I love my smartphone, my iPhone. In addition to this, I love my iPad, but I’m not as enamoured by it as I am with my phone. Since I got my iPad I have found myself using my laptop even less (it’s only 2 years old so not, by any means, old or slow or a cumbersome weighty block of plastic with a tiny screen). But they could both be better.

Considering how I (we) use these new mobile devices I am surprised that there is less integration between apps. Let me explain:

When I click a link in an email it opens up the Safari web browser. Simple and easy to understand. But when I click a link in an email, or on a webpage, to a Facebook update, to a tweet, or to something on LinkedIn or something else that I use an App to manage, the Safari web browser is used. I don’t use the browser on my phone (or iPad) to use those services, use the app I’ve installed and configured for my account(s). I am not logged in to the website version of those services (and many others) but I am logged into the App.

Why can’t the OS be configured to allow it to ‘learn’ from the apps I have installed. Let’s have them learn that a link to something on Twitter (tweet, profile, hashtag, etc) means I want to use the App and not the web browser?

Perhaps this is just ‘limited’ to iOS devices? Perhaps to get what I want I need to think outside the ‘Apple’ box and go Android or Windows … ?

Or have I missed something so fundamental to iOS and it can already do this? Comments below please if you agree with me, have a handy hint to help me sort this out, or just want to gloat because your (smart)phone already does this.

Related posts:

1. ‘Generation Y’ is dead, long live ‘Generation T’
2. Video: History in the making with Social Media and Clay Shirky
3. iPad – more resources on whether it is any good in the classroom

Another poster I am involved in at today’s ‘Excellent education: the heart of the student experience‘ Conference at Bournemouth University is on our work using QR Codes with the student in and around their final year Project (with Milena Bobeva: @milenabobeva).

The poster, titled “QR codes in education: The Business School experience” builds on research and testing of QR Codes in a learning environment, and also on my blog here – see the Resource page for a page of resources, Delicious tags, etc.

“Quick Response (QR) codes, the 2-D bar code, are becoming the new norm for businesses to reach their customers and provide a fast user-friendly way to access relevant content online through the use of mobile technology. Educational institutions are on the uptake in making use of these 21^st century tools as a way to engage their main stakeholders, i.e. students.

“Within the Business School we have recently experimented with using QR codes across several programmes. This has stared with codes leading to library materials and has expanded gradually into further areas such as marketing, programme contact details and learning resources.

“This presentation is going to introduce our experience, including some statistics on user involvement and feedback from students and staff, as well as some innovative endeavours in exploiting these free resources.”

You can view and download the poster, in full, from SlideShare: QR codes in education: The Business School experience.

If you are going to quote or cite this in any work please use the following details (in the style of Harvard Referencing):

Hopkins, D. and Bobeva, M., 2011. QR Codes in Education: The Business School Experience. In: Bournemouth University Education Enhancement Conference 2011, 4 May 2011, Bournemouth University, Poole, England. Available from: http://eprints.bournemouth.ac.uk/17750/.

Related posts:

1. Poster: Building Educational Confidence and Affinity Through Online Induction Activities
2. “Using QR Codes in Higher Education” Workshop: Jan 31st, 2012 #QRCode
3. QR Codes: Learning Technology

If, like me, you are a user and fan of Dropbox then you’ll be looking for ways to enhance how you use it. There have been some excellent guides on how to use and abuse it (links below) but here is another great way … Dropbox Forms!

Here, watch this:

Jotform Dropbox Video from Interlogy Internet Technologies on Vimeo.

As the promotional blurb says:

“Create a dropbox form and we will create a folder named Jotform in your Dropbox. When you get a new upload, it will be there instantly. No mess, no BS.”

So, how can I use it? Well, I’m not advocating using it instead of a VLE, but those who don’t have or use their VLE you could set up the form for students / peers / etc to upload files? I’m sure there are other uses beyond this, and some might even be better than Google Docs (?) … if you think of anything, please share using the comments below.

