Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

Mobile learning has been around for a while; it refers to the idea of lifelong learning under the guidance of the use of mobile communications devices such as mobile phones, PDA, MP4 and handheld e-book reader devices. With the acceleration of the 3G technology, mobile learning really enables learners to learn at anytime they want and anywhere they want. From Twitter to iPhone, mobile learning has taken a giant step forward. Today on the bus I saw a student checking the discussion board in her WebCT course and posted comments right away. She might have just earned 1% of participation mark for that class! Of course not every student could afford a $500 iphone and $80 monthly cell phone plans with 3G mobile internet access. But I truly believe the yet expensive data plans will soon be lowered just like how the voice plans have been dropped for cell phone users.

What’s happening around the world on mobile learning?

In Europe:

There are government funded research projects on using the portable mobile devices to provide information and learning content to enable learning for those whom are unable to participate in school. The learning content focuses on the interesting topics of the young generation such as soccer, music, etc., as well as to develop their language ability and mathematical knowledge.

In the United States:

Stanford University Learning Lab (SLL) believes that by helping us to stay connected with each the web, the mobile devices today are helping us to fill up the "debris" time. They have developed mobile based language learning modules that involves vocabulary memorization, self tests, repeating excises and much more. They also studies how are these mobile content helping the learners to achieve a better mark in schools.

In Asia:

Mobile devices are much more popular in some Asian countries than in North America. Their 3G network is also more advanced than other part of the world. Asian learners are already using their mobile devices to access rich media based learning contents such as video, audio and flash based learning tools.

UBC Student Services launched a virtual campus tour this month. The virtual tour is created using Adobe Flash. It highlights the students life on UBC campus. The presentation was well put together and delivers an interesting perspective about UBC. It covers topics like the beautiful UBC campus, student spaces, the city Vancouver, places to learn, life on campus, student residences, Athletics and much more. Check it out if you care to learn more about the university I am working for...

Sony has officially bundlled a Flash Player with their PSP system software version 2.7. Mobile gamers can now play Flash enabled games and view Flash contents on their hand held gameing devices. The Flash Player on PSP supports a screen size of 480 pixels x 272 pixels. It has fully featured XML parsing support. I am anxious to find out how are our learning tools and Pachyderm turn out on PSP... Since I don't have a PSP yet, here is a photoshoped Pachyderm on PSP picture. I am very confident Pachyderm would work fine on ths new player. :)

Today we installed Flash Player 7 for Pocket PC on Uli's new toy - UTStarcom 6700. It is a pocket PC phone that comes with MS mobile 5.0. The phone has a fairly large touch screen (Vivid 2.8" diagonal, 65K-colour TFT LCD) and a 1.3 megapixel digital camera. The processor speed is 416 MHz, 64 MB of ROM (extendable) and 128 MB RAM.

After the installation, we tested 4 Learning Tools and 3 Pachyderm presentations on this device, guess what? All showed up beautifully in both vertical display mode and horizontal display mode. The learning tools we have tested with the phone are: Timeline tool, Multimedia Learning Object Authoring tool, Character Stroke Recorder tool and Flash Card Tool(Mobile Version). The tests were conducted in the alive mode (no cached or physical files, browsed to the real websites using UBC Campus wireless connection with VPN). Here are a couple of screen shots:

Pachyderm on Pocket PC Phone

Flash Card Pocket PC Edition

Very exciting stuff! One thing noticed is that Pachyderm needs a mobile version due to the screen size makes the text in the presentations un-readable. But overall, the navigation, xml parsing and UI layout all passed the test! Those of you with a PDA, check them out! It's time for some mobile learning (visually).

The first flash player on hand-held devices that support Actionscript 2.0 and XML Socket and Web Service/SOAP API officially released - Flash Player 7.0 for Pocket PC.

Flash Lite 2.0 and Flash Player 7.0 for PPC will push mobile based rich internet application into a new dimension!

Sony announced there will be an official Flash Player intergrated into PSP in the coming month. The player should be Flash Player 5 or later. I just hope it has XML parsing functions. Can't wait to intergrate the learning tools into PSP! Oh, forgot to mention, Sony is also releasing the Chinese Font Set, how is the idea of learning some Chinese while you are playing PSP?

Now you can apply a flash interface over the existing Google Map and yet preserves all functionalities of Google Map!

This demo is built based on VGMap. VGMap is a new library created by Eyebeam that allows designers, developers, and mapping geeks to overlay data on top of Google Maps in a richer way than is possible using their standard system. Flash provides for vector drawing, as well as a interactive and animation functionality. This VGMap library is simply the glue between GMap and Flash, as well as a handful of Flash ActionScript libraries and sample code to simplify the process of drawing over the map correctly.

This new technology simply opens a new dimension to the future Google GPS development. Will give it a try to see how this works...

I have been planning to migrate some of our learning tools and Pachyderm templates onto mobile devices over the last few months. But Flash Lite 1.0 is just not powerful enough. Flash Lite 2.0 is coming in 2006 according to the web speculations. There has been information indicating this player is being built based on the Flash 7 engine. This means it should support ActionScript 2.0. I am expecting it should support object targeting, audio/video support, external file fetching (images, media files), and most importantly, XML parsing. In the meanwhile, I believe Flash Lite 2.0 will have a higher adoptions over the mobile phone industry.