Today I came across an interesting posting in a mobile learning forum on XING. The thread started with the question "When did mobile learning really start?". There was already a posting that claimed that Nokia started the mobile learning idea in 2001. I thought, "wait! 2001 is too late" and started some digging in my references. What I found there was interesting and enlightening. 

Marco Kalz pointed me at a new beta service of Google Scholar: Citations. This service collects my scientific publications into a personal portfolio. This portfolio includes all resources with my name on it  that Google finds on web-pages that are associated with research and development. Furthermore, this service also aggregates a few citation indices for me and provides a citation count per publication. The indices come in handy for benchmarking the personal performance. This is pretty awesome stuff if you publish, need to track your impact, and like to get a little dose of self-esteem boost ("oh my god, yeah I did all that work").  

Interestingly Google collects publications more rigorously than I would personally do myself and includes unpublished project reports, software projects, and other stuff that I would not consider as relevant publications. The funniest thing is one paper among my most cited references that completely surpassed my radar. I definitely worked on that projects and wrote some stuff but I cannot recall that conference publication. 

Check out my Google Scholar Citations profile. 

Just a bit than one year ago the Internet Engineering Task Force has released the RFC5870 that specifies how references to locations have to be written in the URI scheme. This basically provides a technical standard for sharing locations in a human and machine readable way. This is extremely cool because now you  can embed references to locations in space just like you would link normal HTML documents.

This standard is an important step to move location-based services from prototypes to the mainstream. In this article I outline a few ideas how existing web-solutions can lead to new usages using this standard.  

Last week the SURF Academy organised a seminar on learning analytics. Hendrik nicely twittered from the event, so I was able to follow it. After he posted a comment about measuring the performance of teachers I needed to respond. My prime criticism is that the type of analytics that he describes is not learning analytics, but pretty boring performance benchmarking and that this if done by the wrong people might has legal implications that are beyond what Hendrik and Wolfgang outlined in their presentation. 

I worked on the topic for several years, although I do not use the currently popular term "learning analytics" because it emphasizes the statistical procedures over the actual or potential use and usefulness of the resulting data. Instead, I prefer the term "awareness support" because it includes the purpose of how the data should be used and helps to focus on appropriate solutions. The entire topic is very new and needs some clarification. In this article I try to focus on my understanding of what "learning analytics" is about. 

The International Association for Mobile Learning (IAmLearn) has announced the Mobile Learning Challenge some time ago.

The Mobile Learning Challenge looks for innovative, smart, cool, or crazy solutions of mobile learning for real world learning and/or educational challenge. The best thing is that IAMLearn sets out a price of £1000 for the best submission. 

The competition is open to students, teachers, educational practitioners, technical developers, young researchers, and designers. So this is a smart opportunity for thinking out of the box and put down your ideas how mobile learning could offer new ways of supporting learning and education. 

Twitter is a nice tool for social networking. A lot of information is aggregated on twitter. It can be quite an overwhelming information stream. Since Twitter has introduced twitter lists it is possible to structure the information a bit further. However, the list feature is somewhat private to the person who manages the list. 

I just found a nice way to fetch your twitter lists using RSS feeds - err. Atom feeds. For most feed readers is does not matter if you dump RSS or ATOM feeds. The cool thing about this is that you don't need to work around with third party services such as reported here or here. You can simply use Twitter's very own functions.

Today we have a retreat meeting with the mobile learning research group.  One topic that we ran into today is the role of the teachers in mobile learning. In this discussion school television came up as an example as a driver for technological change in schools. The problem with this metaphor is that it is perfectly inline with the content delivery approaches that we find all over the mobile learning world. However, mobile learning is more complex that it looks on the first sight and that the role of the teachers in mobile learning is not comparable with the role of teachers in school television. 

The following graphic provides a very reduced overview of the content of the rest of this article that covers my view on the topic.

Recently, I had a lot of discussions about mobile application development. As there is a big hype around App-stores for the different platforms, it seems that everybody and everything needs a native app for a mobile device. Slightly hidden from this hype are the advances the mobile web. I covered some aspects briefly in a previous post and probably the most important ones are code portability and cost efficiency for reaching a large target audience. Yesterday, I stumbled upon a nice article on mobile application development in ACM's CACM that focuses on the pros and cons of native vs. web-based mobile applications. To spoil the reading: the authors are very much pro mobile web.

Yesterday, I uploaded my presentation about HTML5 for mobile learning applications to slideshare and today I found a mail in my inbox telling me that this presentation got featured on the slideshare homepage. Damn, this is cool. 

As a side effect this had a massive impact on the views of this presentation - within the the 24 hours the presentation is now on the homepage it received massive interest that made it to my second most viewed presentation on slideshare. With more than 1500 additional views starting from the point that it showed up on the home page.  

Finally I managed to get my slides from my presentation at the ICCE2010 to slideshare. This is a bit of a negative record for me because the workshop was already three months back. The workshop was about "Open Standards in Open Education" and the paper reported on the results from several research projects that focused on open educational resources (OER). While the rest of the world is still reasoning about publishing educational resources and if openness is a good thing or not, we were looking at the real problems that educators, organisations and system administrators face alike.