Imagining a mobile Moodle

For this year's 4th International Slovenian MoodleMoot I decided to explore the efforts being made to bring Moodle to mobile devices. I found several interesting projects in this field, although I think we're just starting to explore all possibilities, and that more interesting developments will follow in the next few years, especially when teachers start experimenting with things like geolocation, augmented reality and resources that can interact with sensors on mobile devices.

The main goal of my paper and presentation was to invite teachers to think about possibilities that mobile devices can offer for education and the ways we could embed mobile learning in Moodle, a well established Learning Management System.

Here's the abstract from my paper Taking Moodle Out of the Classroom: Making Learning Mobile, Context-Aware and Fun:

"Mobile devices are becoming increasingly more powerful, better connected and are able to provide better user experience and new services based around location and context of users, which opens new possibilities for learning. The paper presents an overview of mobile learning and the efforts being made to provide better support for mobile devices and learning activities/resources in Moodle. In conclusion we also present some future trends in mobile computing that could also provide new ways of learning on the go."

You can see a video of my presentation at the conference on YouTube (total length 15 min):



And if you'd like to learn more about the topic, you can read my full paper on Scribd:

"Surface computing has arrived"

I've been completely busy in the past few days, but today I've really got to share something with you. You know I'm a huge fan of Apple, but today I came across (via Mac Rumors) a video presentation of a brand new Microsoft product - Microsoft Surface - that just took my breath away. It's a multi-user multi-touch 30in-ch display on which your fingers do the magic. No mouse, just playing around with your hands or other objects. I suggest checking out the first look article with video at Popularmechanics.com, which explains the capabilities of this new product in more detail, and the official Microsoft Surface site.

Finally, the technology we've been waiting for years is a step closer to the consumers! Of course, it will be a quite expensive, but it's a step in the right direction. I know I will have to wait to get my hand on one of these surface computers for quite a while, but I can already see many great things one could use such a computer for, can't you? :) This time it's definitely thumbs up for Microsoft!