone; it can be the peer group or a class in which the learner's actions create socially grounded reactions; or it can be a (computer) game that is independent from real-world social or environmental constraints.

Thirdly, learning results in a change. The definition states "behaviour, knowledge, or attitude" but in the end it boils down to changed behaviour because the other two dimensions refer to cognitive states that are not observable. Two primary types of behavioral change are widely referred in the educational literature: effectiveness and efficiency. Effectiveness of learning means that the learning person shows new behaviour and efficiency means in this context that the learner does something better than before.

When I talk about "those who are directly involved in the learning process" I imply the learner and everybody in the learner's environment who can or should provide feedback to the learner. This can be peers, parents, teachers, managers, or colleagues. This is not the teacher's supervisor who criticizes teaching efficiency and this is certainly not the provider of the virtual learning environment that happens to be used in a course. Two years ago, we have presented a paper on the ECTEL 2009 conference about who is in control for personalizing learning experiences. It should give a good introduction into this line of reasoning.

Returning to the original question about "what is learning analytics?" Learning analytics is not just about analyzing data but also about monitoring processes. It is crucially important to understand that it is not possible to have one without the other. The occurrence of learning in the term indicates that the type of analysis is directly related to the action-feedback loop. Although the theory sounds simple, supporting action-feedback loops requires a great deal of situational awareness both of the learner as well as of anybody who can support learners. Therefore, solutions for learning analytics intend to help improving the situational awareness of actors in learning processes. Tracked data can be highly valuable for boosting situational awareness in learning processes. This is why I prefer to talk about awareness support instead of learning analytics.

I distinguish two meta-types of analytical data as learning analytics.

Data as feedback. This kind of analytics help to generate meaningful responses that helps learners to develop a better understanding about their learning process and supports them to regulate their learning activities. Reflection support widgets and recommender systems are good examples for this data as feedback approaches.
Data for feedback. This kind of analytics helps other actors or systems in a learner's environment to get information to provide some form of feedback or supportive activity. Teacher dashboards that help to identify learners with support needs are widely available solution for this type of analytics.

In my opinion, if an approach does not fall into these two categories, it is very likely that it is not about learning analytics but about analyzing something for a different purpose.

Limitations of and challenges for Learning Analytics

The biggest challenge of learning analytics is to provide appropriate (social) information for learning support on the one hand side, and to ensure data protection on the other hand. When talking to educational practitioners (cyber) bullying has been a major concern. More recently, also caused by inspiring research results from public social networks, educational practitioners realise that their personal data could be at stake as well (and potentially used against them). That these concerns are not coming out of the thin air, shows Hendrik's comment on "educational business analytics". The problem at hand is that the line between learning analytics and educational business analytics is thin and is easily crossed.

In times of google and facebook tracking huge amounts of personal data one might argue that this discussion renders obsolete sooner or later. Personally I am not that optimistic because of existing legislation on data tracking and employee monitoring. For example, Switzerland and Liechtenstein forbid systematic employee monitoring altogether and limit monitoring to the law enforcement organisations. Although no such legislation exists for Austria or Germany, permanent activity monitoring at the workplace is considered as legal only in the case of strong suspicion of a criminal offense (basic overview on the German case). I heard that similar legal views are shared by other European countries as well.

This affects learning analytics, because most educational practitioners are employed and most approaches of activity monitoring require systematic data inquiry. If learning analytics is not limited to the above definition, it goes beyond monitoring for production purposes, which is typically considered as legal.

The driving question is "who has access to what analytical data?"

The naïve approach to data protection is to restrict access to monitoring data all together, both technically and legally. This assures that nobody has access to potentially compromising data. As a consequence of this approach also nobody has access to potentially useful information as well. This approach is very popular where legislation about monitoring data is very rigid or the legislation is unclear (like in Austria).

