Al Briggs

Why is the iPod Touch important for education?

Sep 162008
 

I was asked last week why it is that I am fixated on the iPod Touch and its use as an educatonal tool. Once I had answered this adequately it was pointed out to me that I have not explained the point well enough on this blog. So here it is…

iPod Touch 2G

iPod Touch 2G

iPod Touch as a mobile computing platform

The introduction of the second version of the iPod Touch OS brought with it the ability to run third party applications. The opening of the OS in this way meant that the iPod had graduated from being a media player into a mobile computer platform.

The route that the iPod has taken to become a mobile computer platform is as important as the technology that has been used. The brand of Apple was not well known outside of computer users 10 years ago – but with the the iPod it is now a household name. That the iPod is now well known is great – that it dominates the MP3 player market with 75% market share is part and parcel of this. To become a mobile computing platform with this heritage and the buzz of the Apple marketing machine means that the iPod Touch is a much more acceptable and ‘cool’ device for learning than a Windows based PDA.

The ‘cool’ competition

There are other brands that can also move into this space with more teenage credibility than Microsoft – Sony with it’s playstation brand and Nintendo with the DS. It seems that the heritage of both these companies as gaming companies does not allow them to open up their platforms to a plethora of 3rd party developers as Apple has done with the iPod Touch and Microsoft to a much greater extent with Windows Mobile. The gaming device companies have had a business model for years that involves selling devices at a loss and then making money back with licensing fees from the developers. Apple has always made a profit on every device it sells and therefore opening their platform provides an opportunity for extra income and does not risk existing income.

Sony and Nintendo have also created very targeted gaming devices with inputs and controls that are only found on gaming devices. Nintendo embraced touch and audio input prior to Apple – but the touch area is quite small. The issues for Sony and Nintendo to overcome with the physical aspects of their devices can be resolved in future models and they both still offer the best competition to Apple in terms of ‘cool’ devices.

A final characteristic of both gaming devices is that they rely on physical media to primarily distribute content. This again reflects the heritage of selling games via retail channels. Apple has been extremely lucky with the dominance of the iPod because this has also allowed Apple to become one of the largest digital content retailers with the iTunes Store.

So the iPod Touch is cool and as a mobile computing platform and it faces little ‘cool’ competition as such. Apple is getting aggressive and has inspirations for the iPod Touch to move into gaming and compete with the gaming devices rather than waiting for them to move into the mobile computing market.

The death of the PDA

There are two other types of devices that can be used for mobile computing in education – Windows based PDA devices and smartphones. The PDAs have a long heritage in mobile computing and provide a very open platform with digital delivery (however lacking a single easy retail channel to compete with the iTunes Store). The problem for PDA devices is that their market is shrinking thanks to competition from smartphones and gaming devices. For business and personal use a PDA makes little sense when a user can get a smartphone that can provide them with the same functionality and the functions of a phone.

This shrinking market means that one of the markets where non-phone devices make sense is when schools or other education institutions sponsor the use of a particular device. Non-phone devices are preferable in schools because they create no problems related to the payment of phone bills and connectivity can be more easily controlled through school WiFi connections. It is not clear if this market is big enough for it to be viable for device manufacturers to continue creating PDA devices.

The device already in the pocket

The final type of devices that offer competition to the iPod Touch as a mobile computing platform for education are the smartphones. Statistics only show the smartphone market to be increasing every year and this had led to a very competitive marketplace that is driving down costs. Smartphones are very fragmented though with many different platforms:
*Windows Mobile
*Blackberry
*Symbian (Nokia, SonyEricsson and Motorola)
*Linux
*Android (from Google autumn 2008)

All of these platforms are open (more open than the iPod Touch) and on many of the platforms are Java compatible. However there are lots of different screen sizes and input mechanisms that vary across the devices. The variations in device specifications mean that there are phones for every type of user but make it much harder to write software and some phones are just not powerful or large enough for educational content to work.

