Mobimanage vs. Mobisitegalore: 2 web-based mobile site cms compared

A few days ago I stumbled over “mobimanage.com”, which reminded me a lot of mobisitegalore.com. So let’s do a quick comparison between the two. The whole purpose of both of these sites is to turn regular websites into mobile websites and manage them on a web-based CMS.  Sounds great, doesn’t it? Well, there is a catch. With both systems you have to build your mobile website from scratch. I could find no possibility for an XML export (or any other export) on your regular website to the mobile site, which would be by far the most convenient way to build your mobile site.
As far as I could see from the information on the site, mobimanage offers 3 payment plans from 10$ to 25$ to 50$ monthly, which I personally find a little steep, considering mobisitegalore.com offers almost the identical service for free. Mobimanage offers 3 basic services: Tourism, real estate and political websites. However, during my test it seemed that you could create any type of site you wanted, so I guess this is just mobimanage’s way to attract customers from those types of businesses. Mobisitegalore makes no such “limitations”. All in all, both sites offer a decent service for anyone who wants to create a mobile website. Both sites can be used for educators to deliver content to their students, trainees etc.  Still, the fact that mobisitegalore is free will certainly motivate some people to choose it over mobimanage. Personally, I’d recommend mobisitegalore. Still, at a maximum of 50$ a month mobimanage is very affordable for larger projects, so you might give both a try and decide for yourself.

Mobimanage

Mobisitegalore

Mobimanage LLC is based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Mobisitegalore is a project by Akmin Technologies, which is based in Chennai, India.

Links:

http://www.mobimanage.com

http://www.mobisitegalore.com

Correction May 5, 2009: In response to Seth Spillman’s comment I would like to point out that mobimanage indeed does have an XML-export feature, which in my opinion greatly enhances their service.

A quick look at Easy Meet

Not really brandnew, but interesting for people who haven’t seen it yet. I watched an interesting short presentation (or should I call it an ad?) on Nokia Easy Meet. The service enables participants from Laptops, PCs and of course mobile phones to exchange multmedia files and meeting minutes. Slide sharing, conference chats and remote content access is also possible. The system works with S60 browsers, Opera, Firefox and Safari but not with IE6.

Disclaimer: mLearningblog.com does not endorse any products or services on request. The views in this blog are the authors personal opinion.

What we can learn from “mobile cheaters”

The last few weeks I kept reading news messages about Chinese students who were cheating on exams in school. They would use all sorts of mobile technology to get the information they needed. Sometimes small Bluetooth ear pieces, sometimes sophisticated mobile phones with internet access and sometimes simply regular mobile phones and text messages. Of course, it is wrong to cheat in this way (and any other way), but I kept asking myself isn’t this also a good sign? Doesn’t this show all of us, who try to use mobile phones for education, that the technology is good enough now? After all, it has happened so many times, therefore it must be quite effective. Sooner or later, it will probably become almost impossible to stop such cheaters unless each and every student, who is taking an exam, is checked for electronic devices. Why don’t we integrate it more? It’s just a matter of time. I do not condone cheating, but I do approve of making use of available technology for learning.

So what happened to the Chinese students? Many of them were fined or even imprisoned. Probably not the best way to encourage everyone to make use of mobile learning..

Link news article 1: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2009-04/08/content_7657951.htm

Link news article 2: http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSTRE5324NK20090403

Austrian University studies Augmented Reality on mobile devices

This Monday I attended an extremely interesting presentation by Daniel Wagner of the Graz University of Technology. Daniel holds a Master in computer science and has been working on mobile augmented reality projects. He showed a few stunning demonstrations on what a combination between reality and a digital camera can create. One example was a tour through a campus in which users of a mobile phone could look through their mobile’s camera and actually see the buildings or rooms with certain tags on them.

Another application was a museum tour in which a virtual cartoon guide would explain them certain items whenever they looked through their mobile. (See image)

Interactive gaming with this kind of augmented reality was also shown in a short movie where a PDA camera was used as an interface together with a real life map. On the camera display the games virtual characters were shown as they moved and behaved in certain ways with the real map as the playing board. The player could also shoot the “bad guys” on his PDA and interact with this mixed reality environment .