A more relaxed variant provided by many educational systems is to provide instructors with monitoring data for their unit of learning (or course) and limit the access to this data for the duration of that unit of learning. Although this solves some problems, it limits possible learning analytic approaches to the data for feedback type. Another drawback of this approach is that historic data is erased and lost.

Alternatively, I proposed layered social perspectives for filtering and anonymising data. These perspectives are directly build into analytical functions that enable learners and teachers to access relevant information on the on hand, but restricts the data granularity depending on the role of the person who requests an analysis. That way even learners can get anonymous analytical information about their peers.

Conclusions

It is important that future development of learning analytics build on a strict definition for identifying approaches. I propose a relatively narrow learning process centered definition that links to the concepts of situation awareness. Having "educational business analysts" hijack the term would be highly undesirable because the legal constraints of employee protection would then hinder to exploit the full potential of analytical approaches for learning support.

Mobile Learning Challenge: Looking for Visions of Mobile Learning

2011-08-19T11:29:01Z

The International Association for Mobile Learning (IAmLearn) has announced the Mobile Learning Challenge some time ago.

The Mobile Learning Challenge looks for innovative, smart, cool, or crazy solutions of mobile learning for real world learning and/or educational challenge. The best thing is that IAMLearn sets out a price of £1000 for the best submission.

The competition is open to students, teachers, educational practitioners, technical developers, young researchers, and designers. So this is a smart opportunity for thinking out of the box and put down your ideas how mobile learning could offer new ways of supporting learning and education.

]]>

What is the task?

Identify a learning or educational challenge.
Formulate this challenge and explain why this needs a mobile learning solution.
Think of a cool solution for your challenge.
Submit your solution to http://www.iamlearn.org/competition.php before 15 September 2011

How should you present your solution?

The Mobile Learning Challenge is open to all types presentation of your visionary solutions.

This includes:

User Stories
Essays
Technology Designs
Educational Designs
Short Videos
Storyboards
Slidesets
Mockup Systems

Better get started!

How To Follow Any Twitter List In An RSS Reader

2011-05-23T13:02:18Z

Twitter is a nice tool for social networking. A lot of information is aggregated on twitter. It can be quite an overwhelming information stream. Since Twitter has introduced twitter lists it is possible to structure the information a bit further. However, the list feature is somewhat private to the person who manages the list.

I just found a nice way to fetch your twitter lists using RSS feeds - err. Atom feeds. For most feed readers is does not matter if you dump RSS or ATOM feeds. The cool thing about this is that you don't need to work around with third party services such as reported here or here. You can simply use Twitter's very own functions.

]]>

To get your feed you can use the following URL.

http://api.twitter.com/1/lists/statuses.atom?slug=YOURLISTNAME&owner_screen_name=LISTMANAGERNAME

You need to replace YOURLISTNAME with the name of your list. Also you need to replace the LISTMANAGERNAME with your twitter name, or the name of the person who organises the list.

You can try out the result with my mlearning twitter-list that listens to the following URL.

http://api.twitter.com/1/lists/statuses.atom?slug=mlearning&owner_screen_name=phish108

It is even possible to fetch the information as a JSON object, which makes it really easy to use this information on your web-page or blog. In order to do so, just replace the .atom to.json, like I did for my mlearning list

http://api.twitter.com/1/lists/statuses.json?slug=mlearning&owner_screen_name=phish108

The role of the teacher in mobile learning

2011-05-23T07:42:19Z

Today we have a retreat meeting with the mobile learning research group. One topic that we ran into today is the role of the teachers in mobile learning. In this discussion school television came up as an example as a driver for technological change in schools. The problem with this metaphor is that it is perfectly inline with the content delivery approaches that we find all over the mobile learning world. However, mobile learning is more complex that it looks on the first sight and that the role of the teachers in mobile learning is not comparable with the role of teachers in school television.

The following graphic provides a very reduced overview of the content of the rest of this article that covers my view on the topic.

