Cart before the horse
As you might know, I’ve been developing a mobile learning platform to give Students access to learning resources from anywhere.
It’s baby steps; but a lot of the groundwork has been completed (discussions, project plans, proof of concepts etc), the main issue is money.
Or more appropriately the complete disinterest of any current smart-phone manufacturer to offer an educational discount.
Facts and Figures:
This list is by no means exhaustive, but it does represent the huge barrier to mobile development in education:
- Google Developer Phone: £244
- Apple iPhone: PaynGo (O2 uk): £342 + £10 minimum top up a month
- HTC Touch: £489
If the College follwed ACU’s path we’d need an iPhone each:
x4 iPhones: £1368
1 Year of top ups (£40 x 12 months ): £480
Year one costs: £2400 (and then £480 a year for n years)
Compare this to the development phone:
x4 ADP1: £976
Year one costs: £976
Being Sim free, we can use our existing Sim cards when we need to test outside the College meaning that not only is it cheaper to buy, its total life cost is significantly cheaper as well.
The iPhone has the best interface and the slickest hardware but unless Cupertino does something shortly we’ll be talking to Google.
The Cloud and the power cut
Monday evening was eventful to say the least; there I was happily watching a movie when the lights start to flicker, ‘oh’ I thought to myself ‘a small power surge’.
The latter was true, the former distinctly not.
I’ve got an energy monitor that displays your current (badum tish) energy consumption, my normal evening power draw is circa 200-300 watts, when the surge hit it spiked to well over 1.4kw, it continued to spike in this manner for over 20 minutes. Even though all my electronic equipment is on surge protectors, I still ran to the circuit breaker to kill the power and then proceeded outside to see how it was affecting the rest of the street. The power surge eventually changed to an all out power cut and with that Honiton road was cast back to the literal dark ages. So grabbing some candles, I wondered round the house checking things out to make sure nothing was on fire, I then I smelled oh so familiar smell of burnt electrical wires and equipment. However with no power I couldn’t check to see if anything was broken, so I went to bed.
On waking the next morning I hustled downstairs and flipped the circuit breaker back on and nothing happened, no lights, nothing.
There was no power, I was cut off.
Now alongside the usual inconveniences of no kettle, hot water or being unable to cook food, I had no internet.
Big deal right? Wrong
Humans are creatures of habit as am I, before walking to work my routine is this Shower, get dressed and then Whilst making and eating breakfast (via laptop or iPod touch):
- Review twitter feeds and respond
- Read/write personal and work email s
- Check news, games and other websites
- Download podcasts & other content for the day
- View e-learning blogs for new content
- Check up on current Chess games
So by the time I walk to work I’m:
- Fully informed of current happenings in the world (useful for generating student polls),
- Have a reasonable idea of what awaits me at my desk (ensures I can hit the ground running)
- Have responded to any mission critical emails (Quality of service is important)
- Already musing about blog posts based on websites I visited that morning
In short I am a more effective employee with the internet at my disposal, I can respond to things quickly, ensuring that if something has gone wrong, by the time I arrive at work, I already know about it and can get on with sorting out.
But not on Tuesday morning (sadly I don’t have an iPhone so I had no external internet connection).
I then realised that my entire online life is based in the Cloud: Google apps, Gmail, Flkr, Twitter, Facebook etc. Nothing resides on my local machine, all the data and content is stored on some data centre and processed on a web server. My machine, be it laptop, pc or iPod only presents that data to me, nothing more. Of course I have some applications installed on my netbook but it is no where near the amount it used to be. If you think about it, you can pretty much do everything you would traditionally use a locally installed application online.
Word processing, Calendars, Spreadsheets are well served by Google apps, photo editing by Flkr, you don’t even have to have a printer in your house as you can use an online printing service that delivers direct to your door.
The only application you need to facilitate this is a web browser, nothing more.
Cloud computing is the future (although one could argue that it’s actually a return to the Mainframe and Dumb terminal relationship from the 1980’s), the device is becoming almost an irrelevance, merely a point of access that enables you to connect to your application and services held on the internet.
