Milestone for week 4 - Mobile App Design

This week’s Milestone question in EPSY590ML SU11 asked us to look more at the design of app.  I am choosing an application I have had on my mobile phone for quite some time and added to my tablet as soon as started configuring it with apps.  The app is quite popular, it is: Astro file manager.  It is a great tool to manage files on a mobile device as it acts like Finder on a Mac or Windows Explorer in Windows.  For students who are constructing learning objects with their mobile devices, eventually the objects are stored somewhere and Astro allows you to: edit, move, copy, delete existing files and to create new files.  Students can create folders to better organize and manage the content they create with their mobile devices. 

But there are limitations to Astro and maybe the limitations I perceive with this app are due to my mindset of thinking that my mobile device is a computer operating system, which is it not.  It is a mobile operating system.  Or maybe I did not understand the User Interface well enough to figure out what this limitation.  Tonight I am preparing for a trip to San Jose for the Sloan C conference – am flying from coast to coast tomorrow – I wanted to utilize my time on the airplane to do some research and writing for the other summer class I am taking.  I have been using my tablet to accumulate my research that I want to spend time reviewing while I have quiet time on my flights.   What I found is that my old reliable Astro app did not make it possible to share or send multiple files; I spent about 15 minutes trying to find a solution and gave up in favor of downloading a new app from the Android Market called, ES File Explorer which did exactly what I wanted it to do: allow me to email multiple files from my SD card.    As much as I have liked Astro and found it to be useful, I may have found its replacement tonight with ES File Explorer.  In what turned out to be a frustrating experience at first, provided me with a thought-provoking situation – the choices we have today for software and mobile apps are incredible.  Sometimes all of these software choices can create a glut of useless or ineffective apps, but ten or fifteen years ago we did not have the flexibility on with our computer software of that time, which we have on our mobile devices today.  If an app does not meet my needs, I just go to the Android Market, either on my computer or on my mobile device and download it over the air.  I know there are applications like DropBox that are probably better suited for my current need, but this file manager application does not require me to register with it, which give my lack of time tonight was an advantage.  

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.  

Twitter App on my Nexus One...

While waiting for my delayed flight I tried using the Twitter App on my Nexus One.   This post is coming from my mobile phone and later edited once I got to a computer.

Brad Beecher (@bradbeecher) has shared a Tweet with you: "bradbeecher: Leaving DCA http://t.co/XVMnV2n."

I am on my flight now and I think I am sitting next to former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker.  Gotta go.  Flight leaving.  After arriving, it was confirmed that I was sitting next to the former Fed Chairman.

Back to mobile learning - the Twitter App on my phone was a breeze to use, in fact it let me share my tweet with my blog - hence the reference to the earlier tweet.  It is pretty interesting how all of these various apps are integrated to provided a more seamless experience for the end user.  I have no idea how an iPhone works as I find Apple's iOS exceedingly confusing to use and Android really quite simple, but Android must have some sharing API utilized by some of their built-in apps and used by 3rd party developers.  It makes sharing photos, videos, tweets, contacts and much more so easy and it appears to be interoperable.  Android is a great mobile platform, I cannot wait to get an Android tablet soon.