]]> Before school television the main role of the teacher was the role of the domain expert that presents relevant information to the learners, who are considered as novices who need to learn. The early types of school television in the 1970's and 1980's followed this role division. This kind of school television has been replaced by concepts of discovery channel, which is more related to concepts incorporated to CTV's Sesame Street or the German "Sendung mit der Maus" rather than the early lectures of school television. In a sense these developments are part of what has been later coined as "Edutainment".

The transition of the media formats changed the role of the average teacher from being an expert towards being a presenter of the expertise of others. This transition was mainly caused by production means, where it is hardly possible for the teachers to produce the kind of learning material that is produced by professional TV production teams. This kind of role shift was already observable with the introduction of VHS video players and photo copiers in school. One important aspect of this kind of educational media is that the role of the learners is not questioned.

With the Web2.0 and social software many things have changed. Suddenly, learners can choose the media channels and challenge the presented "propaganda" of their teachers. This had and still has an empowering effect for the learners and tackles the authority of the expert. In these settings the role of the teachers needs to change from the presenter of expert knowledge to a moderator of (possibly) opposing positions. This role is much more challenging than being a presenter. In this role teachers need to accept different opinions and positions, relate and integrate them, and guide the process of knowledge selection and acquisition. This task is challenging because it demands a great deal of confidence, procedural structure, and flexibility as new perspectives may occur and challenge what is said at any point of the process.

I would argue that mobile learning breaks this even further as learning processes are no longer limited to clearly defined learning settings. These settings were the classrooms and lecture halls in the educational institutions or the study rooms at the students' home. This separation is not challenged by Web2.0 and social software. With mobile learning learning settings become seamlessly integrated with settings that were previously not considered for learning and connected to activities that were considered as learning. This has the consequence that moderating learning processes become unmanageable because different learning processes can overlap and interact, learners can connect activities on their own, and learners can identify specific learning needs in different situations at any time.

Particularly, the effect of overlapping processes has been identified by schools as a prime problem and has lead to the denial of mobile devices during lessons. Although "distraction" is put as the main reason by teachers and school officials, I think that the core is more related to the change of how learning is perceived. The seamless integration of mobile technologies into everyday's living moves the teachers out of the center of the scholarly educational process and challenges the role of the learners in the process. From this perspective learners want to learn rather than need to learn. This also implies that learners take greater responsibility for their own learning. However, teachers face the problem of the scope of the students' learning interests. A moderating teacher would guide the learners back to the scope, forbid the switch to other contexts, and kill the transition of learning processes to other contexts.

In order to consider the changed role and responsibility of the learners the role of the teacher changes slowly towards that of a consultant. In this role teachers need to be able to identify the learners interests, relate these interests to topic related learning goals, and offer opportunities to reach these goals that are related to the specific conditions a learner is in. Such integration also implies that teachers may face that learners consult refer to different persons in order to meet their goals. This requires teachers to be able to identify these links and align their learning opportunities with those of others and engage with a wider range of parties (stakeholders) who are involved in these processes. Teachers acting as educational consultants for learners were already present in street and community schools in the 1960's and 1970's, before these schools have been canceled by the neo-liberal educational agenda in practically all western countries.

When we look at mobile learning in schools it is needless to say that the role of the teachers is crucial. However, in order to make mobile learning happen at the large scale we need to check how many teachers perform their role as "experts", "presenters", "moderators", and "consultants".

Mobile Application Development

2011-04-29T13:50:58Z

Recently, I had a lot of discussions about mobile application development. As there is a big hype around App-stores for the different platforms, it seems that everybody and everything needs a native app for a mobile device. Slightly hidden from this hype are the advances the mobile web. I covered some aspects briefly in a previous post and probably the most important ones are code portability and cost efficiency for reaching a large target audience. Yesterday, I stumbled upon a nice article on mobile application development in ACM's CACM that focuses on the pros and cons of native vs. web-based mobile applications. To spoil the reading: the authors are very much pro mobile web.

