Handheld Learning - learning with mobile and ubiquitous technologies

The cost has gone down and the value has gone up.

RedHalo Pro Edition now comes with 25Gb per learner of ultra-secure storage backed up everyday and now costs just £1 per Gb per year. That's £25 per account, a reduction of 30% from the original £35 while storage has increased by 500%.

Every RedHalo account comes with the tools needed to manage and facilitate any mobile learning environment or project and includes a superb integrated application suite* for Windows Mobile, XP or Vista (UMPC) with a proven learning pedigree to get you started. Training also available in London, Cambridge or on-site.

*application suite includes Inspiration**, Opera, PhatPad (advanced animation and sketching), Pocket Painter, Photo Explorer, Calligrapher, Red Media Composer, RedFlipper and RedActivity - the most advanced project-based learning environment. For more information about this bundle visit: http://www.redhalo.com/applications.html

**Inspiration for Windows Mobile only available from RedHalo.

For further information on RedHalo see www.redhalo.com   

Please contact me if you have any questions or would like to have a demo hezron@redhalo.com  ;-)

Some interesting questions which I'll attempt to answer.

By way of background, RedHalo has been and continues to be developed with a number of things in mind:

- learner mobility (learner rather than device centric)
- learner ownership of their work and other data
- mobility of learners work and data
- access anytime, anywhere, on anything
- interoperability with 3rd party and other web applications
- server-side media conversion (future-proofing learner portfolio)
- teacher management tools
- web 2.0

Although there is an independent server option available to use in the manner you describe this largely defeats much of the benefit afforded by its intended design.

One of the benefits of your Yahoo!/Flickr/Facebook/Googlemail/Youtube/etc accounts is that you can access this information wherever and whenever you happen to be and largely on most web-enabled devices. The principle behind RedHalo is the same. The account should be owned by the student rather than the establishment, although, granted, we are some way from achieving this goal. This raises an important point, who owns learning?

I made an attempting at touching on some of these questions (unrelated to RedHalo) here:
http://www.handheldlearning.co.uk/content/view/44/1/

25Gb is hardly a limitation for online especially when it is also being backed up every single day! By the time 25Gb becomes a limit it won't be 

In regards to security/secrecy of data the servers used by RedHalo are based in one of the most secure and reliable facilities in Europe at The Bunker protected under European data protection laws.

Many learning systems expect the student to store their learning within a school or university system which is fine until the student leaves the establishment or changes school etc. In a digital world, how does the student maintain an autobiographical memory of self in the way that previous generations did simply using a box containing all their paper based work and achievements?

Regarding the software bundle, I think it has probably been presented on the RedHalo site for a school audience but as you say the applications are general; Opera, Phatpad, Inspiration, Calligrapher, Painter, RedActivity are all suitable for use within a higher education environment where students are using WM based devices. But given that they are free to keep with the first years sub including all updates, even if you use a couple of them it ain't that bad and still cheaper than a Flickr Pro account! 

The SDK is a really interesting question and I'm pleased to say that, yes, we will be releasing the API's into the public domain. In fact a version of these API's are already being tested as part of the Becta supported e-scape 3 project reported here.

Any device with a browser can access a RedHalo account and future device clients (for auto-backup, application install, restore) are planned. We are also looking at the possibility of introducing a layer of RedHalo as open source so that developers can create their own clients.

Hope this helps!

 

Hi Paolo

 

Before responding I was thoughtful of an old comedy sketch from Monty Python which I dug up from YouTube:

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/k3HaRFBSq9k&rel=0" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/k3HaRFBSq9k&rel=0</a>

I must confess to being somewhat at a loss to present a case to someone who is opposed to principles of web 2.0 (that facilitated the development of much of what is great about the web right now) and believes that the cost of devices are too expensive.

There's certainly some debate to be had on those subjects alone but perhaps in a separate thread so as not to "threadjack" this one.

I'd summarise however by saying that RedHalo and indeed this forum is principally about learning first and how learning and teaching practice maybe dramatically improved by the use of mobile or ubiquitous technologies.

