One of the lesser known free Google services in our experience is Google Goggles. Specially in it’s lastest release (Version 1.7) it has received a few enhancements that make it very useful for some mobile learning applications

Scanning of barcodes

Google Googles will scan most standard barcodes and provide information on the product scanned.


Here is an example from the Google Mobile Blog:

I am using the opportunity of me taking part in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on mobile learning as an excuse to add some more content to this neglected blog.

On of the issues I am facing with my participation in the MOOC is the massive amount of e-mails generated and my already overflowing inbox would not cope (let alone me managing it). That is not taking into account other sources such as Twitter & Flickr

Since a fair bit of my time is spent working and researching in the field of Mobile Learning and there is not a lot of recent listings of Software useful in practical m-Learning implementations I have compiled the following list from my bookmarks and Software I commonly use for these purposes. This list tries to represent currently usable applications not applications in the development stage.

Rather than writing this in the form of a blog entry I decided to keep this as a live document within Google Apps that people can contribute to.

This one nearly escaped my attention yesterday. Google has just announced the ability to edit Google Docs on your mobile device via their Google Mobile Blog.

Just point your mobile browser to m.google.com/docs and start editing.

Along with the use of 2D barcodes this will open a few interesting m-learning possiblities for educators that would previously have required custom coding to achieve. I can see this being very useful in situations where you have students being in the field and allowing them to enter data gathered using a standard mobile phone. The barcodes could point students to the location of the spreadsheet (avoiding the need to type the information)

With the help of SL resident Moggs Oceanlane I was able to get our first Sloodle implementation off the ground. Being a bit new on the SL concepts (Moodle as such is my daily life) I found the technical process quite easy, but was struggling with SL terminology a little.

Came accross this project recently. Seems like an excellent tool for web meetings. Certainly something that we will give some more attention to as it seems to have some good integration with various products we are using such as Moodle and SugarCRM.

Another good sign that 2D tagging is here to stay and there is some (long overdue) standardisation on the way.

Original Article – Herald Tribune

FINALLY !!! As somebody that has been experimenting with this technology for over 2 years now I am quite exited to see that the adoption of this technology is gathering some steem. While it has bee widely adopted in Asia for some years now, it has taken some time to get a foothold in the rest of the world this seems to be changing now. At least in Europe as I can see for myself at the moment. In my opinion with Nokia finally getting serious and throwing its (considerable) weight behind this technology (http://mobilecodes.nokia.com/) and some other industry heavyweights joining forces in the Mobile Codes Consortium.� This will hopefully produce one key outcome, the stadardisation of the label technology, which up to now has been one of the stumbling blocks that has kept people such as myself from adopting these codes in real-world projects. Along with the adoption by some major companies in their advertising this should produce the momentum that was needed to push mobile 2D codes into some broad adoption.

One of the few new (for myself in my working life at least) bits of information I have picked up on here at ICL is Open Educational Resources (OER). That’s probably because it is outside of my usual area of expertise (which is more the technical implementation of e-Learning), but I found the concept never the less interesting and very similar to the Open Source Software concept which I have been working with for quite a while.

The ability to host your own content from your mobile phone opens some interesting possibilities to engage students and will allow the integration of user generated content in the education process. David Johnson from the University of Reading is working on serving portfolio data from your mobile.

Some of the current limitation of this approach:

-cost of the bandwidth
-speed

The ability to proxy the users content on the Mobile Web server Gateway as well as the ability to integrate content outside of the mobile phone seem to be the main points that will have to be improved for this to become a more mainstream technology. Another area of concern (or another potential use of this technology – depending on your viewpoint) is the backup of data from the mobile phone. The ability to proxy the content on the Gateway could also be used as a backup of the content that is hosted within the MWS on the mobile phone.