]]> With the recent developments on the smart phone market lead by iOS and Android systems the mobile web becomes an actual alternative for mobile application development. Before these systems were available there was no mobile (smart) phone that had a capable web-browser that was worth speaking of. With the latest systems mobile devices have now web-browsers with (almost) the same capabilities as desktop browsers that fit into the general user experience of the mobile device.

Andre Charland and Brian Leroux analyse the state of mobile application development with a clear bias towards web-convergence. This is not so surprising because the World-wide Web seems to obsolete the traditional Desktop computing metaphor. Similar to my own opinion, the authors locate the biggest benefits of mobile web-applications at the efficiency level: web-applications are much cheaper and much faster to develop than native applications, if the application needs to the available on different platforms. Given the plethora of devices and platforms of mobile devices this is even more important than it was previously on the desktop. The interesting aspect that is highlighted by this article is that contemporary mobile devices do not share programming paradigms and are built on top of specific frameworks and programming languages, which are not shared across the platform boundaries. This makes it factually impossible to maintain platform independent code of native applications for different mobile platforms. Practically, this implies that multi-platform mobile application development means that an organisation needs to sustain a development team for each mobile platform it wishes to support.

The authors clearly highlight that the efficiency factors outweigh the reoccurring "performance" counter-argument for mobile application development. However, the article emphasizes two facets of mobile application development that limit the potential of the mobile web. The first facet is the user-experience and the second facet are the device capabilities.

The user experience is an important aspect of making attractive and useful mobile applications. This aspect becomes cumbersome because no platform shares the same user guidelines. In other words, mobile web-applications will not fit into the main user experience on every platform that is capable to run the web-site. This remark is interesting, because there are many mobile web-sites that copy the iPhone user experience metaphors, that do not match the user expectations on Android, Blackberry, WebOS, MeeGo, Windows Mobile, or Symbian. The support of the "biggest market share" is frequently used as a key argument. However, worldwide market statistics indicate that this argument has its flaws: the market is mainly distributed among 4 main players, of which Apple is certainly not the biggest. The biggest share argument always fails, because none of the market players have a sufficiently large share (more than 50%) that would justify neglecting the user-experience problem.

The device capabilities of recent smartphones is a ground on which web-based applications can hardly compete with native applications. Although, some device specific APIs are exposed to mobile web-applications (most notably the geolocation api), many device specific features remain unavailable to web-applications. As this includes the phones' microphone, speakers and camera some of the core features of smartphones are only available to native applications. Other high level features are typically based on vendor-specific solutions. This incudes push notifications that can alert a user when the device is not actively in use. These features remain in the domain of native applications.

The authors remark that the device capabilities are weakened from two directions. Firstly, the W3C puts some effort into exposing more device features to web-application through standardised APIs. Secondly, all recent platforms allow to integrate web-components into native applications. Bridging frameworks such as PhoneGap use this feature to enable the development of native applications entirely with web-application approaches.

The article indicates that the future of mobile application development shows a clear and strong convergence towards web-technologies. However, it will remain more challenging than developing for desktop systems with similar interaction metaphors. While the current limitation of device capabilities can already be solved by bridging frameworks, the different user-experience approaches will remain the key hurdle for optimising mobile application development for several platforms.

Featured on SlideShare

2011-02-23T11:27:28Z

Yesterday, I uploaded my presentation about HTML5 for mobile learning applications to slideshare and today I found a mail in my inbox telling me that this presentation got featured on the slideshare homepage. Damn, this is cool.

As a side effect this had a massive impact on the views of this presentation - within the the 24 hours the presentation is now on the homepage it received massive interest that made it to my ~~second~~ most viewed presentation on slideshare. With more than 1500 additional views starting from the point that it showed up on the home page.

