Moblogging - Barriers to Adoption

Created by Catherine Howell (La Trobe University) on April 22, 2005

Quite a few people writing on ed tech (such as The Shifted Librarian) became early adopters/evangelists for moblogging. Six-eight months on, where are we now?

Over the past year, I've read a lot of posts depicting a brave new world in which bloggers, armed with a digital camera / cameraphone, or PDA, would create their own constructivist 'learning landscape'. Moblogs were hailed as a powerful, student-friendly way to communicate digital visual information, complementing written blogs with their qualities of immediacy and personalisation of information. In the UK, research investment by the JISC confirmed that mobile blogging for education was being taken seriously. The technology has moved fast, aided by the expected corporate research partnerships, and just as blogs are now accompanied by aggregation technologies and tools (RSS, Atom), syndicating content and notifying other users of new postings, the same happened for moblogs. Flickr already has a way to manage the above process with proper upload tools and full support for RSS/Atom. Many other 'free' commercially-oriented websites have sprung up that offer similar functionality, while Easy Moblog offers a GNU/GPL option.

Most moblogging sites work on the principle that users upload images by emailing their digital photos directly from their cameraphones/PDAs to their personalised moblog webpage. But... in the UK at least, photo messaging services from commercial mobile phone providers are still very, very expensive! Today, one fruity high street provider was charging customers 25p per photo message, and 50p for any message including more than one photo. Sometimes, it seems to me that all this is just another case of the proverbial hammer in search of something to smash. Tying a form of educational participation to a commercial service (that is not centrally provided) grates with instructors and managers alike -- though I grant that a range of approaches may exist here. How are people addressing costing, not to mention the grey areas of copyright, data protection and storage? Who out there is currently working with or piloting moblogging, in or out of the classroom?

If the point of all the above is to quickly generate a website for your digital photos, perhaps there's another way... Patrick Carmichael at CARET has done this using RDF and a Perl script. Not definitive, but a practical starting point: Describing and Retrieving Photos Using RDF and HTTP, from the W3 Consortium.

A final point -- maybe this is more of a query. Like other recent successful technologies (digital whiteboards, concept mapping software), the rapid rise of moblogging demands that the ed tech community at least consider whether learning technologists need spend quite as much time and effort as we currently do on embedding educational principles into tools. In other words: if familiar tools come to education from other arenas, to what extent do we need to design specifically 'for education'?

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		Moblogging - Barriers to Adoption Created by Catherine Howell (La Trobe University) on April 22, 2005 Quite a few people writing on ed tech (such as The Shifted Librarian) became early adopters/evangelists for moblogging. Six-eight months on, where are we now? Over the past year, I've read a lot of posts depicting a brave new world in which bloggers, armed with a digital camera / cameraphone, or PDA, would create their own constructivist 'learning landscape'. Moblogs were hailed as a powerful, student-friendly way to communicate digital visual information, complementing written blogs with their qualities of immediacy and personalisation of information. In the UK, research investment by the JISC confirmed that mobile blogging for education was being taken seriously. The technology has moved fast, aided by the expected corporate research partnerships, and just as blogs are now accompanied by aggregation technologies and tools (RSS, Atom), syndicating content and notifying other users of new postings, the same happened for moblogs. Flickr already has a way to manage the above process with proper upload tools and full support for RSS/Atom. Many other 'free' commercially-oriented websites have sprung up that offer similar functionality, while Easy Moblog offers a GNU/GPL option. Most moblogging sites work on the principle that users upload images by emailing their digital photos directly from their cameraphones/PDAs to their personalised moblog webpage. But... in the UK at least, photo messaging services from commercial mobile phone providers are still very, very expensive! Today, one fruity high street provider was charging customers 25p per photo message, and 50p for any message including more than one photo. Sometimes, it seems to me that all this is just another case of the proverbial hammer in search of something to smash. Tying a form of educational participation to a commercial service (that is not centrally provided) grates with instructors and managers alike -- though I grant that a range of approaches may exist here. How are people addressing costing, not to mention the grey areas of copyright, data protection and storage? Who out there is currently working with or piloting moblogging, in or out of the classroom? If the point of all the above is to quickly generate a website for your digital photos, perhaps there's another way... Patrick Carmichael at CARET has done this using RDF and a Perl script. Not definitive, but a practical starting point: Describing and Retrieving Photos Using RDF and HTTP, from the W3 Consortium. A final point -- maybe this is more of a query. Like other recent successful technologies (digital whiteboards, concept mapping software), the rapid rise of moblogging demands that the ed tech community at least consider whether learning technologists need spend quite as much time and effort as we currently do on embedding educational principles into tools. In other words: if familiar tools come to education from other arenas, to what extent do we need to design specifically 'for education'? Blog (WebLog) \| Rants \| Teaching and Learning Catherine's blog Login or register to post comments 4185 reads
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