Today the mail server is down so I started tinkering with (i.e. breaking) my phone. I’d been thinking about modding my phone so that I could forward texts from my inbox to a twitter account. This has obvious applications e.g. use mobiles as powerful classroom SMS voting devices. I managed to programatically send SMS from my phone to different numbers. Now I just need to monitor the inbox and forward any SMSes to a Twitter account. I hope to have a prototype of this working soon. If anyone would like to help me test it please let me know.
I used psy60 to do this. It allows a powerful but easy-to-use programming language called Python to be used on modern Nokia phones (such as my N95). The amazing thing is that Python gives you access to all the features of the handset. Just browsing the APIs (i.e the documentation) I can see how you could have a lot of fun with it. Your phone could access your GPS and update your twitter or facebook status whenever you were in a specific location for instance. You could have a “honey I’m on the way” SMS be triggered when you leave the office in the direction of home. You could create a shopping list reminder trigger when you are near the shop. You could have an alarm go off when you are stray too near the fridge or the wine wrack during detox January.
importmessaging, appuifw
nbr = “1234″# the mobile number sms_text =u“hello world” # your message messaging.sms_send(nbr, sms_text)
#How Simple is Python!
One interesting way of looking at your phone with this capability is as computer you can remote control via SMS. You could send an SMS to your phone (from a second phone obviously or a PC) and have your phone do something - take a photo, record audio, take a GPS reading, connect to the web etc.
I predict that phones will soon come equipped with more sensors i.e. light, temperature, distance (lasers) etc. A GPS is a sensor and has spawned massive applications in recent electronics and computing so it may be worth exploring sensors more - all the technology exists cheaply.
90% of all predictions for 2009 will be wrong. This is because making predictions is hard. Especially about the future.
The 9% of predictions that come true will be boringly trivial. Trend x will increase moderately while trend Y will die down yadda yadda yadda
Somebody somewhere (Mr or Ms 1%) will invent something new. However this person will not be one of those doing the predicting.
Invention cannot be predicted. But great changes will come. In order for innovation to be foreseen the revolution would have to be televised. The revolution will not be televised.
If you live in Europe you know that the mobile operators are serious cash cows. If you live in Ireland you feel this pain pretty acutely as everything has become ludicrously dear here (isn’t this what happened in Iceland towards the end?).
The problem is that the mobile operators, like the broadband ones, have a monopoly on the infrastructure.
SMS for instance, when measured by cost per kilobyte sent, is outrageously expensive. It costs a tiny fraction of one cent to send an email but a text message, with a minuscule 160 characters of data could cost 15 cent!
Sooner or later this business model is going to crumble. SMS is just way too dear. companies such as linxster are sniping away at the fringes.
I wrote a recent hack for using Twitter to turn Moodle forum postings into SMS messages. This no longer works in Europe. Twitter have pulled their SMS notifications here because it is too expensive. To make that hack work you now need to add Jaiku to the chain:
Moodle profile with twittermail email address >> goes to twitter account >> RSS from twitter account fetched into Jaiku>> Jaiku sends SMS to students.
This chain is too long and hence brittle.
I have another interesting hack incubating to allow students use their phones as a classroom voting system. This is similar to the clickers you can get except it you don’t need specialist equipment just a mobile.
Poll Anywhere allows you to run SMS polls with up to 30 participants and only charges after that. Alas this system is not available in Ireland. Though it makes me less inclined to work on my own version of this as I suspect it will be commercially available soon (though of course mine would be free).
Take home message: SMS is expensive and people will seek out alternatives to the mobile operators Prediction: There will be a major product in the next two years that decimates the SMS market of the established operators. Email and web are not expensive so why should SMS be?
Update: I put the wrong link in earlier to the GM script, oops!
Putting a large cohort of students into specific Moodle groups can be tedious and error-prone (if you need specific students in specific groups).
I’ve written a Greasemonkey script to help assign specific people to groups in Moodle. It simply hides people already assigned to a group from the list of potential assignees. In effect it hides each person from the list as you add them to a group. You can turn back on the full view at any time by simply disabling the script.
Blogger.com is a blogging platform owned by Google. It hosts blogs that are very easy to set up. Go to www.blogger.com, sign up and you can be publishing web pages through a simple WYSIWYG interface in minutes. Wordpress (WP) is another blogging platform. It’s open source so you can download the software and install and run it yourself (as I do here) or you can go for a hosted version for a fee (www.wordpress.com). However if I were starting this blog again I would use blogger.
Wordpress has become slightly easier to use in later versions but still requires a fair bit of learning. What it does have is lots of plugins which give you lots of cool features. But whenever you hear “cool features” you also need to be wary of ”bells and whistles”.
Here are the important things you need to know about blogger:
It’s free. You can run ads if you want on blogger but its up to you and you get a cut if you do chose to run them.
Its web-based. Blogger is Cloud Computing at its best. You can log in from anywhere, you don’t need a server, a database, or to install or maintain anything.
It’s easy to use. You don’t see any of the nuts and bolts of the web. It’s just point and click and you won’t see a line of HTML (unless you want to).