]]> Besides of being excited about my 5 minutes of slideshare fame, it shows the impact of a front-page feature. This is not really new as such and I have saw this effect while working for aperto.de back in 1998. Then I did some research and development for promoting featured content on web-sites involving search engine optimization and -what is now called- viral marketing. What I find interesting is the fact that the information spreads out into different networks through link promotion and feed aggregation, but that this has not such a strong effect than the home page feature.

Slideshare tracks a lot of data about the visitors but for people who just publish their presentations have only limited access to this information. At least this is enough to make a rough estimation about the impact of a presentation. Although some information is also provided on other slideshare pages, I found that the most accurate data is on the presentation page itself.

Slideshare makes it easy to share slides through other channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, or Blogs. For this purpose they provide a button bar next to the presentation. When a user clicks on one of these buttons, slideshare will automatically create a message for the selected service for you. In the figure below you can see this button bar.

You can also see that for Twitter and Facebook this bar shows how many times this presentation has been posted through these channels. In the figure you see that there more tweets than mentions on Facebook. This is somewhat misleading, because this includes my own tweets and those of Marion and Marcus. More interesting is that there were 5 mentions on Facebook, which I hardly use. However, the number of mentions indicates that these channels are not as relevant for slideshare than the service itself. Below you can see the details of the presentation statistics.

The presentation statistics show very interesting data. The first line can get considered as a social indicator that provides information about how this presentation is perceived by the audience. The downloads and favorites should be read together as both factors refer to how relevant the audience found the presentation. I cannot really say much about the comments function because I never observed many comments on slideshare.

The second line gives the raw impact. Here it becomes visible that slideshare itself plays an important role for generating hits on this presentation - as it does pretty much for all of my presentations. The number of embeds shows how many times the presentation has been presented through other web-sites. This is interesting if combined with the list of embedded views. In this list you can see what web-sites embedded a presentation. Most interesting I find that there are 4 other web-sites besides twitter, lo-f.at, and the ou.nl, which were the obvious candidates because I embedded the information myself. I got curious what this might be and investigated a bit further. It turned out that these web-sites were not promoting the presentation publicly, so I expect that these references are results from automatic feed aggregators (such as Google reader).

Standards and Open Educational Resources

2011-02-22T12:41:36Z

Finally I managed to get my slides from my presentation at the ICCE2010 to slideshare. This is a bit of a negative record for me because the workshop was already three months back. The workshop was about "Open Standards in Open Education" and the paper reported on the results from several research projects that focused on open educational resources (OER). While the rest of the world is still reasoning about publishing educational resources and if openness is a good thing or not, we were looking at the real problems that educators, organisations and system administrators face alike.

]]> Around spring last year Marco, Marion, Marcus and I were discussing the relation of educational resources and standards as part of a educational production process. This discussion has been triggered by the work of several projects we were involved in and in which we studied how to improve the use of open educational resources. While integrating our experiences, we figured that OER is not just about publishing and using resources. Instead, OER really refers to a process cycle of creating, arranging, sharing, searching, delivering, and enriching. Putting resources online is really only the first step, but already at this step many institutions fail to provide resources in a way that supports the OER lifecycle. On the other hand, doing so is not an easy task and certainly not fully supported by open standards.

In this presentation we outline the OER lifecycle and the related standards that are already in place.

Supporting the Reuse of Open Educational Resources through Open Standards

View more presentations from Christian Glahn.

In the presentation I drew the OER lifecycle continuous, but the truth is that it is still full of gaps and at all levels we find open questions for research. With the related paper we try to raise some awareness to these issues in the wider TEL research community (and in this case to the Asian parts).

HTML5 for Mobile Applications

2011-02-22T09:49:07Z

Yesterday afternoon (12 February 2011) a group of managers, designers and developers of Bluetea visited us in the CELSTEC Lab. They were interested in our work on mobile learning - and we did a lot during the last two years. I presented an overview of our work on mobile web applications and spiced it a bit up with a few screenshots of the projects and prototypes I have been working on over the last 2 years.

