BLOGS/WIKIS - Mobile

MOBILE BLOGGING (MOBLOGGING)
What Is Moblogging?
Posting to your blog via mobile device.  Moblogging is hugely popular with teens and young adults, who tend to post photos of celebrities, friends, or themselves.

Educational Use
However, moblogging can also be used for educational purposes.  Some ways that moblogging can be used in a classroom include:

• Group Projects - groups of students or even entire classes can moblog together on a collaborative assignment.
  
  Here is a video of a class of Australian high school students moblogging as part of a group assignment:
  
  
  
• Documenting a process - students can take photos during the creation of a project and document the process by moblogging.
• Field trip summary - students can moblog while on a field trip
• Special event reporting - student can attend special events and moblog while they are there

Moblogging Sites
There are several sites that you can use to moblog, including:

• Most popular blog sites (Wordpress, Blogger, LiveJournal)
  
• Moblog http://moblog.net
• Flickr Mobile http://www.flickr.com/tools/mobile/
• Tumblr http://www.tumblr.com
• LocoBlog http://locoblog.com - location-based mobile blogging site that uses GPS to include location information in your moblog (very cool!)

MOBILE WIKIS
A mobile wiki allows you to view AND input wiki information via mobile device.  There are a handful of mobile wiki sites now and no doubt many more to come in the future as mobile internet access becomes widespread.  Here is a directory of mobile wikis: http://wikizap.mobi

Educational Use

• Group Projects - group activities can use mobile wikis to store information about projects
• Individual or collaborative note taking (e.g. using PicoWiki) - wikis are excellent for storing notes, and mobile wikis can be used to store notes from any location.
• Mobile Wikipedia - students can create new Wikipedia entries as a group even when they are all in remote locations.
• Mobile audio wikis - speech-based wikis that access information via voice.
  MobilED is a good example of a mobile audio wiki that is helping South African students learn.  This is how it works:
  1. A user can search for a term by sending an SMS message to the server.
  2. The server then calls the user.
  3. A speech synthesizer will read the article found in the Wikipedia.
  4. If the term is not found in Wikipedia, then the user can submit his/her contribution by dictating it to the system.