Txtsys ehand - text messaging service for audience polls

From textually org comes news of ehand from txtsys, a local Christchurch company. The company provides a service which allows customers to text feedback / comments back to hospitality / retail providers. Obviously also useful for feedback from lecture / conference audiences.


Audience / users pay the usual cost of a text message and the company pays txtsys $65 a month for the service. So probably cost effective only for programmes with large numbers of students. Otherwise for small numbers (up to 30 text) poll anywhere provides opportunity for anonymous feedback from audiences/students. Twitter is the other tool which has similar use. All of these put the cost of messaging back on to the user.  Whereas the other technology used for this sort of approach, clickers etc. transfers all costs to the organiser / provider.

Another way to connecting mobile learners

After mlearn2008 & Handheld Learning 2008, I indulged in a spot of travel and joined a bus tour that took me from London to Rome via Paris, Lausanne, Venice & Florence. All up, 10 days of travel which provided a quick overview & introduction to the possibilities for more travel in the near future.

As usual I took the opportunity to make observations about the uses of technology by both the tour company & the tour participants. The young English tour director (who also spoke French, German & Italian fluently) make copious use of her cell phone to liaise with a multitude of local tour guides, hotels, restaurants, shops & other tourist attraction operators. The majority of the tour participants were aged over forty but the dozen or so younger participants were queued up in front of the hotel internet or would pay for the hotel wifi access every time the tour checked into a hotel.

During the tour, several visits were made to tourist attractions like Versailles, the Vatican & Sistine chapel & the Coliseum & Forum using the ‘whisper tour guide system’ or similar. This was an FM radio system that supplied a transmitter to the tour guide & a receiver plus earphones to the tour participants. The tour guide could then discourse on the various aspects while tour participants wandered around inspecting the area or reading visual material. The entire tour could listen to questions posed by the more inquisitive tour members & participants who were ‘wanderers’ could keep track of where the main body of the tour was without becoming totally separated from their tour group.

The sound quality was good even over quite long distances & between several rooms. So this technology would be very useful in some areas we teach in at CPIT which have a high level of noise. Examples include the bakery, mechanical engineering & panel beating workshops. Classes that take on field trips should also benefit from this system along with practical sessions that spread learners out over a wide area (building, horticulture etc). I will need to see if the elearning team is interested in investigating this option plus I will have to look at how to better use Twitter as another way to replicate some aspects of the FM link up with hardware the students now all carry with them & as an option.

Mobile tools becoming more mainstream

Latest blog from Jane Hart’s top ten tools reveals that there is a change in the top ten tools for learning including the entry into the list of mobile tools & services (like find.mobi, fring, Qik and Utterz), mobile versions of key tools (like flickr, YouTube, Google Maps) and the mobile browser Opera Mini.

Twitter is in the 15th position, ahead of tools like youtube, igoogle & slideshare! I have not really been taken by twitter but twitter has a mass audience. One of the latest techcrunch blogs is on why twitter has not failed the power of audience. Will have another go at trying twitter out to see if it works for me :)

More info. on the mobile tools mentioned above:-

• Find.mobi is a mobile based search tool. Relatively easy to use and focused on mobile sites for ease of upload & display on mobile devices.
• fring allows use to use Skype, MSN messenger, Google talk etc. on you mobile phone. My Treo 700Wx is on the list, as is New Zealand (yeh). So will give this a go over the next couple of days to see how it works.
• Qik allows streaming live video to you phone. Will be expensive on our NZ telecom plans but will give this a try to find out how it works.
• utterz provides the tool to start a discussion from your computer or your phone. Utterz lets you create and follow discussions with friends or people with similar interests. Utterz can be audio, video, pictures and text. You can create or join a discussion from any mobile phone or computer. Friends can reply by voice, TXT message or on the mobile site at m.utterz.com. New Zealand is on the list, so another one to try out.

Good to be able to try out new mobile tools and by the look of things, mobile tools are an increasingly important adjunct when any social networking site launches.