1. Is there any tangible return on investment to the organisation in terms of employee productivity? Currently our staff mobile phone handsets cost us nothing on a 24 month contract, and we have no data plans. The iPhones will cost us a minimum of $400 per handset on a 24 month contract + a minimum $30 per month for a 200MB data plan. This means that over a two year period each phone costs us $1,120. To roll out iphones to our 50 employees would cost us $28,000 per annum more than we currently pay for moblile phones. We will want to see some significant benefits to justify this level of extra expenditure.
2. Are there any educational  applications of this type of device. How could the iPhone be used to improve teaching and learning? On this side of things it is easier to justify at least a small number of iphones for ‘research’ purposes without the need for any hard and fast ROI data. However there are still some questions to be asked about how much educational potential the iPhone really does have over and above the likes of the iPod Touch, which is a much cheaper option.

I will post more details as our evaluation continues.

• Have people follow a ulearn08 twitter account and then follow everyone that chose to follow this account. The problem with this is the tedious job of monitoring who was following that account and then getting that account to follow them. Also, this would pick up all their tweets, not just conference related ones.

• Use the hashtags bot - only trouble is this seems to have been broken back in June some time.
• Have people enter #ulearn08 on all conference tweets and then get the rss feed of a twitter search for the this string. This worked ok, but the rss feed does not provide links to the user photos, and I didn’t have time to mess around with the twitter api to get this.
• Same as above option but screen scrap the search results page and then wrap a ulearn header around it. I went with this option as it was quick and easy and provided the user photos with each tweet which made the page much nicer than straight text. I used the simple_html_dom php class to pull the search results div out of the page.

Things that would be nice to do for the next conference given a bit more time:

• Have the page refresh with an ajax call in the background rather than with a meta refresh.
• Get the links to show conversation threads in the search results working. These are being stripped out with a regex at the moment as the screen scrapping broke the relative links in the ajax calls.

The current Ulearn08 page is here.

And here is the flv version of a video with these settings:

and a downloadable mp4 version.

It is based on the open source platform phpMotion which was relatively easy to install and modify. If I can convince my copy of Wordpress that I can be trusted to embed video I will add a sample video here …..

His main observation was that videoconferencing had not really moved forward at all since Bell Systems Picture Phone in the 60s. Even with the HD telepresence units that are available it is still a essentially a 2D experience. He had some interesting examples of experimental 3D augmented reality video conferencing. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for this technology to make the mainstream.

He had some interesting statistics about the lack of uptake of videoconferencing, even when HD on fast networks was available. His view was that the VC use would not increase significantly until the experience was ‘better’ than a face to face meeting. The focus of existing systems seems to be on making it an ‘equivalent’ experience. I am sure the same thing must apply to numerous other technology applications in education.

Hopefully we can get our own wonderland server up and running in the next few weeks so we can do some more detailed investigation of its potential in the educational space.

The only drawback at the moment is a lack of Mac support due to the client requiring Java 1.6, and this currently isn’t available for Mac  - but hopefully will be soon.

For the first option Exchange is out of the question so I have been playing around with Zimbra. It seems very good, and synchs with MS and Apple desktops, as well as having a very good ajax web interface and desktop client. We already have a stable email platform, and it is really just the calendaring component of Zimbra that we want, so is it worth all the drama of having to migrate all of our email accounts?

The other option I am looking at is keeping our existing email platform and using Google Calendar for group calendaring. I am hoping to trial this option with a few staff in the next week or so - will keep you posted ….