]]> Html5 for mobiles

View more presentations from Christian Glahn.

Mobile Tools for Experience Sampling

2011-02-19T14:30:22Z

Together with our Faculty of Psychology we are currently preparing a lab study on experience sampling. Experience sampling is an method for collecting contextual data and has been heavily used for motivation research, health research, as well as in usability research for the past 30 years. This method is a way to get information about situated experiences and behaviour. For a method that is frequently used we expected to find tools that can be used with mobile devices. In this posting I briefly review a selection of ESM tools for mobile devices.

]]> The core principle of experience sampling is to ask the participants of a study to frequently repeat a very small survey. Typically, such a survey contains a few questions on the research topic and a few questions about the context of the participant. The underlying principle of repeated questioning and contextualising the answers makes experience sampling highly suitable for research on contextual and mobile learning. It had been already proven a reliable instrument in studies on ubiquitous computing and on media consumption.

I have been looking around to see what mobile data enquiry tools are available for ESM and what is missing. My search showed that some work has done in this area for many years.

The first hit brought me to the project homeage of CAES, which stands of Context-aware Experience Sampling. This project developed a small application for for Windows based PDA. The original software of CAES is no longer maintained and has been integrated into the myexperience system. The CAES project is closely related to the National Experience Sampling Project and smart building projects at the MIT.

myexperinece is an open source project that has been initiated by Intel Research. The project develops a tool for mobile data collection under the BSD license. Just like CAES, myexperience is build for the windows platform and it heavily relies on the system internals of windows-based mobile systems. The interesting part about this project is that it has developed a XML format for scripting experience sampling studies based on sensor inputs.

A bit older is the Experience Sampling Programme (ESP) that runs on the Palm OS platform. This system is less flexible because it requires ESP studies to be scripted as part of the application that will run on the mobile device.

Far more recently the MobXamp application has been developed for the Apple Iphone. This close-source application has adapted more or less the same interaction principles of ESP to the Iphone. The project homepage is very firm on the technology but it seem that MobXamp is server driven and can assign studies to different user groups.

For Android driven smart-phones there is a tool called Affect Sampler. This tool is mainly designed for self-tracking and is available under the Apache License. There is not much information about this software. This software comes with a server component, which is written in as a set of python scripts for the Google App Engine.

All these solutions are tailored for a specific platform, but they show that there are a bunch of open source solutions to start analysing the requirements for our own project.

2010 - the year of mobilizing VLE

2010-06-29T16:09:24Z

While working on a paper for the MLearn conference I did a brief review of mobile learning support of virtual learning environments (VLEs). As connecting mobile learning and VLEs is not exactly a new topic, I did not expect to find so many new developments in this area. You can find the results of the review here.

]]> Open Source VLEs

About five years ago Gordon Bateson from the Kanazawa Gakuin University in Japan presented a first prototype for making Moodle accessible from mobile devices at a moodle developer workshop. This prototype mainly targets the device capabilities of Japanese Cellphones. This presentation marks official starting point when Moodle moved into the mobile VLE market. The related "moodle for mobiles" sub-project ( forum) is still maintained and under development.

Because the Moodle-for-mobiles project targets mobile access for a wide range of mobile devices, the capabilities of recent smart phone web-browsers are not very well supported. The Moodle4iPhones project focuses on developing an interface that integrates with the user interface guidelines for the iPhone. The project went to public earlier this year.

Already in 2008 Gonzalo Silverio posted a first version of an iPhone web-interface for Sakai. The blog entry shows adapted interfaces so users can access a Sakai system through an iPhone tailored interface. However, this side project seems to have come to halt as the both, the Sakai website and Gonzalo's blog are quite silent on the topic.

Ernie Ghiglione from the LAMS project tested the project's web-interface on an iPhone. The screenshots indicate that no adaptation of the interfaces have been done for improving mobile usage.

