January 08, 2007
OpenLearn on iPods?
With lots of interest around the OU at the moment regarding 'Mobile Moodle', and how we take VLE content offline and into peoples' pockets, I was intrigued today when I stumbled across mogopop, a "web application designed to make it easy to create, publish and download multimedia content for iPods."
The premise is simple - create pages of content for your iPod, bundle it an go. As well as text pages, mogopop claims to let you incorporate audio, video and image pages in a particular bundle of pages (though with a 50MB size limit per project I suspect that will limit the amount of video you can include?)
As I had a spare hour or so this evening (that is, I needed a displacement activity away from marking...) I wondered how hard it would be to convert the French: Ouverture OpenLearn unit to a portable version...
The answer is rather trickier than I had at first anticipated, so much so in fact that I don't even have a demo of my own to link to :-( ... nor do I have an iPod, which means I wouldn't have been able to test it properly anyway. If anyone would like to donate one to me, please feel free to get in touch... ;-) Maybe you got a new one for Christmas...? Whatever... I can always borrow an iPod from the OU Library, if not...).
Text pages are easy enough to add:
Audio uploads too seemed to work okay:
The images uploaded fine, but I could never seem to save them into a page, though I could preview them:
I didn't succeed in uploading any video though - no matter what I tried (from following the mogopop iTunes conversion instructions, to using a variety of formats generated via the rather clever video converter utility Hey!Watch (which will even convert files you have subscribed to via a feed :-).
(Thinking of that Hey!Watch feed subscription utility, it would be really handy if you could import a feed into mogopop and have it generate a correspondingly linked package as a result...)
There were significant other issues too with respect to making a (quick) sensible conversion of the actual learning materials:
- the large number of detailed images are actually too detailed (I suspect) for easy viewing on an iPod - and the activites wrapped around the images require you to actually inspect them quite closely;
- pulling a transcript out of the PDF transcript files to paste into a text page proved impossible (probably compounded by the fact that: a) I'm using Adobe Reader; b) on a Mac; c) the PDF text was very accented French, in d) a complex layout;
- several of the exercises are largely designed for print use (not even online use...), so are not really appropriate for use with a mobile screen.
It would be easy enough (I think) to put one of the heavier text based courses on into mogopop, but to my mind that largely defeats the purpose? Any comments?
Just in passing, OU readers interested in the VLE Mlearn project can pick up an invite for three forthcoming workshops here. The themes are:
- Podcasting, Course News and Alerts
- Mobile Course Content
- Social and User Generated Content on-the-move
Ah... Course News and Alerts.... that takes me back three or four years... ;-)
Posted by ajh59 at January 8, 2007 11:05 PM