Further Dropbox resources:

• Jonathan MacDonald: A step-by-step guide to using Dropbox
• Make Use Of: 5 cool apps that make Dropbox even more useful
• AppStorm: The Ultimate Dropbox Toolkit and Guide
• Dropbox: User Guide
• LifeHacker: Use Dropbox to locate your lost or stolen computer

No related posts.

Earlier this week I gave the following presentation to a groups of first year Accounting and Finance students:

• Social Media & Networks: How to survive online (or “your [next] employer is watching you”)

and was kindly asked by Pauline Randall of Florizel Media to write up a reflective account of the presentation and what kind of impact it had on the students. You can read my full account on Pauline’s website:

• Florizel Media – Reflection on a presentation: Social Media and Social Network

I hope Pauline doesn’t mind but here is a snippet for you to read, but please read the full reflection using the link above.

“What I was not prepared for, when I thought about presenting this, was the students were completely unaware that their activity online could have any bearing on their employability. It was clear from the gasps and shocked faces when I introduced the examples of people losing their jobs because of their online activity that I had hit my mark; I was changing their perception of not only social media and social networks, but also of how they are going to use them.”

I also had the event recorded by the Bournemouth University installation of the Echo360 lecture capture system. Here it is;

Click to view recording of the "Social Media and Social Network" Presentation

It was only after I’d finished that I’d remembered I hadn’t said the “Farmville / I Quit” story turned out to be a hoax, but I’ll remember next time!

Links and YouTube videos played in the lecture are:

• Did You Know 4.0 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ILQrUrEWe8
• United Breaks Guitars (song 1) – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo
• CBS News Interview – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0ophSWaRSQ
• “Woman publicly outs boss for playing Farmville at Work”  – http://mashable.com/2010/08/10/girl-quits-job-farmville-boss/
• The Fully Sick Rapper – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqGLHluDoe0

No related posts.

I’ve been lucky enough so far this term to be involved with two sets of students, both under-graduate first years (one unit called ‘Professional Studies’ even), and with both sets I have been surprised and slightly worried about the level of understanding they have about their use of Social Media, and how the little things can make a difference.

What surprised me, from a couple of informal questions to a few vocal and enthusiastic Facebook users, is that they have never considered what is viewable online, their ‘digital foot print’.

So, I asked around about what we do for the students to alert them to the risks, and how this could potentially affect their future employment prospects. I had some good answers but the one that made me groan was simply “why don’t you talk to them about it?” Me and my big mouth!

Social Media & Networks: How to survive online (or “your [next] employer is watching you”).
View more presentations from David Hopkins.

Update, 17 November 2010: I’ve been researching the United Airlines ‘breaks guitars’ example I use in the presentation above and have found some interesting figures. Not only has the original YouTube video been viewed/accessed over 9.5 million times since it was loaded last year, but it is reportedly the cause of a 10% drop in share price for United airlines, costing shareholders a whopping $180 million!

I took the class list (190+ students) and randomly searched for 10 students. I found 6 of them in Facebook easily and the other 4 had names that matched to 300+ other Facebook users, so I didn’t search for them. I used my personal Facebook account, which is not connected to my work or work colleagues in any way. This is important as I wanted to be sure there was no way I could have access through a friend of mine or theirs … this is the kind of set-up a future employer would have when searching.

What I found reaffirmed my belief that they don’t understand what they do, or how the privacy settings worked. I can say that all users had photos they’d uploaded that depicted some very good nights out, drunken behaviour, in one case smoking possibly dubious material, lots of holiday and beach pictures, and also photos they’d been tagged in by friends, so content they had had nothing to do with, but it appeared on their profile!

Naturally when I present this I can’t show them the exact photos or say who I searched (I do not have the list of names saved anywhere!) but I hope this will at least raise the awareness of their online activity and, if nothing else, these students think about their use of Social Media, their privacy settings, as well as the kind of people they befriend online.

It is also very difficult to talk about Social Media or Social Networks without concentrating on Facebook; it seems that’s all they’re interested in, and the majority of news stories I researched all concentrated on it too.

