iBooks 2 – Introducing the future textbook?

Today Apple released iBooks 2, a beautiful new format for interactive books that they hope to use to “re-invent the textbook”.
Steve Jobs reportedly spent the last few years of his life planning to shake up the textbook market, and revitalise education. Today’s event in New York is the first education-only launch from Apple in a long time. Has Steve added to his legacy? Or is this announcement just hype?

The background: Textbooks are big business. They are expensive. The industry is dominated by a few publishing giants. Steve Jobs is quoted as saying the US market for text books is worth $8bn per year. According to Reuters, 90% of this market is controlled by the big three: Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

The Apple vision is by moving textbooks onto the iPad, they can be cheaper, more interactive, and ultimately more useful as educational reference tools. And at first glance it does look exactly like that.

So what is the iBooks 2 format about?
The iBook format has been enhanced, to allow embedded video, interactivities, quizzes etc. In itself this is nothing new. There are several beautiful eBooks that have been released as apps that do exactly this (like The Elements). But the big difference here is that these capabilities are included in the eBook format itself, so you don’t need to create an app to distribute it. You can do so as an eBook. You can also highlight and annotate the books, and even generate flash-cards to help you learn key sections.

Which textbooks are available?
All three of the major publishers mentioned above have been signed up already. Right now there are only a few in iTunes (none available outside the US), but there is a very lovely (free) sample called Life On Earth, which is well worth a viewing.
Early pictures from the event, here: http://www.theverge.com/apple/2012/1/19/2718539/ibooks-2-first-hands-on-photos

And who else is making the new eBooks? Right now, anybody can!
The best bit about the format is the free iBooks Author which allows anybody to create an eBook, and add media, and interactivities. We are not just talking textbooks here. Anybody with a great book idea can add their own media!

The theory is you can even add rich HTML / Javascript but we haven’t tried this yet. 
If you would like to see more samples, those good people at TheVerge have a bunch of photos of it in action over at http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/19/2718646/ibooks-author-hands-on#2879838

Will this transform educational publishing? Yes, I think so.
Especially in the marketplaces like the US where so much money is currently being spent on the old-skool paper versions.
But I also think that Open Educational Resources will transform educational publishing too. As will other non-Apple platforms. Remember, these eBooks are iPad only. So this is an important step forward for education at large, but not the only way.

Will this transform education? No.
This is the point where technology enthusiasts and real teachers often get “their streams a little crossed”. It is useful to have a richly engaging eBook? Absolutely! Do on-screen interactivities take away the need for any interaction with peers and teachers? Of course not!

So – we are hugely enthusiastic about the new format, especially given the free authoring tools. But also slightly concerned that the hype is masking some more significant issues ahead. As Seb Schmoller says, we probably need to watch and wait to see how many of the details pan out over the next 18 months.

Mobile Learning at TEDxLondon

Geoff Stead presents mobile learning as a tool for empowerment at TEDxLondon – a TED event dedicated to shaking up education

Original slides available on slideshare

Presentations by the other (amazing!) co-presenters on the TEDxLondon site

Transcript:

I’d like to introduce you to a word. Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is an African concept that doesn’t translate easily into English. It means “I am me because of us”, “I grow myself by helping others around me to grow”.

It is an awesome word. I try to live my life by it. And it is the philosophy behind the projects I would like to tell you about.

Mobile phones have become part of our lives. There are more phones in the developed world than people. The developing world is catching up fast. Mobile connectivity is transforming how we communicate. And where.  And when. It has fundamentally changed how we look up information. It has generated new kinds of job that didn’t even exist 10 years ago. New types of entertainment.  New forms of art.

So why not new ways to learn?

This is already happening - it is called mobile learning. Bringing mobile devices and phones into the class to enhance learning.