The cloud is the future; it’s the next logical step in the evolution of both the PC and the internet, but my experience on Tuesday morning leads me to think it can never replace traditional application access methods until internet access is universal.
Long term illness and mobile technology
Last week I was sick, epically ill, so much so that getting out of bed was a feat comparable to climbing Everest.
So whilst stuck in bed with nothing but my mobile phone and my iPod touch I did what any web professional would, I surfed the web. I thought my first port of call would be ICTHorizons.com, as I hadn’t spent much time viewing the site from a mobile device (I realise that this is a crime but the site total time spent creating the web site was less than eleven days from first idea to the site going live, which didn’t leave much time for testing on multiple devices). On perusing the research section I noticed a duff link (horror of horrors) in the article about seeK, how it slipped by I’m not sure but that wasn’t the issue causing me to frown, no the problem was that:
I was ill
It was 9pm on a Friday night
My laptop was downstairs
It was dark and I was wearing Sunglasses.
In short I had three options, one forget about it and leave it until I was back at work (unprofessional), crawl downstairs and log into the server (in my then state, unlikely) or find someway of amending the issue with the tools available at my disposal. My mobile phone a (A Sony Eriksson W890i), is not the most advanced bit of kit in the world, granted it can surf the internet quite quickly thanks to HSDPA and has a somewhat decent web browser but that’s about it, so it would not be able to aid me in my quest, so I turned to my ipod touch. With its fully featured web browser, touch screen, WiFi connection and functionality provided by third party applications, surely I could not fail.
Initial confidence was soon shattered by the fact that I was unsure how I was going to even connect to the servers, let alone the problem of amending the aforementioned dodgy link. On my laptop I would use RDP to connect to the server and then edit the file Visual Studio, but my laptop was far, far away and all I had a was a mobile device running OSX which can’t download files or really edit text, not a good start. My only option was to bet it all that some intrepid developer has created an RDP app for the iPhone, that it would work on my iPod Touch and the demo version did not enforce ludicrous restrictions (like two minute sessions etc, or local sessions only).
It was with some trepidation that I browsed the Apple application store.
A light at the end of the tunnel?
On searching the store I found an app called RDPLite and best of all it was free! (what? in this economic downturn being miserly is in fashion!) , in a couple of seconds the application was downloading and auto installing, within moments I was entering connection information and in mere seconds I was connected to our web facing server, from my bed, via wireless technology on a mobile device, with no traditional input devices like a mouse or keyboard
And whilst I was ill in bed.
I then had one of those moments that geeks and techies get, the one where you say (or in with my sore throat squeak), “that’s so cool!” The sheer impossibility of achieving this 6 years ago (granted windows mobile probably had it back then, but using it is so infuriating that I would have thrown the PDA against the wall and gone back to sleep) is tantamount to what incredible devices mobile phones/mp3 players have turned into.
Out of the frying pan
So I had achieved step one, communication with the live servers, now what? The iPod cannot download files and it only supports one application running at a time dragging and dropping to edit would be out of the question, the application did not support multiple touch to move windows etc. So how was I going to edit that link? If I couldn’t edit the file on the iPod, it meant I had to edit the file live (yes a horrendously bad idea, but I was stuck between a rock and a hard place on this one), so how was I going to do it? What does a web teacher tell you to use to write HTML code on your first day on an entry level web developer course?
Notepad
I opened up notepad and navigated to the ICTHorizons.com directory, luckily the plucky little application had no issue opening up aspx pages and so I thumbed my way through the file (Even running RDP over WiFi it still takes some time for the window to refresh), luckily for me the broken link was right at the bottom, so it took a good minute or two to locate it. Once I’d found the link, it took about three seconds to amend it so that it pointed to the correct location and save. I checked the link to ensure it worked which it did, logged of the server and contemplated how far technology has come.
All in it took about eight minutes from finding the link to fixing it, not a great amount of time, but it did get me thinking, even in my befuddled state the possibilities of mobile devices to help those people and learners who are long term sick or are undertaking a course via Distance Learning.
If not now, then when? 