Phones are ‘cool’/desirable and already in the pockets of students – but the lack of standard configurations means that there is very little software for these devices. The lack of an ‘education standard’ makes it hard for consumers to choose devices, schools to put their weight behind particular configurations and developers to focus their support.

I am writing this article on a plane with my Nokia N810 so I feel I should also quickly mention the ‘Internet Tablet’ devices. These devices are the successors to the PDAs and are very powerful – with great off-line capabilities, a keyboard and great application distribution features. They lack however any media player credibility (they do it – but not as effortlessly as an iPod). The power & flexibility of these devices is also a flaw when compared with the simplicity & usability of the iPod for “non-geek” users.

Other ‘netbook’ computers like the Asus EEE are not pocket devices and not up for consideration.

Conclusions:The iPod Touch has the least flaws and the most advantages at the moment

The iPod Touch / iPhone platform is a single configuration of screen size and input mechanism which helps in the creation of content. The brand is also well known and understood by consumers as desirable and ‘cool’. It is easier for school to encourage the use of iPods with students and parents.

The heritage of the iPod as a media player provides compelling reasons for students to use one with or without educational content. The addition of gaming to the iPod Touch only makes the devices more compelling to students.

The iPhone is a great device for consumers who want the functionality of a smartphone but can run all the same software as an iPod Touch. The iPod Touch is great for schools who do not want to be involved in billing issues. (The media player market is more secure than that for PDA devices and a better investment for schools.)

The digital delivery platform greatly reduces the barriers for developers of niche software (such as education) to compete globally and find viable markets. This distribution method also means that operating system upgrades are applied more easily and more widely than any other mobile platform.

The iPod platform has flaws:
*Lack of keyboard input
*little competition to drive down price
*no compatibility with existing software
*A psuedo-open platform that is tightly controlled by Apple

In my opinion at the moment the advantages mean these flaws are acceptable and in some ways these flaws are a consequence of the advantages.

It has become clear to me in writing this article that to seriously compete with the iPod Touch platform would take a combination of something like Nokia, Nintendo and Amazon.

I hope this has laid out in a bit more detail why I see the iPod Touch and iPhone as being highly important as a mobile platform for education. I welcome comments and opinion to help sharpen my understanding and thoughts on the issues facing students, educators and parents in choosing and using mobile devices in education.

iPod Touch to be marketed as a gaming device

Sep 102008
 

iPod Touch 2G

iPod Touch 2G

It seems that the latest adverts from Apple will market the iPod Touch as a gaming device – which in turn could get it into more pockets.

The latest iPod Touch advert from Apple was launched yesterday during Steve Jobs Keynote at the Let’s Rock event.

The Tag line for the iPod Touch now is “The Funnest iPod Ever” (not the funniest as I first read it!). The guided tour headlines games with music and movies as the reasons why you want an iPod Touch.

From a comercial point of view this is a problem mostly for Sony with the PSP (Howard Stringer Sony CEO was in the front row of the Key note apparently) – a more bulky gaming device that can play movies without the storage or touch. Nintendo will still compete on price and have all the great titles at the moment – but they must also be worried about the new iPod.

Why is this great for education? Well this increases the market place for iPod Touch (and to a lesser extent the iPhone) to gamers – they are a very picky bunch but if the iPod Touch titles become cool games then it could become a must have device – increasing it’s credibility. Anything that increases the street credibility of the iPod Touch helps create more software for it and also makes it more acceptable.

If Apple could only solve the problem of input – a clip-on keyboard that was also a screen protector as an accessory would be fantastic – or a bluetooth keyboard – or a full screen landscape keyboard for note taking.

Review: Ubiquity – a grand project from firefox (for educators and students too)

Sep 052008
 

I started seeing the buzz about Ubiquity last week after the anouncement my slice of the twitterverse seemed to be making comments about it – so I finally got around to installing it. It is an amazingly ambitious idea, but here is a quick review of the potential of Ubiquity for desktop and mobile learners – and a projection for the future.