There are several very promising ways in which these projects could help mobile learning professionals to create an entire new level of mobile learning. If you have the time and haven’t visited it yet, I really recommend to check out the demo page of the Graz University of Technology.

Link demo page of Graz University of Technology: http://studierstube.icg.tu-graz.ac.at/handheld_ar/media_press.php

Disclaimer: mLearningblog.com does not endorse any products or services on request. The views in this blog are the authors personal opinion.

A quick look at Koollage.com

After reading a post on Koolage.com I signed up a few days ago. Koolage offers a platform to create your own Packages-on-Demand, better known as Pods. They can include any type of digital media one can think of. You can also “mobilize” the pods and then access them on an iPhone. Sounds great so far, doesn’t it? However, I tried to sign up. Twice. I am still waiting on an e-mail as I write these words.

It was also a little tricky to find out about who is behind Koolage, since the “contact” information only includes a contact form without an address and the whois entry doesn’t contain anything helpful. There is a page with the development team, but just first names, no e-mails and phone numbers.

To summarize: The service is free and the idea is fantastic. I did run into some problems however. The site is filled with great Web 2.0 capabilities, but when you try to actually use them, they failed to work. At least for me. If anyone had a better experience please let me and the readers of this blog know.

Links: http://www.koollage.com/index.html

Disclaimer: mLearningblog.com does not endorse any products or services on request. The views in this blog are the authors personal opinion.

The 3rd London Mobile Learning Symposium

This Friday, March 27 2009, the third WLE mobile Learning Symposium will take place in London, UK. Several very interesting subjects will be covered, ranging from the recently started Mo-LeaP, a mobile learning projects database to “The Inevitability of Microcontent”.
I briefly reviewed the Mo-LeaP project, which is also a project of the London Mobile Group. The mission of this database is “to provide opportunities for the systematic gathering of practice” and to create a large resource of mobile learning projects. Although it is not explicitly mentioned, corporate mobile learning doesn’t seem to be included in the focus. Unfortunately, the database includes less than 5 projects at this moment, so I am not commenting on the quality of submissions. I will check back in a couple of months again, though.

About the London Mobile Learning Group: The people behind the London Mobile Learning Group are from several universities across Europe including Germany, Italy and of course Great Britain. Oddly enough some of the presentation titles on the website are in German… In any case: If interesting material concerning the Mobile Learning Symposium will be released (in English), I will post links to it on the mlearningblog.

Links:

Mo-LeaP Project: http://www.londonmobilelearning.net/moleap
Programme of the Symposium: http://symposium.londonmobilelearning.net/?page=Programme

Innovative possibilities for mobile museum tours

I watched an interesting Educause presentation by Dr. Geri Gay, who is Chair of Communication and director of the Human Computer Interaction Lab  at Cornell University. In her recent talk, Gay presents several interesting projects and studies on mobile computing , which Cornell and other universities have conducted. Among the most interesting to me personally were “mobile-enhanced” museum tours, where visitors were able to get more information about whichever piece of art was on display. Of course, this is nothing new in the world of mobile learning. Several museums have been offering tours through their rooms with some kind of mobile device which gives them information on what they see.  Such services have been around for decades. The new innovations about which Dr. Gay was talking, are that these visitors were also monitored in a few ways. For instance, their travel path and the time they stayed at different locations was monitored. Like this, the museum was able to precisely say which room and which pieces of art were the most popular. Furthermore, they went as far as monitoring some participants heart rates, to be even more accurate about what raises everybodys eyebrows (i.e. interests them). Gay’s presentation is 43 minutes long, but certainly worth the time if you are interested.

Links:

Dr. Gay’s presentation
http://hosted.mediasite.com/hosted5/Viewer/?peid=3de098ee14f1448591e7672cc6ddb60d

Dr. Gay’s website at Cornell:
http://www.hci.cornell.edu/people/gay.htm

Other interesting links on the subject:

Tate Liverpool Museum offering iPhone guides

Museumpods.com

What the iPhone OS 3.0 could mean for mobile learning

It is clear thathe iPhone is one of the most interesting devices for mobile learning applications. There are hundreds of
educational iApps. This Tuesday, March 17, Apple introduced the new OS 3.0 to the developer community. There are some interesting updates which could help to create even better iApps in the near future. Let’s take a (real) quick look
at some of them in regards to mobile learning.