You can use your own domain name. If you have a web address you can use this on blogger. But if you don’t have a web address you get one from blogger (www.blogger.com/yourBlogName)
If you put all these things together you see a very powerful tool. Blogger is not just a blogging platform. It is a web publishing tool. It is a conentent management system. Budgets for web development could be slashed if people realised what Blogger is and what it can do. For me Blogger is a game-changer. A disruptive technology that can change the way you work for the better (or collapse your business model).
Do you need a VLE? Do you need a CMS? What do these things give you? And what is the overhead of using them?
Blogger may not be technically superior to say Wordpress or Drupal but it may be good enough.
Because I am lazy I always have a list of things I would like to blog about but never seem to get around to. I may write about some of these things in the future but I will need to chose which one(s). Here is today’s list - anything grab your fancy?
A few years a friend told me about a new technology that BMW were putting in cars. The volume of the car stereo went up when the engine noise went up. The volume automatically turned itself down when the car was stopped in traffic and the engine noise was lower. Cool hu?
I was thinking about this yesterday as I turned down the radio while waiting at a traffic light and all of a sudden the penny dropped. The problem is not with the radio it’s with the car. Cars are noisy. This is a hard problem to solve. Instead of performing extensive surgery and solving the real problem (noisy cars) the car makers gave us a cheap sticking plaster - gimmicky radios. The makers of the car (technology) gave the users (technologists) a clever solution to the wrong problem. It’s a trick engineers love to play on technologists. It’s called gadgetry.
I have been thinking about Moodle and Twitter lately. They share something in common. From a certain vantage they both look like a stream of babbling data. People frequently complain about the amount of emails they get from Moodle forums or how they can keep up to date with active Moodle forums and not get swamped. Twitter has this problem too in that once you follow a certain threshold number of people the stream gets disorientating. This stream of chatter is what makes Twitter different and interesting as a medium however it also has tools to let you manage the flow.
The beauty of Twitter is that you can unsubscribe (unsub) anyone you are not interested in. But not only that because Twitter is based on RSS feeds you actually have very powerful filtering tools to hand. If you are a power RSS user Twitter will make sense to you and you will have strategies for pulling the twitter feeds of most interest to you while ignoring the rest. (Of course one of the beauties of twitter is that you can go on a tangent and expand a scrap of interesting conversation that you see in the periphery of your vision to find new friends and conversations).
How could you filter Moodle in the same way? Gain some control over large and active discussion forums while extracting the best bits from them? One way to do this is by using email filters to route your Moodle discussions into feeds.
Step 1: Forward to GMail
- Go into the email account that is in your Moodle profile
- Set it to forward all mail to a GMail account
Step 2: Use GMail filters
- Create GMail email filter so that all emails from Moodle skip your GMail inbox. This will keep you sane.
- Now become acquainted with GMail email filters. For instance you could forward all emails from a certain Moodle discussion forum to TwitterMail. This would allow you say to get SMS alerts of what is happening in a forum with vital information such as “assignment is due five minutes ago/tutorial is cancelled”.
A Twitter account of course is just an RSS feed. So, in one sense, what Twittermail really is is an email to RSS tool. Have you ever wanted to get an RSS feed of a mailing list? Simple just forward the mails to a Twittermail account and subscribe to the associated Twitter user.
What does this mean for Moodle discussions? Well it means you can create feeds from discussion threads yourself. The power is yours. You don’t need to wait for your Moodle admin to do this for you. This is the power of web 2.0. The only limit to what you can do is your imagination.
Once you start thinking like this about email filters, RSS, SMS, Twitter and Moodle discussion forums you can see limitless possibilities. And none of this is rocket science. No programming is involved.
We have the tools. The web is truly here. Let’s use it.
Want to make Moodle and Twitter talk in a basic way? Very simple, just turn on RSS feeds in your forums and run it through a Twitter account. If your system administrator is too busy fighting fires in the server room (i.e. playing online games with Troll in the title) to enable RSS there is an even simpler way. Use Twittermail to update a twitter account by setting this as the email address of a user subscribed to a Moodle forum with email alerts enabled. TA-DA your Moodle forum is now streaming to Twitter. Of course this means you are pulling Moodle conversations into Twitter which is just a one-way stream. Your students can’t talk back from Twitter to your Moodle forum which would be ideal. If you want full on realtime web streaming chat you all need to be in twitter - up to your necks.
I was in a meeting very recently. In a discussion on promotional material bookmarks were suggested. Some thought that this would not exude a high tech image. One wag referred to them as “anti-social bookmarks” with a wry smile. The bookmarks idea did have a nice ring to it though. It’s retro and bookmarks are a great technology.
What is technology anyway? Why is the old fashioned bookmark great technology? Because, obviously enough, it makes life easier, more enjoyable and makes us more productive. Technology is the tools that make life better. But the best tools don’t make life better the best. The best people do. Good users, good technologists, are the ones that know their tools well. And the very best are those that are not only the most skilled but also the most creative.
My aunt. Her five kids are talking, eating and vying for her attention while she conducts a conversation with my mother. One of the youngest kids is complaining that his sausage is too hot to eat. She picks up the sausage and runs it under the cold tap before handing it back to the now happy child. All the while she conducted a conversation with my Mother. Now that was expert and creative use of a cold water tap. Without doubt the quickest way to cool a sausage. The tool was within arm’s reach but most people wouldn’t have thought of using it. Parenting requires ingenuity and, such as in this case, technical prowess.
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