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'Killer apps' for mobile phones - an educational view
By Martin Owen, Director of Learning, Futurelab |
This article is based on a presentation to a seminar entitled 'Killer Applications for Mobile Phones' at the International Broadcasters Convention - IBC 2005.
October 2005 is an interesting time to be involved in mobile phone technology in the UK. A trial of mobile television delivered to the mobile phone is underway in Oxford, and O2 is launching an i-Mode service (interactive data service on mobile phones developed by NTT DeCoMo in Japan). This has to seen alongside the staggering penetration of mobile phones into the youth market in the UK - and any statistic I state would be an out of date underestimate.
I was asked to present what I thought might be killer apps for education. I started my thinking as to what the killer apps for phones are, anyway. This is almost a non-question. People buy phones and phone services to communicate with each other - initially to talk synchronously but more recently, with the advent of the mobile phone, we have reinvented the telegram - a short textual communication which is not quite synchronous. Any consideration of the phone must take into account the fact that this is one of the most powerful pieces of social technology since the invention of speech itself - people use it to communicate. Another important factor that has arisen since the availability of the mobile phone is that it has become a personal tool; it is your phone and its purpose is to communicate to and from you wherever you are. Any application that is going to be killer must surely build on that issue.
Of course phones are getting more functionality; they can receive data services, they can record and transmit video, still images and sound. These are an important part of the future of telephony and it may be that the sheer convenience of already carrying the phone makes watching TV on a small screen acceptable in a way that owning a small-screen TV per se is not. Richard Harper of Microsoft RL in Cambridge points out that research in Singapore indicated that people wanted multifunctional portable devices, but they still wanted to maintain the integrity of the phone because of the personal nature of its phone-ness. Person-to-person communication is so important to people that anything which interferes with that functionality would be resisted. Harper points out the problem: the phone's user interface needs to be optimised for that purpose - ergo any other functions are by definition not optimal. Nevertheless in education I would think that any killer application likely to emerge will be an application which has the communication function of the phone at its heart, and the data or media streams are driven by the need and ability to communicate.
As an aside I think one barrier to developing such an application is the fact that mobile phone operators do not enable and promote self-initialised audio-conferencing on mobile phones. This is important for learning - I can imagine activities that require multi-way conversations. I also think that it would drive the need for other data services; I see my own children using their phone to coordinate their lives with their many friends in making decisions about how to dispose of their spare time - a series of one-to-one phonecalls (often repeated) and searches of the cinema times in the local newspaper seems so unnecessary.
So what might the uses of the multimedia mobile phone be? At a Futurelab Innovations Workshop we identified a number of possibilities. The ability of students to record and capture multimedia information at any time - because they had the wherewithal to do so - could be transformative of educational experiences. One is no longer constrained to textual recording. The QCA and Richard Kimbell of Goldsmith's College are experimenting with multimedia recording as a way of students recording moments of creativity as part of their assessment. Synergy.TV is working with the Imperial War Museum and museums in Bradford and Leeds to have young people gather witness statements from people who have been forced to migrate through conflict. Whole new ways of using media grow from its very ubiquity. These do not necessarily draw on the phone-ness of a phone however - they could be done with highly portable digital video cameras.
The portability of the phone gives rise to other possibilities - specifically location-based services. The location can be grossly estimated by your location in a specific cell of transmission, or it can be more specifically estimated by either having a geographic location device included in the phone's hardware, or the phone may use identification devices - like QR tags - placed in specific locations. Museums - which would much rather people bring their own technology into the buildings - could make use of such technology to provide enhanced information for visitors. We might think of this process as low fidelity augmented reality - overlaying space with digital information about the space. The social and educational applications in this space are almost endless. Adding the personal and the inter-personal communication makes the proposition stronger. There are killer apps here.
I am certain however that the real excitement comes when we add inter-personal communication to this facility. In 2004 Futurelab, along with the BBC Natural History Unit, University of Bristol, HP Labs and the MRL at the University of Nottingham, made a tentative experiment that modelled this possibility. We developed a game that involved learners roaming their school field role-playing as a pride of lions. They had wireless wearable equipment, and had to plan, communicate and coordinate with each other in order to survive. Later they would meet in the 'den' to share information and plan for their next foray. A reason why we used to play games before the invention of the computer game was to support our social interaction amongst friends and family. The use of real location, and streamed media and real person-to person communication opens up new possibilities. There are killer apps here.
In the end for me the phone is a social technology, which is why people want them. Having a media machine in the same case is convenient. That convenience may produce new markets for broadcast media - however that does not seem so 'killer'. It may be we prefer to have devices optimised for that purpose. However I think when we enhance the social functions of the phone with media we may find applications that people discover they want from their phone rather than their pocket TV.
October 2005
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