Well it would seem that we Britons like our SMS text messages. At the last count we were sending one billion of them weekly!
Britons are now sending more than one billion text messages per week according to the latest figures from the Mobile Data Association (MDA).
From the BBC.
Personally I am not a great fan of SMS in the main as I don’t like small phone keyboards, liked it when I could use it through my Mac OS X address book, but have generally either used the phone or e-mail.
Unfortunately I couldn’t make Handheld Learning this year, it clashed with everything that week.
So it’s nice to know I can catch up online.
Well, the conference was incredibly busy and very exciting. Lots of new product announcements, major addresses by senior government ministers and policy makers and a who’s who of practitioners that are doing amazing and leading edge stuff with mobile and ubiquitous technologies. A couple of major themes emerged; the speed of change, need to involve more students and learners in the conference and I’m sure quite a few, yet to surface, while we sift through the materials.
You’ll now find a lot of media from the conference now online with much more to follow:
Handheld Learning TV is at:
http://handheldlearning.blip.tvPodcasts are at:
http://tinyurl.com/39fzx4Presentation slides at:
http://www.slideshare.net/HandheldLearning/slideshowsPictures at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/handheldlearning/sets/Tony Vincent provides a review at:
http://www.handheldlearning.co.uk/content/view/41/2/And Bob Harrison at:
http://www.handheldlearning.co.uk/content/view/40/2/A large list of other people’s reviews can be found at:
http://tinyurl.com/32u5xy
And to quote Graham, “isn’t the internet wonderful”.
The Register reports that T-Mobile is launching the Sidekick Side in the UK.
T-Mobile last night unveiled the Sidekick Slide, the first handset in the consumer-friendly email gadget range to appear since T-Mobile cut its ties with Sharp and signed up Motorola as a manufacturer.
Sidekicks (sometimes referred to as Blackberrys for kids) is a quad-band GSM/GPRS/Edge phone aimed at the younger social end of the market.
With a 2.5″ screen and a 1.3MP camera, it allows users to browse the web, send e-mail and use Yahoo Instant Messaging. It also comes with a slide-out qwerty keyboard for text entry.
If this is the sort of device that some of our learners are using, we need to ensure that they can access learning content via it. It looks like an interesting device for mobile learning.
I have always been intrigued by the Nokia N series as a potential platform for mobile learning. So much so that I had in fact placed an order for the N800 on Friday.
Of course on Friday, Nokia announce the new Nokia N810, luckily for me the order hadn’t been processed so I was able to change it to the N810.
The N810 is as you might guess is an improvement on the older N800. Key improvements are a full QWERTY keyboard, a faster processor and GPS.
For me this makes the N810 a real device for mobile learning. For connectivity you either use a wifi connection or a bluetooth connection to your phone, so mobile browsing is possible, especially if you have a 3G phone. You can also play movie, audio and look at photos.
Is it an iPod touch, no, but the phone connectivity does give it an advantage over Apples’ innovative iPod.
You can read the press release and see some nice photos.
Thanks to Handheld Learning Forum.
The colleges who were successful in securing MoLeNET funding have now all been announced.
The Mobile Learning Network (MoLeNET) is a unique collaborative approach to encouraging, supporting, expanding and promoting mobile learning, primarily in the English Further Education sector, via supported shared cost mobile learning projects.
There are fifteen large (in excess of £130,000) projects and sixteen smaller projects.
Large projects – lead colleges
Matthew Boulton
Weston
Stockport
Norwich
Stratford
New College Swindon
City of Wolverhampton
Gloucestershire
Eccles
Cornwall
Bourneville
Worcester
Oaklands
Kingston
Huddersfield
Smaller projects – lead colleges
Cardinal Newman (6th form – Preston)
Bolton
Gateshead
East Berkshire
Lowestoft
Havering
Chichester
Aylesbury
Brockenhurst
Regent
Accrington & Rossendale
Boston
Lewisham
South Thames
Back in August I mentioned how much cheaper the Sony VAIO UX1XN was getting.
When the Sony VAIO UX1XN was released in the UK it commanded a £2,000 price tag. Last month (July) I noticed my local Sony Centre had reduced the price to £1,600. Still expensive, but 20% off is quite a reduction. On Amazon
now you can get the UX1XN for just £1,199 which considering the features of the UX1XN (the cameras, flash hdd) makes the UX1XN seem like a reasonable proposition.
Well there has been another price drop.
Sony are now selling the UX1XN for £999, whilst Amazon
I suspect there will be new UX VAIO soon, but when I don’t know, in the meantime the UX1XN is now getting to be reasonable value for money.
I do like the UX1XN (well apart from Vista blue screening on my way too often), I find it a very neat useful device at meetings and conferences.
The BBC are reporting on how BT Broadband customers will be able to share their broadband connection to others to create a free shared wifi network across the UK.
The UK’s wireless net credentials have been boosted with the launch of a wi-fi sharing community by BT. BT has backed a global wireless sharing service called Fon, billing it as the “world’s largest wi-fi community”.
This means that it will be much easier (and cheaper) to access wireless internet when and where you want to.
What makes this interesting to me, apart from the obvious impact this will have on mobile learning is the following comment.
Joining the BT Fon scheme is free of charge and community members will also have free access to existing BT hotspots in its Openzone network.
This is one good reason for joining the BT Fon network as I suspect at the moment there are more BT Openzone wireless hotspots then Fon spots.
Today I was at the MoLeNET launch conference at the Oval in London.
I did Shozu a few photographs to Flickr and the blog, but unfortunately connectivity was poor and time was limited for writing blog entries.
My workshops went well, though it was a struggle to cover what I wanted to cover in only fifteen minutes, I would liked to have had more time to allow more discussion, in a similar way to the way I ran my mobile learning workshop at ALT-C.
Quite a few people came up to me to ask about various things I showed we are either doing at Gloucestershire College (the college formerly known as Gloscat) or in the process of planning how we can implement them.
I enjoyed Mick Mullane’s presentation about podcasting and texting (sms), which was illuminating.
Other parts of the conference were interesting and informative
I was disappointed with the connectivity, but it is a lesson for all of us, the wireless network failed to cope with the sheer number of wireless clients in attendance. Not only did we get a large number of mobile and e-learning enthusiasts together (most with laptops) we also had exhibitors with their wealth of wireless devices. My 3G connection was less useful for basically the same reasons, lots of people with mobile devices.
It was certainly worth going to, lots of useful networking, and nice to see a lot of colleges looking at mobile learning.
It would appear that the last mobile phone barcode I posted was not a QR code at all but a datamatrix code (thanks Roger).
This is a QR Code.
I generated this code at the Kaywa website.
I am using the Kaywa reader software on my Nokia N73 to test the concept and it reads both the QR codes and the datamatrix codes really easily. I have done tests both on screen and printed.
Very clever concept and having showed a few people in college we think there are a lot of potential uses.
The current craze in Japan is for QR Codes that allow information to be sent to a mobile phone via the camera.
Simply put the information or link is encoded into a barcode type graphic.
You then take a photograph of the barcode, and with special reader software you are able to convert the barcode into information, which could be a link to a website or just plain information.
You can make simple barcodes on the Nokia website, there are also links to various applications which can read these codes.
