Month: May 2009

D is for Dongle

Vodafone PAYG Dongle
Vodafone PAYG Dongle

My mobile technology adventure continues.  Today was my first day using my new pay-as-you-go Vodafone Dongle, bought yesterday after extensive (ahem!) research.  I plumped for Vodafone over O2, as data usage rather than time seemed to be best suited to my occasional out-of-office-at-some-event use.

I paid £35 which includes 1GB (£15 worth) of data use.  According to Vodafone 1GB will give me 30-hours of browsing.  Today I was online for most of the Futurelab Research Day from 10am to 4pm.  I was mainly twittering, browsing,  making notes in a wiki and sending (web) emails so nothing too heavy.  However, it appears to have only cost me 84p which even allowing for lunch & coffee seems pretty good to me.  The time-based O2 PAYG would have cost me £2 (for 24-hours use).  One of the other things I like about the Vodafone deal is that there is no time limit on using up credit which seems to be common in other deals.

Today I was in London, so as I’d hoped the connection was reliable.  My next Dongle test will probably be on the move, bound for Sheffield,  in a couple of weeks.  As you can see my ‘mobile adventure’ is a slow burner.

Staff, Students & Social Web

A report into “the impact on higher education of students’ widespread use of Web 2.0 technologies”, Higher Education in a Web2.0 World was published last week.

Both staff and students, according to the report, are struggling to see how social web technologies can be applied to learning.  It also highlights that face-to-face teaching really matters to students and I’m pretty certain this is true of teachers too!

However, the report suggests that there is a digital divide between students and teaching staff in terms of more general usage of social technologies.  While this is undoubtedly true to a certain extent, there is also a danger of overstating it.  It’s like the digital native – digital immigrant labelling, it just isn’t that simple.  Many students don’t engage with digital technologies and many teachers do.

Anyway, there is a need, as the report indicates, for staff to:

  1. be technically proficient, i.e. capable of using social web technologies
  2. make effective use of these technologies for teaching/learning (effective e-pedagogies)
  3. keep up-to-date with ongoing developments as web-based ‘resources’ continue to grow

The report goes on to suggest that students could help with this.  There is some mileage in this, particularly for 1).  But in terms of e-pedagogies it seems more likely that for a while to come  students will continue to look to teachers for this?

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/leighblackall/65030029/

Would be nice if…

I’m writing this as I listen to an interesting talk by Martin Weller,  How digital technologies are impacting higher education which is part of the From Courses to Dis / Course event.  As you can tell I’m multi-tasking…  a few minutes ago I dipped out and when I dropped back in I really wanted to flick back thru’ Martin’s presentation slides but wasn’t able to.

The session is in Elluminate and for all I know it may be possible but I don’t think so.  Nor is it possible with the equivalent tool that we use Wimba Classroom.  What I’d like is the ability for participants to be able to control which slides they see with a one-click option to jump back to the presenter’s current slide.  Perhaps Elluminate allows this or perhaps other web conferencing tools do?  Now, back to viewing as well as listening to the discussion…

Finding People to Follow

I’ve been preparing for another Twitter workshop this morning and spent part of the time looking for examples of people who Twitter.  As Twitter is all about your network,  if you don’t build one then you are unlikely to see the benefits and stick with it.  My last Twitter workshop was at the Plymouth E-Learning conference (pictured) and ‘selling’ Twitter to elearning folk is fairly straight-forward as there are lots of educational technology types to follow  (BTW – There are over 1000 Twitter updates related to the Plymouth conference!).

My workshop on Wednesday is for staff at the LSE who are not educational technologists so I wanted to have a list of ‘people’ to follow that might be more relevant to them.  Finding people is quite difficult when you are looking beyond your own network so below are a few starting point I’ll be highlighting on Wednesday.  If you’ve any more social science related twitterers, let me know!

For politics there’s a lot of potential, Tweetminster is a good site bringing together the feeds of MPs who Twitter, as well as @DowningStreet, @UKParliament and @guidofawkes to keep you in touch with goings-on in Westminster. According to sourcewatch there are 19 Senators and 50 Representatives in the US Congress twittering away.  Other examples i’ll be highlighting are @intuteeconomics,@IntutePsychUK, @policynetwork, @HEFCE, @GuardianEdu, as well as a handful at LSE @lsepublicevents, @lsecareers, @lsesummerschool & @charliebeckett

And I’ll be encouraging the use of searching via both Find People & Twitter Advanced Search.  I’ll also highlight sites such as wefollow.com which have lists such as academics who Twitter.  Once you have a small network it gets easier and I found browsing friends of my followers the best way to widen my network.

Slides from my Plymouth workshop:

My annotated Twitter handouts are also on slideshare.

Going Mobile

I’ve never been one for gadgets – the Franklin Rex-3 I bought back in 1997 being the only one I ever owned!  My mobile phones have always been bog standard (free)  models and I’ve never really made much use of the camera or web access:  the odd pic that rarely left the phone, the footy results when I’m out and about.

This year my habits seem to be changing and it is strongly connected to my ever increasing use of Twitter.  A few months ago I discovered that my mobile had  the Opera Mini web browser (it had never occurred to me to look!!).  Since then I’ve found myself reading & twittering more and more on the move which in turn has led to a lot more general browsing.

At the same time I’ve been enjoying an increase in the number of pictures appearing in my twitter stream from services such as twitpic.   And now I’ve joined in thanks to my discovery that I can update Twitter with photos via MMS (multimedia texts) from my phone.  I send the MMS to Mobypicture via an email address (I didn’t know this was possible!) and they automatically update Twitter.  Despite the name, Mobypicture can also be used for audio & video and there are many service integrations including facebook, youtube, flickr & wordpress.

Audio Boo LogoOf course I’m still a long way from being a gadget boy as I discovered at James Clay’s great Mobile Learning workshop at the Plymouth E-learning conference last month where there was a whole suitcase of gadgets!  One of the mobile applications James showed that I really liked was audioBoo  At the moment it’s restricted to the i-Phone but I’m sure they’ll be alternatives soon.  AudioBoo allows you to make & publish an audio recording, with a photo and an automatic Google map location.  Great potential for fieldtrips.   Here’s an example audioBoo James made with me at the conference dinner.

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