Other Open Source VLEs appear not to have much interest in supporting mobile learning - or at least providing mobile access to their systems. The Projects OLAT, Caroline, and .LRN do not present concept studies or interfaces for mobile devices, yet.

Commercialising the mobile access to VLEs

Nevertheless, the support of mobile devices - and more specifically - is a crucial requirement for the future development of VLEs - at least when we analyse the activities of commercial VLE developers during the first half of 2010. Mobile extensions for three commercial VLEs have launched during the last six months. Blackboard, CLIX, and Learn eXact have now mobile interfaces to the core VLE.

The three platforms follow very different strategies to promote their interfaces.

Blackboard launched two products for mobile devices: Mobile Central and Mobile Learn. Both products are based on native applications for the popular smart-phone platforms (RIM, Android, iPhone OS). Mobile Central is a mobile campus information system. This system offers location based services for study management such as a campus navigation system. Part of this product is a study planner, through which students can keep track of their courses. Mobile Learn provides an interface to the main VLE. All functions of the VLE are also accessible using the native interaction scheme of the learner's mobile device. In addition to accessing course data, Mobile Learn appears to integrate a push system that allows to trigger events (such as reminders) on connected mobile devices.

Both Blackboard products are tailored for the North American Market and seem not to be available for European institutions before 2011.

The CLIX VLE is primarily used for vocational training and more specifically in-house trainings. The mobile learning support for CLIX is promoted primarily for ubiquitous access to learning resources with poor network connectivity or offline usage. Consequently, the CLIX mobile learning solution is promoted primarily as a cost effective offline course repository. The information sheets of the product leave the following question unanswered. How is this translated to contemporary mobile devices (esp. smart phones)?

Learn eXact targets the same market as CLIX. The mobile solution for Learn eXact is promoted as a tailored solution for the mobile workforce and blended teaching programmes. The Learn eXact solution to mobile learning is based on native applications. GuintiLabs have therefore chosen a similar approach as Blackboard. Learn eXact's mobile solution targets a more conservative selection of mobile platforms (RIM, Symbian, Windows Mobile), rather than providing tailored solutions for contemporary and popular smart-phone platforms. The selection of supported platforms is likely driven by the targeted market.

Conclusions

The current developments for mobile access to VLEs indicate that the general shift towards mobile information access is not ignored by the players in the VLE market. That several competing attempts for improving the support of VLEs for mobile learning occur almost simultaneously in the first half of 2010 is certainly no coincidence. Instead, it indicates that platform vendors are confronted with changing needs for information access of learners and instructors, shifting from desktop computing to mobile information access.

Although all players target in the same direction they chose different approaches for their solutions. While the mobile Web appears most attractive in the open-source community, native applications are the tool of choice for commercial vendors. However, this is only a weak pattern. The current developments indicate that it is difficult to choose an appropriate business strategy for positioning a mobile learning solution for a VLE. This is partially due to the fragmented market of smart-phone platforms, in which each platform offers different features and application models.

The current developments mark a change in the innovation of VLE platforms. While desktop centred web-based teaching support was dominant over the past years, now mobile learning starts to become a relevant market factor.

From web-applications to Mobile Widgets

2010-05-01T21:35:24Z

Almost one year ago Dirk and I have released the first version of team.sPod. team.sPod is a prototype of a mobile web-based information sharing platform. The first version allowed us to develop a better understanding about translating personalisation and contextualisation of information management to the interfaces of mobile handheld devices. This has lead to a complete re-conceptualised and redesigned of the prototype. The process reflected also the recent developments in the field of web-technologies of the W3C. Consequently, the new version of team.sPod is entirely based on widgets.

]]> If this sounds like extremely geeky and technology centered stuff to you, you don't need to worry, because it really is. Nevertheless, these developments are relevant for the next generation of mobile learning solutions. Over the past year we identified three key requirements for future work.

