Thoughts on the Nokia N97

After using the Nokia N97 for a few days I thought I’d record my initial impressions. In general it’s a great evolution of the N95, although the camera specs are not actually improved (The N95 camera is still pretty good!). The N97 feels like a cross between the Xpressmusic 5800 and the E90, with higher (N95 level) specs and a big leap in memory capacity (32GB standard, with option to add up to another 16GB via micro SD memory card). The N97 touchscreen experience is welcomely much better than the XM5800, but still not as fluid (and the UI is not as intuitive) as the iPhone. I think Nokia are struggling to reign in the iPhone, especially with the upcoming iPhone 3GS that answers most of the iPhone 3G’s short-comings!

What I miss most on the N97 in comparison to the iPhone 3G is the wealth of applications available, and so integrated via the iTunes Store – the Ovi store experience has so far been pretty meager , and I’m still having to rely on some golden oldie Java apps – thankfully they mostly run far better on the N97 than the XM5800 due to the inclusion of the built-in keyboard on the N97.

There are three areas the the Nokias walk all over the iPhone – video out (screen mirroring – great for demos), broader bluetooth connectivity, and ease of mass memory storage connectivity.

N97 the Good:

• It looks cool!
• Nice physical keyboard, but not as good as the E90
• Great camera
• Touchscreen feels nice and relatively responsive
• Nice all-in-one device, almost a laptop alternative (If there were a wider variety of apps available)
• Relatively good battery life – in comparison to the N95!
• USB charging FINALLY!
• Good built-in memory capacity
• Nice screen – bright and good resolution
• Web Browsing experience almost as good as the iPhone (Trumps the iPhone with Flash compatability!)

N97 the Bad:

• Ridiculously expensive – makes it easy to choose the iPhone 3GS instead!
• Stupid dangling stylus/plectrum for handwriting – should have been integrated into the case.
• Lack of native applications
• Charging via USB ONLY! – having to carry an adaptor to use my older Nokia chargers to work with it!
• UI and software BUGGY – crashes with any RSS widget on homescreen! – although it seems to be much more stable after the firmware update
• Doesn’t feel ground-breaking after having used the N95, E90, and XM5800 – so you do kinda wonder about being able to justify the cost when upgrading from these!
• No A/V cable included in the package!

EDULearn Conference09 Virtual Presentation

A short video introduction to our collaborative research paper presentation at the EDULearn09 Conference in Barcelona, 6-8 July 2009.

By Thom Cochrane, Unitec, New Zealand. Paper: “Mobilising Learning: Mobile Web2.0 Scenarios in Tertiary Education.” Wiki Link for more info: http://ctliwiki.unitec.ac.nz/index.php/MobilisingLearning

Cochrane, T., Bateman, R., Cliffin, P., Gardner, J., Henderson, I., & Holloway, S. (2009, 6th to 8th July). Mobilizing Learning: Mobile Web 2.0 Scenarios in Tertiary Education. Paper presented at the EDULEARN09 the International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies, Barcelona, Spain.

Designing SMS apps for mobile Africa

An interesting article from the Google Mobile development team!:

Designing SMS apps for mobile Africa: “As is well known, our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. We aim to do this through technology, and in Africa, that means developing tools for the mobile phone. Africa has the world’s highest mobile growth rate. Mobile phone penetration is six times Internet penetration — one third of the population owns a mobile phone and many more have access to one. Most of these devices only have voice and SMS capabilities, which is why we have chosen to focus our initial mobile efforts on SMS.

Today, we are releasing Google SMS in Uganda. Google SMS is a suite of mobile applications which provides access, via SMS, to information on a diverse number of topics including health and agriculture tips, news, local weather, sports, and more.

The suite also includes Google Trader, a marketplace application that helps buyers and sellers find each other. Users can find, ’sell’ or ‘buy’ any type of product or service, from used cars and mobile phones to crops, livestock and jobs. Google Trader has been designed to help make markets more transparent. Many people in Africa lack access to information and markets beyond their immediate business and social networks. Google Trader allows sellers to post items for sale via SMS, and for buyers to search for such items.

