I went to a fabulous ISTS brown bag presentation today by Andrew Campbell called "The Rise of People-Centric Sensing" where we learned about the potential for smart phones to act as mobile sensors to allow both data collection and sensor based social networking.
A version of the talk is available on Andrew's website.
Campbell's team has designed an iPhone app called CenceMe that users the embedded sensors in the iPhone/Touch (such as GPS, microphone, camera, and the acceleromator) to automatically update the "presence" of the user.
The app sends the data to Facebook App (article) - allowing social presence to be injected into the status updates.
One area where I see an immediate connection and research agenda is the relationship between mobile computing and how students consume mobile curriculum.
We have this idea that increasingly our students will access course materials through mobile devices. They will watch course videos, read course articles, follow course discussions, blogs, and wikis, and even upload responses and questions through their iPhones, Touches, and Android phones.
We also have this theory that students will consume curricular content on mobile devices in short chunks (10 minutes here, 10 minutes there), and do so while multi-tasking (on the treadmill, in line for the shuttle), and in social settings (while hanging out with friends). However, we have no way of testing these hypotheses.
Seems to me that Campbell's tools could put some data to these theories. We should know from our CMS logs when users go in, and maybe what they are doing when they are in the mobile CMS.
The sensor data (or CenceMe data) could then be correlated to understand what the student are doing while consuming the curricular material and interacting with the mobile course management system.
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