Using QR Codes

About a year and a half ago I downloaded to my Nexus One an application called Barcode Scanner v3.6, I think downloaded this particular app because I had read in some article it was an “essential” app you should have on your mobile phone.

It utilizes the camera on my phone and the data connection.  It seemed like an interesting application, it can scan 1D barcodes, QR codes and data matrixes.  I really did not find a use for it, so it was one of those apps that just took up storage on my phone.  One day I was looking through my contacts and saw an option to share a contact, and one of the options was the barcode scanner app.  I thought was pretty interesting that I could create my own QR code to share this contact on the fly.  After creating a few QR codes with my contacts, I started thinking about the convenience factor of sharing contacts through QR codes, but I did not do anything with this application again.  One of the downsides to sharing contacts this way is that the person you are sharing your contact with must have a QR reader, but the fact that my phone was producing QR codes is interesting.  Now that the topic of the week is QR codes I spent some time exploring my mobile devices using QR codes – this was design principle 9 in the University of Wollongong article - Personalise: Employ the learners’ own mobile devices.

Last night I began using both of my Android devices to explore QR codes on my mobile devices and found a few interesting personal uses, which will lead into a discussion of using these for educational purposes.  First and foremost I learned I can create QR codes for more than contacts.  In a discussion from a previous blog posting I discussed the ecosystem within the Android environment – it may be similar in iOS, Windows Phone 7, Blackberry and WebOS - that built into many of the applications is the option to share information you have created on the mobile device.  Typical sharing options include sharing via: email, Bluetooth, SMS, Facebook, Twitter and QR Codes.  The convenience options are allow me with the push of a button to share this information. 

As I was employing my mobile device for exploration of QR codes I found the following Apps utilized QR codes and I can construct my own codes:

·      - Contacts

     - Catch Notes for creating and sharing documents

     

     - Articles from News sites like Pulse

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- The Android market App allows you to share links to apps via QR codes

  

    - Google Maps and Places

     - Sharing YouTube video

  

There are many other applications that can create QR codes for sharing, but these are the ones available to me on my devices.

I was traveling home this week and while on the plane I was preparing for a meeting where I was going to provide an orientation to the web conferencing software I work with.  Using my tablet to jot down some notes for the agenda of this meeting.  Using Catch’s sharing capability I created a QR code for the agenda.  I took a picture of my mobile phone with the QR code and the agenda - it may not be the clearest picture, but I find it difficult to take pictures of mobile applications:

There appear to be some limitations to QR codes.  Firstly, the codes work well for encapsulating text oriented information, which for mobile devices is ideal, but mobile devices are quite advanced these days easily supporting video and images.  For sharing text-oriented information, QR codes work well.  Someone had posted a video of a panel discussion this week regarding QR codes and using them for multiple purposes, mostly from a marketing perspective.  The person from Microsoft mentioned a limitation of QR codes which do not reside in Microsoft Tags.  Once a QR code is produced, it is static meaning that you cannot change the content it represents, whereas Microsoft Tags can be updated once produced.  For marketing purposes, the Microsoft Tag would appear to hold greater benefits. 

In thinking about uses for QR codes for educational purposes I can think of:

• Sharing content – students using mobile apps like Catch can create documents and then share these documents with other students so that they can view them on their mobile devices.  This could be an instant peer review on a mobile device. 
• Expanding the field trip experience – when taking students on field trips, using their mobile devices they can access QR codes to gain more information about what they are seeing.
• At academic conferences QR codes can be used in the program guides to provide more information about the session speaker or links to their research.
• Universities could use QR codes in their advertisements for their programs, potential students could access the codes to learn more about a given degree.

·      There are many more potential uses for these codes.