Google SMS Tips is an SMS-based query-and-answer service. After you text a free-form query, Google algorithms restructure the query to identify keywords, search a database to identify relevant answers, and return the most relevant answer. SMS is a very limited medium: each SMS can be no longer than 160 characters, and, unlike the web, allows for one result to be returned in response to a query. Short or ambiguous queries are particularly challenging. For example: we’ve received queries as brief as ‘hiv’. What exactly is someone asking for: symptoms? Causes? Prevention? Treatment? We not only have to discern intent in order to identify a relevant answer, but we also have to convey information back to the user within the confines of SMS. The challenge is further complicated by the fact that people must pay for each individual SMS message.

These are the sorts of technical challenges that have surfaced in developing SMS Tips, so please don’t view it as a finished product. We need to greatly improve search quality and add to the content that we have in the Health and Ag focus areas. Now that Google SMS is live, we’re working on improving search quality and the breadth, and depth, of content. As for Tips, we will work to add more focus areas.

Clearly, we’re just beginning; there’s still much to be done. If you’re curious about what Google is doing in Africa, visit the Google Africa Blog. And here’s a video about the broader effort initiated by the Grameen Foundation to introduce mobile applications to under-served communities.

Posted by Fiona Lee, Africa Project Manager

“

(Via Google Mobile Blog.)

PollEverywhere

Make your own poll voting question with Poll Everywhere

Make your own poll voting question with Poll Everywhere

Quick Poll for Unitec students following me: What are the key features of smartphones as learning tools?

Quick Poll for Unitec students following me: What are the key features of smartphones as learning tools?

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2009 MLearning Projects Overview

The projects are guided and supported by weekly “technology sessions” (Communities of Practice, or COP) facilitated by a ‘technology steward’ (Wenger et al., 2005) investigating the potential of mobile web 2.0 technologies for integration within each course. The COPs are a collaborative partnership between the researcher (as the ‘technology steward’), the course lecturers, and their students. The mlearning projects prior to 2009 had comprised small groups of students from select courses that volunteered to participate in the projects, while the breadth of funding secured for the 2009 projects enabled all students in each course to voluntarily participate if they chose. All participants (both lecturers and students) are provided with either (and in some cases both) an appropriate smartphone or 3G enabled netbook for the duration of their courses in 2009.

The following sections outline three illustrative mobile web 2.0 case studies:

1. A collaborative sustainable house design project between a third year Product Design course and a second year Landscape Design course. The Ning (http://www.ning.com) social network is used to facilitate collaboration between the two different courses (http://designprojects.ning.com).
   * Product Design students using Nokia N95 smartphones and folding Bluetooth keyboards to capture and share design ideas and reflections on design via the use of an online blog/eportfolio.
   * Landscape Design students using 3G enabled netbooks to facilitate the development of a collaborative design process via Ning forums, and online media sharing sites such as Flickr (http://www.flickr.com) and YouTube (http://www.youtube.com).
2. Contemporary Music students using iPhones as tools to record and share environmental sounds from a variety of off-campus contexts, as well as creating online profiles on Vox (http://www.vox.com ) and MySpace (http://www.myspace.com), evaluating the use of new technologies for music generation, sharing, marketing, and distribution.

Read more and view videos etc… on our WIKI page:

http://ctliwiki.unitec.ac.nz/index.php/MobilisingLearning

What’s new in iPhone 3.0

What’s new in iPhone 3.0

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Tag Maps for TPA eTeam (Wordle)

Below are a couple of ‘Wordle’ pictures overviewing some of the areas of speciality of the Te Puno Ako ‘eTeam’:

Unitec Strategy Planning Day.jpg

Unitec Strategy Planning Day.jpg

Originally uploaded by thomcochrane

Trying to define a new unique essence.

Thom Cochrane
Academic Advisor (elearning &Learning Technologies)
Unitec
New Zealand
tcochrane@unitec.ac.nz

How One Teacher Uses Twitter in the Classroom

Here’s an example of using Twitter in education:

How One Teacher Uses Twitter in the Classroom: ”

Teachers are always trying to combat student apathy and University of Texas at Dallas History Professor, Monica Rankin, has found an interesting way to do it using Twitter in the classroom.

(Via Read/WriteWeb.)