Have you got, or had, a Social Media (horror) story or have you taken a similar approach with your students? Please leave all comments below.

Related posts:

1. Reflection on a presentation: Social Media and Social Network #SoMe
2. Presentation: ROI of Social Media
3. Policies for Staff use of Social Media and Social Networks

http://bit.ly/bKqDy9

Updated 29/10/10: with information about Quickmark – I couldn’t get it installed initially, but I have done so now and I’ve updated that section of this blog post.

Regular readers will know I like QR Codes and am trying to get them used more in learning and teaching, in the classroom as well as out of it. There are plenty of links to content on this, including mine, so please see the ‘related’ links at the bottom of this post for a couple.

This time I want to address something that has bothered my about QR Codes … everyone talks about mobile phone users and the apps they can use to scan the codes to access materials while they’re on the move. But what about those people who can’t or don’t want to do that? What about people who still work at a computer (desktop even).

Well, thanks to a few replies on Twitter I’ve found a few options worth checking out.

Desktop QR Code Reader: www.dansl.net

“To use QRreader, you will need to have Adobe AIR installed on your machine (once the Adobe AIR run time is installed, you should be able to install the QRreader app). From there, all you need is a scan-able QR code (which can be generated from a device, or printed on paper) and a web-cam. Now you can scan the code into your computer using QRreader.”

Yes, it worked, but it takes a while to work out lighting at your desk in order for the code to be translated, you need very steady hands while you position the code in front of the webcam, and you really ought to make sure the code is as flat as possible or it’ll take some time.

You will also need to update the settings (top-left icon) so URLs open automatically and the application plays a sound when it’s captured the image or you could be there all day.

QuickMark Mobile Barcode (for PC): www.quickmark.com.tw

“QuickMark for PC is a powerful, yet easy to use PC application that lets you decode multiple popular 2D & 1D barcode formats via a image file (drag & drop), a screen capture, or your webcam. Not only does QuickMark let you scan barcodes, it also allows you to create your own 2D barcodes via a simple interface.”

I’ve been using the iPhone version of this for all my QR Code work so far, so I had high hopes for using this. I was originally unable to install this and get it working on my office PC due to some error on the temporary file location and the networked nature of the PC’s home drive … but an install on my laptop works fine.

It’s very simple to use; just start up the application and it sits on top of the windows of any website or other PC application you’ve got running. When you find the code, wherever, you drag the Quickmark window over the top of it (see above) and press the camera button to capture the code, then press the Quickmark Q logo to decode.

From here you can choose to open the code in a web browser, save it, or add it as a bookmark. Simple, and very effective!

You can also use the application to generate a code for a variety of different content types; URL, SMS text message, Email address, vCard, telephone number, or just plain text. Amazing!

James Clay has also had it working, and has written about it over on his blog; eLearning Stuff: QR Codes on your computer.

bcWebCam: www.bcwebcam.de

“Just place a barcode in front of your web cam, take an image and bcWebCam will read the barcode. The barcode content will be copied into your browser or other applications.”

This is the final offering I have been able to find. While it installed fine and runs well you’ve got to be careful about how it runs – a couple of times it suddenly started giving instructions in German. I was able to translate a barcode through the webcam but all it did was show me the URL, I could not work out a way for the application to launch a web browsers. Reading through the stuff that comes with it, and going by the screen shot on the download website I also thought it could read a code from a web page, but I could not get this to work, if indeed it is supposed to.

All three of these applications are good, but  my favourite (now it’s working!) by far is Quickmark; it generates as well as decodes, captures from the webcam but, more importantly, from any on-screen source.

“So, what’s all this for then?” I hear someone at the back whisper … well, I have always been a little concerned that the use of these codes will disadvantage users without a phone that has camera and a reader software. Now I know it doesn’t have to, and that there are at least three options available for desktop users, then there really isn’t any stopping us from fully integrating it into our lectures, publications, assignments, hand-outs, etc.

No related posts.

Note: In this series I’ll delve into some of the better plugins available for WordPress that I am already using, or about to start using. I’m aiming to highlight 30 of the better plugins.