Smartphones are like a swiss army knife, packed with school friendly tools:
They are cameras, writing tools, eBook readers, calculators, diaries, reference books. You have the entire web in your hand

But more importantly they are agents for change - encouraging new ways of teaching

    * Learner centered: Learning is mobile and can happen anywhere. It can happen anytime: in or out of school. It can be collaborative. It can also be intensely private.
    * Teacher is no longer the source of all facts, but rather a collaborator and guide
    * The encourage lots of future skills like those listed on the slide

In the UK I mostly work with learners NOT in school. Kids who have dropped out. Young offenders. The unemployed. Adults in training but struggling to read and write. People for whom traditional school didn’t work out. I build software to support their learning – regularly making use of mobile phones as a stimulus. But a few years ago I happened to meet a fellow South African who shared my passion for education, and wanted to take these same ideas back into South Africa, to mainstream schools

And we did! The projects are collectively called m-ubuntu, and use mobile learning as a stimulus to encourage critical debate between teachers, and improve the quality of teaching.

They take refurbished smartphones, with some educational software and tools installed onto them, and use them to improve teaching and learning. The results have been inspiring. Local teachers even won a grant from the US to go to Washington and share what they had learned with American teachers!

But the successes are not down to putting smartphones into poor schools – they are about using them as an agent for change.

The real wins happen when teachers work with other teachers to discuss how best to use these new tools.

<< stepping through a range of photos from the project >>

Of course these happy photos only tell a fragment of the story. There are some challenging new skills to learn for both students and teachers. What happens if they are stolen? Or if students give away personal data? What about internet safety? Or plagiarism. By working on these challenges together, the real value kicks in . Students get engaged and build real life skills

Mobile learning is certainly here to stay. It may be initially disruptive – but isn’t that exactly the stimulus we need to help focus education towards the future?

If you want to try this for yourself, here are my 3 top tips:

1. Firstly – don’t be constrained by pre-packaged learning resources. Think of the smartphone as a tool to do stuff. Record music. Film a movie. Build an app. This is what they are made for, and makes for the best learning.
2. Secondly – It won’t be right first time, but if you try again it will get better. And the time after than even better. It is OK to make mistakes – so plan in flexibility
3. Thirdly – Share the learning with your students. Discuss mobile learning with them. Let the kids learn the details about the phones, and become your technical support. By building autonomy and problem solving skills they will be learning some real future skills

Mobile Learning InfoKit [free download]

Hot off the press, we are pleased to present the Mobile Learning infoKit. Launched at ALT-C 2011

The infoKit offers valuable advice for any organisation starting out in m-learning, as was compiled with interviews and contributions from all the main thinkers, creators and educators in this space

See the overview presentation (below) for a great introduction to m-learning, and if you want more you can download the entire infoKit at http://bit.ly/mobilelearninginfokit

Many months in development, this infokit was put together by Doug and those nice people at Jisc infoNet as a service to the education community. Thanks all!

Google’s App Inventor … liberation or stagnation?

A year ago, Google released App Inventor – a fascinatingly visual, albeit rather buggy tool for developing android apps. Although not robust enough for our commercial development, we loved the fresh ideas about interface, and app building. Perfect tools for learning about coding. Today I found an email in my inbox announcing that Google are dropping support for it.

Google are open-sourcing the code base. Often a sign of a project’s demise. Sounds like bad news for education … or is it?

MobiMOOC 2011 - a summary

The first ever MobiMOOC (Massively online course on mobile learning) happened earlier this year.

Were you there?

If not, we have saved all the links, and best bits into our MobiMOOC 2011 summary.

MOOCs are Massive Open Online Courses, normally free to access. This one was the first ever focussed on mobile learning, initiated by the endlessly energetic Inge De Waal (@ignatia) , for the uninitiated) is

The aim was:

‘Getting you up-to-date with mobile learning and providing the tools to plan, develop and implement a mobile learning solution in different environments via collaboratively discussing and exchanging knowledge through a variety of learning activities.’

Discussion was spread between live sessions, online fora, and the MobiMOOC website, but are already starting to get a little lost in the ether.

To help capture a small fragment of what happened, the Tribal research team pulled together all the links / references / project info shared during the course, and have frozen it in time in our MobiMOOC 2011 summary.

Help yourself. We hope that some of the info shared during this amazing event is of use to you. And keep your eyes on the main MobiMOOC site in case we do another next year!

