Erewhon at Handheld Learning Conference

Mobile Oxford & Erewhon @ FOTE 2009

I’ll be joining Peter Robinson and Carl Marshall (from our sister http://steeple.posterous.comSteeple podcasting project) at the Future of Technology in Education conference today in London. 

The Future of Technology in Education Conference 2009 (FOTE09) is dedicated to showcasing the hottest technology related trends and challenges impacting the academic sector over the next 1 – 3 years and builds on the success of our inaugural event in 2008.

Date:      Friday, October 2nd, 2009

Venue:    Royal Geographic Society, Exhibition Road, London

The 2008 conference completely exceeded our expectations and we were taken back with the great feedback we received for bringing together a diverse mix of speakers to give an insight into the unique technology related challenges currently facing the academic sector.

via fote-conference.com

M&S Using Datamatrix 2D Bar Codes

Alex Dutton and I are on our way to see the guys in Bristol who are
part of the JISC funded Rapid Innovation project “Mobile Campus
Assistant” (link to follow).

En route we noticed that Marks and Spencer have started putting 2D
barcides on some of their products to provide bits of information to
their customers.

Although there isn’t all that much useful on there at the moment, I
think it has potential to deliver some interesting ideas in the
future. I would be quite interested to see what kind of take up M&S
have from this.

My personal incling is that there may well be a large response
initially as they publish these codes on their products but unless
they can deliver some compelling content the trend will die down.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Datamatrix (2D Barcode) for m.ox.ac.uk

Points your Datamatrix readers at this! :) (Link is due to be live on the
5th October).

Posted via email from Mobile Oxford

Talking at the Open University Library Seminar

Yesterday Sebastian and I spoke at the Open University library seminar
regarding OxPoints and the upcoming Mobile Oxford (m.ox.ac.uk – coming
soon) website for mobile devices.

Slides below!

Download now or preview on posterous

intro.pdf (1664 KB)

Download now or preview on posterous

geo.pdf (637 KB)

Download now or preview on posterous

Erewhon – Open University Library Seminar 24th September.pdf (4510 KB)

QR (2D Barcode) for m.ox.ac.uk

Points your QR Code readers at this! :) (Link is due to be live on the
5th October).

Posted via email from Mobile Oxford

Microsoft’s Sense Cam [via Techcrunch]

A device that you wear around your neck, photographs, geo-locates,
auto-tags and then automatically uploads your life to the cloud?
That’s what Microsoft Research at Cambridge came up with some time ago
with the “Sensecam”. Techcrunch makes a good point in saying that
although the concept of wearing such a device may seem rather horrific
to many people today, people of yesteryear would have been
uncomfortable making their personal photo albums available for the
world to see as we do with places such as Facebook and Flickr.
 
I think the concept is certainly pertinent and now is almost
inevitable, as a serious photographer I carry a GPS logger with me
whenever I go taking photographs and whenever I travel great distances
I like to keep a log of where I went for future reference. I would
quite like this information available to my ancestors to come too, so
a device like the sense cam would only make recording it easier.
 
Of course recording every minute of your day would certainly involve
storing a lot of pointless data, so you would need tools to help sift
through the data. One of the features the Sensecam concept
incorporated was that of ambient sensors to trigger recording only
when significant events happened, e.g. a change in lighting,
temperature or movement.
 
[Via TechCrunch]

Interview about the Erewhon project at the JISC Rapid Innovation conference

I’m currently at the Rapid Innovation conference in Manchester, talking about the Erewhon project and forging links with others approaching similar problems.
Highlights so far include:

• Jasper Tredgold from the University of Bristol was great to talk to about their upcoming Mobile Campus Assistant
• Peter Pratt from the University of Edinburgh talked about Walking Through Time, which uses Google Maps on a mobile device to display historical maps for the local area
• Simon Harper from the University of Manchester represented Structural which, to quote, ‘is a user agent extension which can make sense of the implicit structural layout of a web page and adapt it into a format suitable for a mobile device’

Other interesting links include:

• Enabling Remote Activities – using Asterisk for VoIP in the field.
• Wookie – The Apache-incubated platform for widgets, implementing the W3C spec.

To round off the post, there’s an interview for the conference available at IE Demonstrator.

More analysis and information to follow!

Game changing news?

With iPhone, Blackberry, Palm and Android dominating the smartphone headlines. Microsoft and Nokia have been haemorrhaging market share, will an alliance between them be the best way forward?

A conference call tomorrow [via Engadget] suggests so!

Further rumours suggest that Nokia may be ditching Symbian in favour of something more open source. [via Techcrunch]

Geolocating ducks in Essex

Earlier this week, Sebastian and I gave a workshop about geolocation at IWMW 2009. Despite ongoing struggles with the wireless networking it all went fairly smoothly, and the 12 or so workshop attendees seemed interested and engaged — and even willing to do the ‘audience participation’ section! This was a re-run of what we did in a local workshop, but with the added advantage that this time the participants came from a range of institutions — so we were keen to see whether our examples and suggestions were things they could all relate to.

Happily, it seems we weren’t being too Oxford-centric, as there was plenty of discussion around our ideas (particularly on the topics of library books and energy usage) and several interesting new suggestions.

Workshop whiteboard notes

We particularly liked:

Analysing PC/wireless provision and usage to help users determine the likelihood of finding a free PC nearby

It’s easy enough to show the location of currently free PCs, but by the time you’ve got there, what are the chances of there still being one available? Enhancing existing usage metrics with geodata would help users head for the best ‘hotspots’ without wasting time trekking from one bit of campus to another in search of a workstation. However, there was a concern that this might also look like an open invitation to burglars, showing them a map of all the unattended computers on campus!

SMS reminders for courses/meetings with directions tailored to user preferences

Enhance course reminders (already provided by EduTxt) with directions appropriate to the user’s location, mobility, mode of transport, etc. It’d be difficult to do this dynamically based on the user’s location at the time, but possible to allow users to set more general preferences for the sort of reminders/directions they want.

But the firm favourite was one delegate’s suggestion of geolocating a duck: apparently students at York have a pet duck and would love to be able to find its current location and follow its progress! Ducks have generally been less quick to join the smartphone revolution than students, but this problem could be overcome by attaching a lightweight GPS data-logger to the duck. While of course this service would have clear benefits for the duck-watchers, opinion was divided over the benefit to the duck itself: on the one hand it might be more likely to get fed and looked after in a timely fashion, but on the other hand it might not want the constant attention…

Ducks: how can institutional geolocation services benefit them?

See the IWMW2009 website for details of the workshop (including all our slides). Thanks again to everybody who attended the workshop – please feel free to comment here with follow-up, further suggestions or discussion!