We are truly at the edge of human endeavour, as Stephen Fry puts it, and the rise of the Smart Phone like iPhone or HTC Desire is testament to this. And so is our increasing need to access email, Twitter, Facebook, etc on the move (or certainly away from our cumbersome and heavy desktop or laptops).

This is where the ‘WPTouch iPhone Theme‘ plugin is really really handy. It can transform your WordPress blog, irrespective of the template you use, into a quick and easy format for the majority of smart phone users. Don’t let the name fool you, it does work “when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Opera Mini, Palm Pre and BlackBerry Storm mobile devices” too, although I’ve not got these devices so obviously haven’t tested them.

I have posted on this plugin previously, but I’ll recap it here since it has been updated with features for WordPress version 3 blogs.

The admin panel allows you to customize different aspects of your blog’s appearance to deliver a version of your blog to mobile browser visitors without modifying your regular  theme. The plugin also includes the ability for your visitors to easily switch between the WPtouch view and your blog’s regular theme. The finished product … as viewed on an iPhone;

No related posts.

There are many uses for Augmented Reality systems and applications already out there, but most I come across are for more generic “find a hotel” or “find a wifi spot”. These are great, but not really pushing the boundaries of what the technology can do.

I’ve read a little about how AR is being used in Education, which is good and I’ve spoken of these before – “Augmented Reality: does it have a place/future in education?“  and will continue to again as I find the links and research. But what about the other side of the education … not only in and out of the classroom, but to help the students around the Institution?

What about these ideas?

• Student Orientation: What’s the worst part of being in a new place? For me it’s not knowing where anything is. You may have a room number, or even a building name, but where is that? If an Institution were to develop something that covered the whole campus (buildings, rooms, facilities, lecture theatres, etc) then the students could use it to find directions to the right place. You could use this to show the student how the campus used to look 10, 15 or even 20 years ago, as well as the history of the Institution and it’s previous staff and students?
• Student Induction: Take the above one step further, the whole Induction process and programme could be incorporated (via QR Codes even?) into the app then the student could use the Induction programme to find their next session, the QR Code (placed outside the door to the /building room their about to enter?) to find out more about why they are there?
• Library: Why not have an Augmented Reality app for the Library? Search online for the book/journal you want and AR can direct you to the floor and even to the exact shelf where the book or journal is? That would save some time, even more if it could tell you if the book was already out on loan.

These thoughts came about from watching this video on YouTube; created for the Junaio iPhone app, it worked in this example in the indoor 2010 Kiosk Europe Expo to guide visitors around and to help them decide where to go, and when.

If you know of somewhere that is already doing this then please let me know, I’d be happy to know that my thoughts and ideas were already being put into practice.

Also, if you’re interested in developing something like this I’d love to be involved in whatever capacity I could help with! Drop me a line or a comment below

No related posts.

The iPad is here, and there seems to be no escaping the fact (even though it’s not in the UK yet). I wrote previously about links and resources I kept finding in a previous post – iPad, is it any good for the classroom or learning – at the beginning of April.

Here we are at the beginning of May and people are writing about it with more authority as they are actually using and trying it out. Here are a few I’ve found useful and think you might too.

Jodi Harrison; iPad on Campus:

“Within higher education, there are a variety of aspirations, expectations, skills, and abilities. The iPad will be helpful to some, and to others it won’t make the slightest difference. By focusing on what we do with technology, instead of the technology itself, we put our institutions in the best possible position to increase the value of what we provide to our students.”

Scott Weidig; Love your feedback – The iPad for English Language Learners:

“The overriding objective in providing the iPad, as opposed to a different computing platform, is to provide ELL [English Language Learners] students with current technology that will allow them to access thousands of learning applications. This access will positively impact their English language acquisition in ways that would not be afforded to them on conventional computing devices.”

Lauren Barak;  Educators weigh the pros and cons of the Apple device:

“But ordering the devices for every classroom? That’s not on the immediate agenda. Knowing that applications are still being developed—with just 310 educational ones available on a recent check of the iTunes store—[Beth] Knittle says it’s critical to try the devices on a smaller scale before committing to larger integration.”