Best tools for cross platform app development

As part of our work on the MoLE project we have been revisiting the rapidly growing number of frameworks, libraries and platforms that developers can use to create cross-platform mobile apps 

If you are new to app development, you may know there is a constant debate between app developers, building “native” apps, and mobile web developers, championing “web apps”. The native app developers get better performance and integration, while the web app developers get broader reach and better standardisation

In the middle of this debate are a growing team of developers championing a hybrid of these two positions. Developing code once (like “native”) but deploying across apple / android / blackberry (like “web apps”). This is a rapidly emerging area, with a flurry of very exciting toolkits available.

To keep you up to date, we are very happy to share our recent report:

 

Cross-platform mobile development

a review of the top cross platform mobile app development frameworks, libraries and platforms

 

mLearnCon presentation

I have just finished a very enjoyable discussion-filled presentation at mLearnCon – a mobile learning conference in Silicon Valley arranged by the eLearningGuild.

My session was all about helping the mostly US audience look a little wider at international m-learning projects, to see what lessons could be learned for the many current m-learning projects that are starting up right now

See below for the presentation we gave – comments (as always) welcomed

m-learning across the world

View more presentations from TribalSlides

Use Smartphones in class, say school principals

The National Association of Secondary School Principals have been trying to make sense of the whirlwind that is Social and Mobile Technologies.

They have just released a position statement, summarizing their thoughts on the matter … and it is surprisingly good!

They actively encourage schools to accept smartphones, and social networking as part their educational provision, and offer a range of guidelines and advice to different levels of practitioner.

Mobile market share 2011 – really?

Fascinating overview of mobile operating system market share - but is it real?
Those nice folks at icrossing have updated their infographic summarising mobile operating systems all over the world.
It is a great visual image. I use it often. BUT BEWARE … it is easy to read too much into it. The same old problems with mobile stats apply here.

Mobile stats for 2010 and 2011

I can’t help but be bowled over when I try to get my head around exactly how many people are doing useful tasks on their phones.

There are always a flurry of stylish YouTube presentations around this time of year, showcasing the “growth of mobile” – here is one I like:

We are in the midst of some “deep dive” research at the moment, which is cool (because we have very current stats), but it does also turn us into cynics, as we realise how easy it is to over-sell the feel-good factor.

Many of the stats are by their nature skewed. A good rule of thumb is that “the more financially viable, the more accurate the stats”. So if you want to know mobile internet usage in Ghana – you will struggle. But if you want to know which mobile apps are bought most in the USA … easy!

I like the stats, above, as they are a pretty accurate, global summary. We will be uploading some of our own perspectives on this in the future

App-fatigue? There’s an app for that!

Feeling overwhelmed by the total onslaught of apps that sound a lot like … other apps?

Nielsen estimates that 24% of US Adults use apps on their phones. They see mobile apps as “an important new part of the technology world of many Americans”

But if you are one of the remaining 76%, and are starting to develop “App Fatigue”, never fear! Those fine fellows at Sesame Street have an app for that!

mobile phones: the e-readers of choice in South Africa

Our m-Ubuntu project in South Africa hits the news in USA!

I have blogged about m-uBuntu before – a growing family of schools in South Africa who are using “cell phones” to transform how they teach.

We have been out there a few times, and were very excited to hear it being reported on by “The Word”, a US radio channel who spent a while in Cape Town visiting two great mobile literacy projects there:

• M4Lit – Mobile Phones for Literacy. Young people writing mobile stories. Championed by the excellent Steve, Ana & Marion at the University of Cape Town
• m-Ubuntu – Helping transform teaching in impoverished classrooms, and empower resource-poor teachers.

You can here the recording here: 

Well done the the m-uBuntu team! It is the perfect example of collaboration, empowerment, and shared learning.

- based in South Africa
- dreamt up and managed from Washington
- funding from Sweden, UK, USA
- feet firmly planted on South African soil
- championed by Learning Worldwide (Theo), Duke University (Lucy), Tribal (Geoff & Jess), diGameworks (Jeff) and many other friends

Even the learning itself follows the principle of “u-Buntu”, helping one another to help ourselves. This is not an initiative trying to push unwelcome solutions – rather they are helping the South African Education system rise to the challenge of supporting more students with less money.

iPad + apps = amazing archaeology

(by Andrew Merryweather - @merryux - our UX guru) 

The iPad, loaded up with a few off-the-shelf apps, is revolutionising the way archaeological digs are run.