The Idea

The idea behind Ubiquity is that natural language can be used to get the browser to do some tasks in a browser that are beyond a few normal keystrokes. For example you can select an address with your mouse and then press Ctrl-Space and then type map this and a map will be displayed – click on the map and you can then send this map as an email.

Ubiquity is a platform that allows people to write and share new commands (scripts or macros we would have previously thought of them).

The final idea is that all of these commands can be linked together – so that a user can input some quite complex instructions. An example given on the documentation site is “book a flight to Chicago next Monday to Thursday, no red-eyes, the cheapest. Then email my Chicago friends the itinerary and add it to my calendar.”.

Lets be clear this is very ambitious stuff.

The Potential for Education

How does this relate to education? Well the open nature of the commands means that commands for anything can be written.

When proficiently used it is possible to quickly pull data together from multiple sources which can be quickly combined. In some ways this can be thought of as cut and paste for the web.

It can also make data come to mean much more – highlight a word then Ctrl-Space define this and the definition is there on the page. Highlight a piece of text and then Ctrl-Space email this to xxx and an email will be drafted which can then be added to with other sources.

One very powerful feature is that you can edit a page with a couple of commands – for example select some text and say delete it is no longer in the page, select some text and say bold it can become bold. You can also say edit-page and the page becomes editable and you can type where you want, delete what you want and insert as you want. This means that students can edit any page on the web (BBC NEWS, Downing Street etc) although the edits only exist in the browser these can be printed off – so a custom BBC News page can easily be created and screen grabbed or printed.

There are already commands to grab something and quickly twitter it – there is no reason why text on a page could not be grabbed and sent to a mobile device for later reading.

The Problems to overcome

In all the analysis it should be remembered that this is just version 0.1 and clearly shows the power of the idea with some very simple commands.

However looking at people who are trying to write new scripts and combine them together it seems that there are still a lot of fundamentals to get working. For example – the email command supports Google Mail only and then only the vanilla version. Customising support to include Google Apps has proved to be quite hard and this has highlighted that something like email relies on the application knowing quite a lot about the user.

Then there is the problem of the natural language – as a programmer I am comfortable that I have to use exactly the required command – but to appeal to a wider audience there is going to have to be some flexibility.

The “Elephant in the Room” here is security – this is a very powerful scripting capability that is installed in firefox – an untrusted script will have the ability to do all sorts of nasty things to your data (files, bank account etc). To go back to the original vision of a sentance that should be supported :

“book a flight to Chicago next Monday to Thursday, no red-eyes, the cheapest. Then email my Chicago friends the itinerary and add it to my calendar.”

This is going to need at least access to my payment details and my address book – it will take a great amount of convincing me to give Ubiqutity this information.

For the moment I’ll be sticking with Dopplr and Skyscanner.net to solve this problem.

Fennec (Mobile Firefox) – not very impressive

Aug 292008
 

I was delighted this morning to see that Fennec the project from Mozilla to put firefox on mobile devices has reached M7 (Milestone 7) and was ready for testing on my Nokia N810.

The N810 comes with a version of Firefox that is cut down and customised for the N810 so I figured that Fennec must be better than that for them to target the N810 – wrong very wrong!

If this Milestone is an indication of the way the project is going it is clear the project has some big problems.

Startup time was awful – mobile users have less time than desktop users and fast startup is essential – I got to the point I was questioning if I had started the browser or if it had crashed while loading – my estimate would be 20 seconds – 5 seconds is what I would want.

Once the app started it was no responsive and took a further 5 seconds to load the mozilla homepage (no search engine page yet). With a lack of a search page I needed to type in the url to find the site I wanted to visit – not so easy – to be innovative the UI is unlike any other browser – no address bar – the only thing in the UI I recognised was a reload button to the right of the page title.

I touched the upper window bar for that is the standard place to get an application menu on the N810 – nothing – so I opened the keyboard and pressed the menu button – suddenly the screen changed. I got a list of tabs on the left and some buttons on the right – not clear what the buttons did. One of the buttons was a plus sign – that looked interesting – I clicked and that then took me to the add-ons pages! So the most prominent button in the UI with a plus takes you to the add-ons pages – surely add-ons isn’t something people will want to do everyday? The add-ons locked up the system – I had to quit and restart. Eventually I found that if I clicked on the page title in the right way it would turn into an address bar – but the application became unresponsive again.