Miss Signal; iPad in Education:

“For a piece of technology that has created such a buzz through the world and the education sector it has been interesting to read through many articles and see the difference of opinions that are circulating about the iPad. The key to this conversation though is the students – it will be about what students think about iPad in comparison to the technology they already have access to in our classrooms.”

DigMo; The iPad in your classroom:

“As a parent I see the iPad as the perfect solution for my own children. An affordable alternative to buying a laptop and a media player coupled with excellent parental controls it seems to make perfect sense.”

Nick Provenzano; The iTouch and iPad in the classroom:

“As teachers, our job is to make the information as accessible to the students. The information is out there and the students can get it without us if they really want to. We need to teach them how to find the information and the true capabilities of the devices the have. It will always be tough for teachers to learn and manage new technology in the classroom, but this movement toward free flowing, social networking, global education is not going to go away. The iPad and the iTouch could be used to knock down walls and introduce our students to a world they would never see otherwise.”

Nick Provenzano; The iPad in my classroom:

“I feel confident that I could run my classes effectively and have even more students engaged in learning if I had a full set of these in the room. I would no longer be chained to the computer lab sign up sheet. My lessons would be able to flow freely to my students and back to me without all of the walls that separate the free flow of information.”

iPad in the Classroom: First Impressions of iPad in Schools:

“My 5 year old picks the device up, navigates to an app he’s familiar with, and begins to play.  This bodes well for younger students who often spend a great deal of time learning what a mouse is, how to log in, how to open a program, and so on.  More time learning actual content is always a good thing.”

If you have any experience of using it, and even getting students working on an iPad, then please share and share alike.

Related posts:

1. iPad – is it any good for the classroom or learning?
2. Reading “The iPad for Academics”
3. Games in the Classroom … are you sure?

I’m really looking forward to our upgrade to Blackboard version 9 this summer. I’ve had a play on the BB development website (last year!) and on the test server here at BU, and I want to like it … I really do!

So, do I like it? I’m not sure yet, and I want to be fair to the system and the people who have worked, and are continuing to work tirelessly, to get it installed, configured, and integrated with our internal systems.

In the meantime I’m going to post a series of links and resources I find about Blackboard version 9 here, the good and the bad (I haven’t found any ugly ones yet, but a few of the bad ones are fairly damning!).

• University of Syracuse: BB9 Testing Issues:
  blogs.syr.edu/blackboard9testing
• University of Leicester: BB9 YouTube video guides for staff:
  www2.le.ac.uk/institution/lts/talent/blackboard/blackboard9upgrade/
• University of Leicester: Blackboard Staff Development:
  www2.le.ac.uk/offices/staff-development/courses/it/elearning
• Hack College: Blackboard 9 ‘enough is enough’ (and some interesting comments from staff and students):
  www.hackcollege.com/blog/2009/9/9/blackboard-9-enough-is-enough.html
• Leiden University: Log of Upgrade from BB7 to BB9:
  http://bb9.weblog.leidenuniv.nl/
• Kentucky Community College: Issue and Bug ‘fixes’ for BB9:
  efaculty.blogspot.com/2009/05/bb-v9-current-issues-and-work-arounds.html
• Keith Russell: BB9 the next generation:
  keithrussell.blogspot.com/2008/05/presentation-blackboard-9-next.html
• Getting started with BB9:
  www.ric.edu/faculty/revans/bb9/

If you have any links or resources you’d like to add to the list then please email me and I’ll include them (with your name as referral) or just leave a comment with the details below and I’ll publish it.

Either way I am interested to hear from all types of users of Blackboard, whether you are using the current version 9.1 or anything previous to this, whether you love or hate it (but please say why otherwise it is a little pointless!).

Additional Links/Resources:

• Blackboard On Demand – links and videos from Blackboard:
  ondemand.blackboard.com (thanks to alextronic)

No related posts.