After having annoyed you all with newbie questions, I would like to introduce myself and my planned work here. I chose the dev forum as I really appreciate other developers thoughts about that and I am sure there are many points where you can help me a lot
So my name is Andreas, I am 23y old and I am from Graz, Austria. I currently work on my diploma thesis at the university of applied sciences, department for "information management", branch "digital media technologies" (http://dmt.fh-joanneum.at).
My work is based on the general idea of m(obile)-Learning, especially the usage of smartphones. In 2004 a colleague, Matthias Meisenberger, worked on an m-Learning application called "MLE" (mobile learning engine). He developed a feature-rich J2ME application which made it possible to download precreated content (so called learning objects) to the mobile phone and afterwards walk through them (offline, meaning at no cost). The project was rather successful and even won several awards. Now the project is still under development by eLibera, a business Matthias set up together with another colleague, Ilias Lazaridis.
You may be interested in giving http://www.elibera.com a visit and have a look at the MLE. One can register there for free and download the application to a compatible (MIDP 2.0) mobile phone. Precreated content may be booked from the platform, or even newly created by use of a comfortable editor.
At our department there is currently a project (http://www.ixmedia.biz) which successfully integrated the MLE application into Moodle, making it possible to create mobile content via a module.
My plan is to expand on this idea, making not only special mobile content usable, but also Moodle core modules like choices or quizzes. I also think of other functionality as there could be integration of the messaging system, or far more important - forum and wiki support. As a mobile is not the best suited medium for long textual input, I want to clearly focus on multimedia elements there (i.e. audio comments, photographs and movie sequences). Also other functionalities could be suitable for mobile use (messaging system, journal,...). As my time for working on it is limited, I decided to not fully implement a new client application, but extend MLE. Negative side effect: MLE is not open source (still it is free for personal and educational use), so I will not be able to share the client code with the community (at least I don't even have it).
Now here is where YOU come in!
I would really much appreciate your thoughts and ideas on that.
- Which Moodle functionalities do you think will be suitable the most for mobile use?
- Which new functionalities could you imagine?
- Focussing on the quiz module, which different types do exist and which of them could be best adapted for mobile usage?
- Not thinking about Moodle for a second, which features would you expect from a mobile learning solution (community features, wiki search, google search,...)?
- Which features could you imagine to not only enable mobile moodling, but also to have some more "collaborative learning" - i.e. having activities together with a mate via bluetooth for example. Could you imagine new "collaboration focused" quiz types?
Any proposals are welcome! I know there are many creative and experienced brains in here and I am sure there will be the most wonderful ideas!
I also realized that there is at least one other project (moodle for mobile)dealing with some kind of "mobile moodle", but there are some differences. First of all I am convinced about a rich client on the mobile, making (to a certain degree) offline usage possible. Furthermore I search for new ideas and functionalities which could be implemented using mobile phones as devices. I just think about the possibility of doing some location based stuff out in the field...