Over the last few weeks, gadget-lovers in the US have been going crazy for Apple’s entry into the mobile phone market, the iPhone. Estimates indicate that about 700,000 of the devices were sold in the first weekend of sales in the States at up to $599 each. Expect the hype around the iPhone in this country to build dramatically prior to its launch in Europe before Christmas. The iPhone will be the “must have” gadget for Christmas 2007. Parents of teenagers need to either prepare their wallets, or their resolve, for the direct hit that the iPhone is likely to make upon their lives.
For those who haven’t seen details of the iPhone, here are some links you might find useful:
- Engadget iPhone review - a balanced review of the iPhone
- Apple.com iPhone homepage
Early reviews of the iPhone in the US have been largely positive, and 85% of those who’ve bought one would recommend it to a friend. While there are some obvious deficiencies to the device as it currently stands - no video camera, no Flash support, no support for third-party applications, no cut and paste (!), plus of course the expense - I believe that the iPhone may give us clues to the educational possibilities of the next generation of handheld devices.
Mobile Learning is a massive growth area in education at the moment. Witness the success of Wolverhampton’s Learning2Go programme and other similar initiatives around the UK and the world.
Here are some features of the iPhone that I’d love to see in a future handheld device in educational use. It is, of course, worth pointing out that I haven’t actually seen or used an iPhone - all of the information here is based on reports from elsewhere.
Multi-touch display
All of the reviews of the iPhone have commented on the quality of the iPhone’s display. It is big, bright and beautiful. The display is designed to be operated using your fingers rather than a stylus. Fascinatingly, it is also designed to be operated with more than one touch at a time, allowing the user to interact with applications in whole new ways. For example, a user can zoom in on one portion of a photo by literally pinching the screen.
Imagine the possibilities of this kind of technology in education; using your fingers to rotate, pan and zoom around 3D models of buildings, geographical features or chemical molecules and to interact with photographs, maps, text, video and audio.
Thanks to a clever orientation sensor, the display also changes from landscape to portrait and back again as you rotate the device in your hands.
Microsoft Surface, a technology designed to integrate computing power into tabletops, shows that Microsoft too are starting to think about next-generation touchscreen computing. Is the era of the mouse and keyboard coming to an end?
A really decent browser
The use of handheld devices and mobile phones to browse the Internet has always been hampered by the power, or rather the lack of it, in their browser software. Browsers on handhelds have usually been stripped-down versions of the software on a desktop PC. Webpages look and respond differently. Sometimes they don’t work at all. This often leads to website developers either deciding not to support handheld devices at, or to them developing whole new, reduced-feature, versions of their sites for mobile computers.
According to reviews, the browser on the iPhone, Safari, renders and responds to webpages exactly as the desktop version of Safari on Mac (and now PC) does. Webpages look the way they do on a desktop machine. They respond the same. Yes, the smaller screen size on a mobile device may cause some issues, but the need for whole different versions of websites (”the mobile web”) has gone. Using the multi-touch technology in the iPhone screen, users can even also easily zoom in on one part of a webpage.
The browser on the iPhone also has the potential to interact directly with the latest Web Applications. Documents shared in Google Docs and Spreadsheets may be edited and saved online (apparently, this isn’t quite working yet . . . ). With full browser functions on a handheld device, students in the future will be able to manage their eportfolios and online web presence in the latest MySpace-clone or on their blog. Virtual Learning Environments will be fully accessible. The addition of new technology such as Google Gears heralds a future in which students can edit their documents using a version of a web application running on a portable device, then seamlessly synchronize their work with an online version of the application. As applications move from the desktop to sitting online, handheld devices become increasingly powerful as clients to manage every aspect of our students’ learning.
Unfortunately, one thing about iPhone in its current form effectively eliminates it as a tool for educational use of the Internet. The iPhone lacks support for Flash, the web standard for creating interactive media online, and the most common medium for interactive educational resources online.
User interface, easy-to-use iPod functions and streaming media
The iPhone is the “best iPod we’ve ever made” according to Apple. Video and podcasts synchronise with iTunes and can be played back with a touch of the finger. While current handheld devices can of course play back video and audio files, the ease-of-use of an iPod-style device is difficult to resist. In fact, the user interface on the iPhone appears to be a significant step forward in many regards. The easier it is for students to move from one application to another and to interact with the resources available to them, the better. It appears that Apple has raised the standard for the quality of user experience for a handheld device.
Google has also recently announced a service called Telekinesis (http://code.google.com/p/telekinesis/) which will allow users to stream audio and video and move files direct from their desktop computer onto their iPhone over the Internet. Imagine the possibilities - in future, lessons could be streamed from anywhere to anywhere. Students on field trips could interact with a bank of media stored on the server back in school.
Conclusion
The iPhone in its current form is unlikely to be appropriate for large-scale use in education. It is both expensive and limited (you can’t install extra applications onto it, no Flash support, no cut and paste, no video camera). Looking forward, however, some of the features of the iPhone, whether in future versions of the iPhone or iPod-style devices from Apple, or in other devices using similar technologies, may drive mobile learning to the next level.