Platform independence
Extensibility and flexibility
Context awareness and context responsiveness

Although these requirements sound pretty straight forward, meeting all three requirements is quite a challenge for rich and interactive solutions for mobile devices.

Platform independence

All work related to team.sPod was centred around the first requirements from the very beginning. The developments in the context of the Web2.0 including the latest major revision of the HTML standard are usually considered as the key to platform independence. Theoretically this means that any mobile web-application can be used on all mobile devices that come with a web-browser. This would allow the development of mobile learning solutions without restricting learners to a specific device vendor or one platform. Consequently, team.sPod was always planned as a web-application with optimisations for mobile usage. These optimisations should hide the web-based nature of the application from the user, so team.sPod should not feel too different to vendor specific applications. So far we managed to get both versions of team.sPod to run on iPhone OS and Android powered devices - without changing the underlying code.

Extensibility and Flexibility

The second requirement has been also considered very early in the process of developing team.sPod. From a technical point of view, extensibility and flexibility are connected to modular system architectures. With the first version of team.sPod we tried to link the modular approach with a coherent user experience of a mobile interface. The design was guided by the general idea of web-applications for information streams. With the new widget-based solution the paradigm has changed towards a more educational perspective. The interface now represents a working/learning environment in which the different aspects of the environments are represented in a tiny widget application. Learners and instructors can arrange the most suitable environment by choosing the appropriate widgets. If something is missing, people with decent experience in web-development with Javascript can easily program a new widget that extends the environments with additional functions.

The metaphor of arranging widgets to a learning environment implies that the different parts of the environment are not completely independent. This means that all widgets can communicate among each other. This allows one widget to inform related widgets about its state or important updates. This is achieved by providing an event interface. This interface allows to implement widgets independently from each other. This approach is similar to sending messages in bottles, the sender is not sure who will receive the message. team.sPod only assures that all widgets that are interested in a message will also receive it.

Another aspect related to flexibility is that mobile learning solutions are cachable for offline usage. At first sight, this seems not so important anymore with widespread wireless connectivity, but it turned out that the "always online" metaphor only holds for mobile phones within the boundaries of the transmission towers of mobile telecommunication providers. Mobile media players such as the iPod Touch or on field trips abroad continuous online connectivity is usually not possible - or not economically affordable for learners. Therefore, we decided that the new mobile widgets have to handle the online status of the device transparently for the learners, so they can use their widgets without bothering about the network connectivity.

Making a web-application working offline has the side effect that the web-application has to be cachable. Basically this means that the learners "install" the widgets on their mobile device as an effect the new mobile widget design of team.sPod loads much faster than the previous prototype.

Context Awareness and Context Responsiveness

Context plays an important role for learning. The learning environment metaphor of the new widget implementation of team.sPod includes features for making widgets aware of the context and allows also to respond to contextual changes.

In the previous section the event interface for anonymous intra-widget communication was mentioned. Although this feature does not sound too stunning it is the key for implementing mobile learning and contextualisation. In a simple application case a tag-cloud widget shows a list of keywords that are related to the content that is provided by other widgets. If a learner selects a tag, the widget informs all related widgets that the tag has been selected. Now all widgets that handle tagged content can apply a tag filter for the selected tag. In a more complex scenario a widget can inform that a learner is now at home and the learning environment adapts all widgets for self-studying and/or homework. When the learner returns to school the widget detects this change and informs the interface to adapt to the current lesson plan and hide non-related widgets for the time being.

As the last scenario outlined, location is an important dimension for contextualisation. Therefore, location awareness has been included to the new framework when the device supports it. This location awareness can trigger learning activities that are anchored to a specific location, redefine the learning environment, or set contextual filters for selected widgets.

Outlook

At the very moment these features are not very visible in the front-end of team.sPod. In future postings we will discuss the architecture, specific use-cases and application scenarios, and introduce new widgets as the system matures.