Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Study: for most, all-in-one phones aren't - Engadget Mobile

"over half of multimedia phone owners are still toting a dedicated MP3 player, some 75% of smartphone users lug a PDA as well, and a staggering 80% of cameraphone owners "regularly" carry their digital camera."

Thursday, October 19, 2006

Mobile Learning at the Stanford Learning Lab

"Last summer, the Stanford Learning Lab (SLL) developed a few rough prototypes for mobile learning. The SLL staff chose foreign language study as the content area, hypothesizing that mobile devices could help provide sorely needed opportunities for review, listening and speaking practice in a safe, authentic, personalized and on-demand environment.

The prototypes developed let users practice new words, take a quiz, access word and phrase translations, work with a live coach, and save vocabulary to a notebook - all in an integrated voice/data environment. The intent this summer was not yet to support an actual Stanford course, but instead to begin exploring recent technologies and fundamental human cognitive challenges involved i learning on-the-go."

Monday, October 02, 2006

Microlearning

"Microlearning deals with relatively small learning units and short-term learning activities. Generally, the term 'microlearning' refers to micro-perspectives in the context of learning, education and training. More frequently, the term is used in the domain of E-learning and related fields in the sense of a new paradigmatic perspective on learning processes in mediated environments on micro levels."

Friday, September 29, 2006

Ambient Mobile Communications

"In a world where people are busier than ever and arebombarded with more information than they can process, ambient communications through mobile media can provide rich social connections to friends and family. Users can stay connected to the people that they care about by sharing awareness information in a passive way and being able to access this information at leisure, even in quick spurts throughout the day."

PDF link
http://chi2006mososo.telin.nl/docs/papers/Bentley_CHI2006MoSoSo.pdf

Glanceable Peripheral Interfaces

"Glanceable visuals better help users monitor secondary tasks while multitasking by enabling quick and easy information uptake. However, little is known about how to best design glanceable information abstractions for multitasking situations. ... The major contribution of this work is an understanding of how to design and evaluate glanceable interfaces, which will improve user ability to manage multiple tasks through low-effort monitoring."

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Situated Learning

Situated learning is education that takes place in a setting functionally identical to that where the learning will be applied.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situated_learning

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Mobile Phone Energy Use

Do you unplug your phone as soon as it's charged?

"If 10 percent of the world's cell phone owners did this, the group's final report said, it would reduce energy consumption by an amount equivalent to that used by 60,000 European homes per year."

http://news.com.com/2100-1041_3-6118116.html