As an ex-archaeologist I keep an eye on digital trends in the digging world, and came across a great post on Apple.com about an old friend and colleague Dr Steven Ellis of the University of Cincinatti and his digitally-enhanced fieldwork at Pompeii. He is using iPads, with simple off-the-shelf apps to collect data in a simpler, and more shareable manner than ever before.

Computers and archaeology have a long history, but excavators have been waiting for mobile tech to hit the right balance of portability, usability and power to really have a big impact on the way they conduct fieldwork. The latest generation of mobile devices, and especially the iPad, has hit the sweetspot.

Ellis credits the introduction of six iPad devices at Pompeii with helping his team solve one of the most difficult problems of archaeological fieldwork: how to efficiently and accurately record the complex information they encounter in the trenches.

This kind of digital data collection could be a learning opportunity in the making. There's a chain ready to be created which takes live data from field projects (in any scientific discipline, not just archaeology), being captured by fieldworkers on iPads, iPhones, and other devices, and feeding it up to a web site, from where it could be pulled directly into a classroom.

It's not hard to imagine a collection of classrooms 'partnering' a dig, and getting data piped straight from the trench to a few iPads of their own. Activities could be built around looking at the latest photos and maps each day, discussing the latest finds, following the life of the project from start to finish.

M-learning with a twist?

If you like the sound of this, please also check out Nick Short’s work at the Royal Veterinary College. He is using Android devices, and off-the-shelf Google tools to support Vets in Africa collect and share some extremely valuable data  

Sending text messages during sex … really?

I get a constant flood of statistics reminding me how many mobile users there are in the world, but despite that, every now and again something pops up that makes me say … “what!”

Have a look at this infographic from CellPhones.org pulling together a range of stats about SMS usage in the US.

 

Any surprises?

1: that an average teen sends 3000 messages a month!

That one I get … and am making a mental note to update my teen’s phone contract

 

2: that between 6 – 10% of interviewees thought it was OK to text while making love!

Doh … sorry. That one I just don’t get at all. Maybe I really am still a digital immigrant after all!

 

Handy list of references at the bottom of the graphic

Apple u-turn is excellent news for cross-platform app developers!

The big news of the moment amongst App developers, is the surprise announcement by Apple that they are relaxing some key restrictions on how Apps can be made. In particular they say:

…we are relaxing all restrictions on the development tools used to create iOS apps, as long as the resulting apps do not download any code. This should give developers the flexibility they want, while preserving the security we need.

As one of a small (but enthusiastic) set of app developers striving to make cross-platform apps, this is a HUGE deal.
Apple is not against cross-platform apps per se, but until recently they were very against Adobe & Flash, and their previous stance was to a large extent an attempt to block several different technologies that allowed Flash apps to be automatically disassembled, and automatically re-assembled into an App.
Ignoring the Adobe vs Apple squabbles for a moment, there was another group of developers who were being caught in the fallout. Those are the app developers using one of a few choice systems (many open source, collaborative frameworks) that allow you to code once, and deploy to iPhone, Android, WinMob, Blackberry …..
The smallprint of the Apple restrictions, also restricted this sort of App. And an increasing number of them started getting refused across all of the frameworks
The fundamental technical problem is that it is not possible to write one piece of native software that plays on iPhone, Android, WinMob, etc. They all use different languages. The only way to do this is to use a computer to generate multiple different versions for different platforms. And it is this interim computer intervention that caused the trouble.
But – today this has changed. And all the cross-platform app developers around the world are heaving a sigh of relief
So – good news for cross platform mobile apps!
(Another equally interesting development, is Apple going public with their developer guidelines – previously us developers had no way of knowing the criteria used to decide whether to accept, or reject an app!)
For a quick synopsis of the top tools for building cross platform apps  read on …

 Appcelerator Titanium - http://www.appcelerator.com
Like most on my list, Titanium lets developers create an app in traditional web coding (HTML, CSS, Javascript), and then it renders the web code into a native apps for iPhone and Android (Blackberry in the pipeline)
The system builds apps. But you also get access to the converted (native) source code which allows for a second round of platform specific tweaks - if you know what you are doing
Initially Titanuim started as fully open source, but now a “free” and better supported “pay” version.
Nice review here: http://labs.thesedays.com/2010/02/04/review-of-appcelerator-titanium/