So I now have two versions of firefox on my N810 – one that has been stripped down, is fast and does everything I want (including support for Flash). This new one is bloated, slow and unresponsive – to the point that I never managed to get to a page I wanted.

OK it is a Milestone release – but my gut feeling is that they have taken the wrong approach to bring firefox to mobile devices and that it won’t get fixed until they review their goals. Mobile users need add-ons – but don’t have the memory, or processing power to just take desktop add-ons – they should have a cut down XUL for add-ons. I hope they look to the Maemo version of Firefox for inspriration – it has been around for at least two years and works very well – they need to better that – and they should do that by questioning why it works so well.

In most people’s minds there is already an open source mobile browser that is deployed on millions of phones and that is WebKit – it is on Nokia S60 phones, iPhone, iPod Touch and Android phones and it is available for Windows Mobile already.

Follow up on educational startups

Aug 282008
 

Last week I wrote a guest post on TechCrunch UK questioning the lack of start-ups in the UK that are focused on Education. This article started a nice debate about what exactly the problems are and why both entreprenuers and investors steer clear of solving the problems in education in the UK.

In addition to the comments on TechCrunch a link was also pointed to the article in a post on the  handheldlearning.co.uk forum – which started another debate.

In the article I point out that the UK education market is dominated by schools, universities and further education colleges but also that there are also segments in this market for informal education – workplace training, language learning etc.

Structural Problems

The discussion however focused very much on the schools market place and there was discussion around who the actual customer is (schools or local education authorities or central government). The confusion seems to have been created because a headteacher has control over their own budgets and makes the purchasing decision, but local and central government heavily influence these decisions. The picture is not as simple as that because in addition to the local and central government there are other quangos that also influence the decisions – BECTA being the largest.

Can anything be done about this “structural problem”? not easily, but if start-ups were given support and encouragement from the the influencers (BECTA, central and local government) then products and services would be more appealing to schools. This support does not have to come as funding – recognition and support of an idea with appropriate feedback would be good enough to help encourage funding from angel and VC sources.

Niches and content

Another point raised in the discussion was from Paul Sweeney:

There are existing billion dollar players (education publishers), and early successful niche players don’t tend to get bought out for high multiples.

The point about the existing players is true and in my opinion this is what makes the market place prime for disruption – as those existing players are not innovating. The second part talks of niche players and points out that they are not so attractive for venture capital becuase their value never increases enough to pay back at the levels that are needed.

So niches should be avoided – start-ups looking to help with very narrow areas of education may find problems when scaling esepcially when what they offer is mostly based on content. The Open University proclaimed that “Content is no longer king” when starting their OpenLearn initiative – and this is an astute move which will will have a large effect for university level education over the next ten years. How will open content affect publishers? Well that is the key question here.

Products and services that solve real problems in education that are neither niche or content focused – should receive funding (if they really do solve the problem and have a good business model behind them).

Why the focus on languages?

It seems the answer to this question is quite easy – start-ups avoid formal education because they don’t understand how purchasing works. So they turn to informal learning and look at the biggest consumer sector and realise that language teaching is not niche and that content for language learning is open. Also language teaching is global and means that companies do not have to focus on a UK only market.

This market is very crowded though for this reason – which brings its own problems when looking for funding – but this competition is certainly bringing innovation to the market (for example our own getawayphrases).

So many areas that are missing out

What is clear is that within education there are so many market sectors that are not getting any focus from start-ups whilst all the focus in on language learning and to some extent schools.

Hopefully the debate is starting to get people thinking – next I would like to talk to BECTA about how they can help.

iTouch to iPhone ratios

Aug 282008
 

Just a quick note to say that I have found out from an iPhone web application game developer that up until the iPhone 3G was released that for every 3 iPhones that visited their site 1 iPod Touch visited.