On Apple’s website the 6 new main features are the ability to make purchases within an app, the Apple push notification service, peer to peer connectivity, embedded maps, remote access or remote control via Bluetooth or the 30-pin dock connector. A big change, which is not explicitly pointed out on that overview is the new possiblity to send MMS via the iPhone. And let us not forget that Cut&Paste is finally possible. All of these changes have lots of potential to create better mobile learning for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

The peer to peer connectivity enables users of iPhones to communicate with each other via Bluetooth. The embedded maps functionality helps developers to customize the iPhones maps with location pins and added information. Combined with the peer to peer connectivity this could create some pretty interesting mobile learning for students or trainees. For instance an outdoors exercise at an historic site, where students have to find certain spots and inform their colleagues.

The remote control function which allows the iPhone to control outside devices opens up an entire new chapter of mobile learning. You will be able to remote-control other devices via Bluetooth or the 30-pin connection. An example would be the students at Abilene Christian University, who are all equipped with iPhones. There could be class presentations with each student pointing out what they like or dislike about a certain movie, website and so forth. Each student could be remote-controlling the same large TV screen. That would create a new level of interactivity in a class room, although it is not mobile learning per se.

The Cut&Paste function was so overdue that it would not need an example. Of course it is much more convenient to write something small or paste information on the iPhones notepad (or any similar apps). It is needless to say that this will improve mobile learning as well.

All in all, one can say that the OS 3.0 certainly is a good thing for the mobile learning community. I sometimes wonder why we had to wait so long for MMS and Cut&Paste, though. However, we all know that the iPhone is not the perfect solution. Even better devices for mobile learning will see the light of day. It is just a question of when.

Links of interest:

Engadget’s blog post about the iPhone OS 3.0

Apple

Mobile learning for train conductors

One million people use the train in Switzerland. And that’s every single day. This makes the 7.5 million Swiss one of the worlds most prominent “train nations” in the world. In most trains one or more conductors are on board to assist passengers and check tickets with the help of a specialized mobile device called ZPG II. This device can check the validity of tickets within seconds, accept credit card payments and even print new tickets. For already 2 years, this device contains a mobile learning software which helps the conductors to learn about their daily tasks. New conductors can log in with a guest account on their spare time and run a training program, which should help them to pass the qualification tests right at their first try. The benefits of this kind of mobile training were that the conductors do not have to be off the job to get their training which in turn results in less costs for the SBB (Swiss Railroad Company).  Let’s hope that this kind of great “on the job training” will be implemented more and more in the near future. Not only on trains, of course.

The ZPG II mobile learning was developed by the Swiss E-Learning company Steag AG.

Links: http://www.steag.ch

Disclaimer: mLearningblog.com does not endorse any products or services on request.

What mobile learning developers can learn from Pecha-Kucha-Nights

Mobile learning and micro learning certainly go well together. Anyone has a few moments during their day to take out the mobile phone and learn something they are interested in. So why not profit from the experiences of micro learning in the non-mobile World? The “Pecha Kucha Night” are events in which material is presented on 20 slides for no more than 20 seconds per slide. These extremely popular events originated in Japan just 6 years ago and are now held in over almost 180 cities over the World. Because of the very short time frame, each presenter is forced to really get to the point and therefore make their presentations more condensed and summarized. Furthermore, the attendees (or should we call them the micro-learners?) are paying much more attention, because the presentations are moving at such a rapid pace. So what exactly how can this popular format be used for mobile learning? Well, for starters it shows us that the 20 slides/20 seconds format -which therefore equals a maximum time of 6 minutes and 40 seconds- can be a great restriction for vodcasts on iPhones, iPods and other smart phones. Personally, I have seen a few videos on my iPhone that have been called mobile learning, while lasting over 30 minutes.. Mobile learning developers must realize that almost no one is willing to stare into their mobile phone for 30 minutes. And even if they are willing; it is extremely easy to get distracted within such a time frame.

So if you are developing mobile learning format, why not profit from the experiences of the Pecha Kucha Nights and keep learning modules (or vodcasts) small enough to last no longer than a few minutes? Your learners will thank you for it.

Links: http://pecha-kucha.org/