 
 
PhoneGap - http://www.phonegap.com
Like Titanuim, developers code their app in web coding. Unlike Titanium, the final app that is built still contains the original web coding, but buried within the app. Fully Open Source, all the app code is available, and can be customised for your own needs
We use both of these two quite a bit, and they are both great. Lightweight native apps embedding web-apps that can be both online, or offline. 
Although not really “app building”, special mention needs to go to JQTouch (http://www.jqtouch.com/) and Sencha Touch (http://www.sencha.com/products/touch/), 2 AJAX frameworks that you need to use if you want web-apps to look and feel like native apps 



Rhodes / RhoMobile - http://rhomobile.com
Rhodes is a harder-core techie solution, which tries to do without the browser, giving you tools to build cross platform native apps. Free to use (MIT license) plus premium support options
it is good – but uses Ruby as a programming language. Ruby has a cult-like following, unless you are already a Ruby developer, you may be better to stick to one of the other options
One of the big advantages of Titanium over RhoMobile is that with RhoMobile you don’t get any source code – only the finished (and un-alterable app). But it does support more phones (iPhone, Windows Mobile, RIM, Symbian and Android)

These three are the main players. They have very technical arguments with one another about exactly how “native” each other’s apps are – but in all cases they use the same basic trick – embedding a web-browser into the app, and using that to deliver web-esque layout and features in an app

Others worth looking at include



Grapple Mobile - http://www.grapplemobile.com
Grapple are not Open Source. They recently hit the news with some (untrue) speculation that the 7 month old startup was bought for £15m! They use a similar approach as the previous systems, as well as a secondary system to support older phones. (On iPhone and Android, it uses Webkit. On Blackberry and Symbian it compiles to J2ME.)
Most commercial engagement with them seems to be from marketing and advertising companies
 

MotherApp - http://www.motherapp.com
Like rhomobile, motherapp tries to build native apps without needing to include a browser in your app. We have only recently found out about MotherApp, so don’t know much about it apart from the fact that you use a special subset of html to define your app, then upload to motherapp who will render it into native apps for different devices, passing any calls for data back to your website (supports iPhone, Android, WinMob)

Corona (by Ansca) – Corona is specifically for building games. You need a Mac to develop in it, but you can build apps for iPhone, iPad & Android. It uses the unusual Lua language, which is purpose built for describing 3-D type games (like World of Warcraft!)
Free 30day trial, then fairly inexpensive developer license (currently $99)
 
If you want to find out more, there is a very considered, and well presented comparison on AMLCode’s site

There are also A LOT of offerings that help you build apps automatically. These are not developer tools as such, but do allow non-technical people to auto-generate apps. Examples include AppBaker, App Inventor, AppMakr, AppBuilder, MyAppBuilder, Wapple and more appear every day.

If you would like me to post a bit more on these apps, either the developer ones or the others, leave me a comment

why mobile changes things?

Living in the middle of “mobile learning”, it feels totally obvious that mobile is important, and that it fundamentally changes the way we look at information … but I can’t help noticing that not everybody else shares my view!

(shocking, I know!)

That’s why I really like Bryan’s presentation – with (quite a lot of) simple, non-technical images and statements he manages to capture the excitement, the challenges, and the diversity of the mobile landscape

 

I especially like the simplicity he uses to get the message across – if I wasn’t already enthused, I would be now! Thanks, Bryan

Introducing the $35 tablet!

I had the honour of meeting one of the Global VPs at TATA today, and getting a small insight into the extraordinary power of the Indian market for technology.

One part of our discussion was about the recent announcement of a $35 Android powered tablet targeting education

Yes – you heard that right. $35 !

(it is not quite that simple, of course. An Indian manufacturer has made a lovely prototype, and has offered to supply 1m of the devices for $35m, which the government is considering to buy for education)

But = still. $35 for an Android powered tablet (with all the extras you would expect) does sound awfully compelling!

 

What do you think?

Let us know your comments, or if you find further links to it

Can my m-learning course run the same on every phone?

There are a few m-learning conversations that pop up again and again when talking to clients about mobile courses. It often starts with a seemingly simple question:

“I want richly interactive content for any phone”

“Will it do Blackberry? And iPhone? And Nokia?”