Clearly this figure is in no way accurate – and only an indication – but I can’t see any reason why statistically this should not be a good sample.

This shows that either the iPod Touch players are not using the internet, are not game players or that the iPod Touch is nowhere near competing with the iPhone for market share.

I am still curious to find out the figures from outside the US – especially in teritories where the iPhone is not available.

New York Times Article on iKnow initiative

Aug 212008
 

Yesterday I mentioned the iKnow initiative at Freed-Hardeman University well today it is covered in more detail in the New York Times.

From the article:

The rush to distribute the devices worries some professors, who say that students are less likely to participate in class if they are multitasking. “I’m not someone who’s anti-technology, but I’m always worried that technology becomes an end in and of itself, and it replaces teaching or it replaces analysis,” said Ellen G. Millender, associate professor of classics at Reed College in Portland, Ore. (She added that she hoped to buy an iPhone for herself once prices fall.)

iPhones in education? A US university is taking the initiative

Aug 202008
 

I came across an initiative last week from from Freed-Hardeman University which is planning to give their students a uniform collection of technology including a macbook and either an iPod Touch or iPhone.

I think this is an interesting approach, because most other approaches focus on either a laptop or a PDA when looking to give equipement to students. When the focus is on just handheld computers then a lot of work must go into helping students create content using handhelds with creative tools. The small screen may be OK for creating small pieces of work – but is not suitable for essay writing or creating presentations (I know it is possible and is used for this  – but my argument is that it is not really suitable).

As mentioned before we think the Mobile Phone or Handlheld is suitable for delivery of some content, revision, planning and a group of things we call Handy Education.

So to provide students with both devices seems to me to make a lot of sense  – I am keen to find out the results of this initiative. One thing that concerns me is the lack of useful tools for the iPhone – iPod Touch platform – especially that synchronise data with a laptop (be it PC or mac).

Where are the other educational startups?

Aug 202008
 

I’ve just written an article for TechCrunch UK about the lack of educational startups in the UK – you can find more details here : http://uk.techcrunch.com/2008/08/20/please-sir-where-are-the-education-start-ups.

From the article:

“The market for Education in the UK is massive – there are 26,562 different schools in the UK, and 157 universities and classroom based learning is only part of the picture. There is also adult education, distance learning, workplace training and many qualifications that could be thought of as niche, but have high enrolments each year. On top of formal education there is informal education that is best represented by language learning and the “Dummies guide to” range of books……”

Please follow the link and join the discussion.

More on the iPhone and iPod Touch in Education

Aug 182008
 

If Apple hit their sale goals (and there is every indication they will) there will be another 10 million iPhones in circulation by the end of 2008. This will bring the total number worldwide to close to 14 million iPhones.

I can’t find detailed figures on the iPod Touch – but I have found references saying that the touch is now outselling the iPod Classic, and others saying that Apple is downgrading sales figures for the iPod Touch this year. (If someone can contact me with better figures I’d be grateful!). For the sake of this article let’s assume there are already 6 million iPod Touch devices and that these numbers will continue to increase at a pace similar to the iPhone.

This means that by the end of this year there will be at least 20 million iPhone/iPod Touch devices in the hand of real people.

The really important question is who are these people? I would like to get an idea of the demographics of iPhone and iPod Touch users. It would seem to me that the iPod Touch is more likely to be a school or university student from 15-21 and the iPhone is more likely to be a professional 25-35 – but that is purely gut feeling. At this high level it is clear to see that educational software would be different for those two audiences and gives an indication about what types of sftware would be useful to them.

Can anyone help me get better figures for the iPod Touch sales? I know that it has none of the country constraints of the iPhone and is available world-wide. Also how can we get to better understand the demographic – has anyone seen any research in this area?

The lack of a good input mechanism make both of these devices of less use in education for classroom work, but the multi-media capabilities are great. The Touch could do with a microphone and camera though so that in can capture in addition to play multi-media (lets hope both of these get announced with GPS for the iPod Touch in September).

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