You may be against social network systems, media sharing networks, Google, Yahoo!, etc but the fact remains that this is the world in which the majority of web users and therefore learners inhabit. Many users of such systems have become adept at creating their own social pages, uploading and sharing video, accessing and storing their private email on free storage systems (wherever they may be!). I would say that these are very serious things! Looking ahead, wouldn't it be sensible to embrace this growing skill-set and allow learners to evidence their learning in similar ways rather than attempt to force them to use legacy learning platforms and VLE's that simply place technology over decaying teaching practice?

In terms of devices, although there are some clients (for Windows Mobile/XP/Vista) that permit scheduled back-up, restore and application install/uninstall functions a learner can access their RedHalo account using an device with a web browser. This includes ubiquitous game consoles such as PSP's, Nintendo Wii's and PS3's which are relatively inexpensive. Accounts can also be accessed via ultra low cost laptops such as the EEE PC as well as the range of low cost MID devices appearing later this year. One things for sure, device prices are falling and many are already free.

So no, RedHalo isn't simply a browser for services exposed on the server side. It is to a learners collection of digital artefacts, that evidence their path of learning, to what Flickr is to their personal collection of photo's.

We've never had a problem with any of the international users of RedHalo about where their data is stored. I'm not sure that we're planning a war in Europe anytime soon and our storage facility is deliberately outside of London (unlike many educational data warehouses) and in a bunker 30 metres below the ground to prevent the possibility of loss. The Internet, of course, was intended to maintain communication in the event of war.

The release of the API's and open source layer will be interesting as here we want to see what people such as yourself might come up with. Often it's usually the things that you didn't imagine the technology would be used for that demonstrates innovation. Our original intention was to build a foundation platform that would recognise a world of heterogeneous devices that constantly change during a learners life.

Who can tell what kind of devices that a child entering primary school this Autumn will be using when they leave university in 15 years time? But one thing certain in my mind is that the learner should still be able to access any of their digital learning artefacts and take it with them wherever they go.

When I was speaking of ownership it wasn't in the Taoist sense rather I was referring one of the principle tenets of constructivist learning. Having said that, I did enjoy your quote! 

Cheers!

Graham
 

Agreed! 



There was a thread recently about the use of the "web 2.0" term (the thread was also related to digital divide issues) on one of the Becta research lists to which I replied:





Yes, it's called commerce. Most people now expect things, even very powerful and important things to be available for free (at point of use) on the web. But the reality is that someone has to pay for the freeness and that often tends to be advertisers or other organisations that want to reach certain audience profiles. It's why, for example, some university students get scholarships to go to uni paid for by the RAF and why such a practice will continue until universities or schools, etc and their staff provide their service's for free. 

I do think things are improving however and the use and placement of advertising is getting smarter. Do people really mind getting a few text adverts after a Google search? Not, if they're relevant and discrete. Likewise I think Facebook is a big improvement on MySpace in the way it handles advertising.



Good point, I think that RedHalo is a good case of solving a problem before people realise they have one and learners start demanding their copyrighted material to be extracted from sharepoint databases 



As previously mentioned we have a version working and being tested by nearly 300 students as part of e-scape 3. In this case the API's are being put to good use with TAG's MAPS e-portfolio system. So we would expect to release the API's on a beta program in the next few months, maybe sooner to those with interesting projects 



Forget it!  Although we might set-up a developers area.



hehehe!

 

 , it's good to have some discussion so no worries there!




The standard platform edition of RedHalo is FREE, only the Pro edition has a fee attached. You can download an entire trial version for Windows Mobile, XP or Vista from the site.

For or against, no problem for us. It's been a useful research, development and incubation project intended to assist the development of the sector. What people do with it will be interesting.



Religion, springs to mind here... (apologies for offending anybody!)



There are over 17,000 free e-books on http://www.gutenberg.org/ and a quick Google around and you'll find many other sites too. RedHalo (the free edition) is a great way of easily distributing these e-books to a variety of devices 



No need for apology, a lot of our work was inspired by digital divides from West Africa to Peckham and beyond...

Cheers

G
 

Yes, the team in Cambridge is working on a Linux client but, of course, there are many flavours.

By migrating to an open source model there maybe opportunities for interested parties such as yourself to develop their own clients.