“all my students need to have the same access to learning”

These are good questions, and the obvious response to any is “yes, of course”, because we would all like equality between mobile users. But there is a painful reality that (right now, in 2010) makes this an impossible dream:

The painful reality about making m-learning content is that there is no single solution to push richly interactive mobile content onto every possible phone. Rather, there is a spectrum of possible solutions: On one side, going for the richest possible interactivities (but narrowing down to single platforms) and on the other side going for the widest possible phone coverage (but limiting interactivities to the very lowest common denominator)

Examples on either side of this spectrum would be some of the delightfully interactive apps you can get for the iPhone (which exclude all other devices) vs several SMS / text messaging solutions (which work on just about any phone)

This spectrum is just the reality. There is no getting away from it. if somebody tells you otherwise they are not seeing the whole picture.

M-learning developers have been trying many creative approaches to cover as wide a range on this spectrum as possible, but it is technically impossible to cover it all. Examples are:

- making a different app for each device, playing whichever bits of the same central content that device supports

- delivering media-only courses (video or audio) that make up for lack of interactivity with wide device coverage

- using 3rd party players (like Flash, or eBook readers) to render a common course format to different devices

- putting content online, in the browser, and allowing the web-server to decide which versions suit your device

In all of these scenarios, there is a functionality sacrifice (because you are not exploiting device specific features, like GPS), but the benefit of create-once but used-by-many.

So, if you are thinking of making your own mobile content, my best advice is to be pragmatic about this spectrum of solutions. Instead of starting with the big dream (“for every single device”) rather start a little more pragmatically by narrowing the range of technologies you are looking at, and them work backwards to see which type of authoring tool or technical approach works best.

A popular example of a narrower range is "smartphones", though depending on who you are trying to reach out to it might also be "phones with decent browsers".

Another good subset (if data rates are not an issue) are phones with decent browsers, since the latest smartphones and high end featurephones all have a pretty good web browser, which is a lot more standardised than their operating systems.

Currently, my team in Cambridge cover the spectrum via a hybrid approach. We build for iPhone and Blackberry by hand. We have a java (j2me) engine we use for old-skool phones. We use a hand-made authoring tool for WindowsMobile / Android / UMPC / Linux / Windows / Mac (also sold commercially as MyLearning Author). We use another handmade tool for SMS activities (SMS Quiz / SMS Survey).

A lot of our current research work is looking at a hybrid between our MyLearning app (building installable learning apps) and browser-based content (wider cross-device support), so that we can get the best of both – with content that can be installed like an app, runs both on- and off-line, and uses the browser to play back courses wherever possible.

m-learning at the White House!

Our work with m-uBuntu has suddenly gone global - two weeks ago we were sitting in a rural school in South Africa, and this week we are in Washington, DC with four of the students presenting our work!

We were picked as one of 3 projects to showcase Mobile Learning to the White House officials who spearhead technology-assisted learning initiatives in the US. 
 

By “we”, I mean Tribal (Jess) and Duke University (Lucy), masterminded by the ever energetic Theo at LearningWorldwide who turned this dream into a reality.

At the event, a Global Digital Media and Learning competition was launched in collaboration with Presidents Obama’s Educate to Innovate initiative, ‘challenging designers, inventors, entrepreneurs and researchers to create digital environments that promote building & tinkering in new innovative ways’.

Following Jess’s travelogue, it seems that the highlights were a double whammy of:

• meeting the Aneesh Chopra, first Federal Chief Technology Officer of the United States of America, and
  
• taking the students out for pizza!

See what the students themselves have to say.

This is deeply moving stuff. Children who had not even touched a mobile phone before using it to build literacy skills. And the project is working!

Go m-Ubuntu! it is a pleasure to work with you.

m-learning in South Africa

We are back in South Africa again this week, this time working with Spectrum Primary school, and Lucy Haagen (of Duke University) to continue the very successful m-Ubuntu project

Spectrum have been part of the m-Ubuntu project, and working with mobiles for a year already, though this is Tribal’s first visit – what a great group of kids! For a blow-by-blow account of the visit, as well as some great ideas for how you can use mobile devices in your own classroom, please visit Jess’s blog.