This summer Susan, Steve and I have looked at a lot of applications built for the iPad platform. As part of this, we looked at web app equivalents of these applications (for example the flickr website & iPhone app) and did some development in this area to investigate what features a mobile website could replicate. For me, the key functions of these types of applications were the ability to retrieve data dynamically (e.g. rss and multi-media) and read, share or manipulate that data.

Earlier this year I played around with Dashcode, an apple based web/applet development platform to create an RSS viewer. The app was pretty simple to make but created a complex site of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code that was a bit overwhelming. It served the purpose but did not include the interactivity that I was looking for in an app.

In the last few weeks I have been working on developing mobile sites using the jQTouch framework – a combination of CSS, JavaScript, and HTML that produces an ‘iphone-esque’ experience. As a result of this I created a template ZSR library mobile site. I have posted a ‘how to’ in the ZSR library tech explore blog for writing a simple mobile ‘app’ for the ZSR library using the jQTouch platform, a JavaScript and CSS framework that enables quick, simple development of websites that behave and look a lot like native iPhone applications.

The mobile app was interesting but still lacked dynamic updating and flexibility. In order to push the idea a bit further I followed some tutorials on Django, a web development framework for creating dynamic web applications. You can read more about that experience on my blog. Django simplifies the webapp development process by off-loading complex tasks such as creating administration interfaces and connecting to and creating databases. Further it simplifies your application into models (your data structure) and views (how you want to retrieve and look at that data). The screenshot below shows a portion of the cataloging interface that required only a few lines of configuration code from me.

Putting these two platforms (mobile web apps and dynamic web development frameworks) together I was able to create a mobile web site that very closely mimicked an iOS app. It also was device independent (it worked just as well on Android, Windows, and Linux platforms), was easily managed through a web-admin interface and was easily extended through the addition server-based application code.

My take away from these experiences is that HTML based ‘apps’ are a good fit for academic needs. Being able to create the sites using existing frameworks makes them easy to manage and update and having built-in system administration tools provides non-technical users access to update the applications in real-time. Susan, Steve and I discussed how these features could be used and came up with some ideas for how this platform would impact the student learning experience. One example focused on using a simple course-shell developed in Django and jQTouch/HTML5. The application could 1) be used both on and off-line, 2) be updated by the instructor using an automatically created web-admin interface 3) provide students with media streaming and geo-location services and 4) include methods for students to create and share content with other students (uploaded pictures, observations & discussions).

The main direction of Steve, Susan and my investigation has been iPad use in learning environments. Through this investigation one of the challenging questions we have continued to ask is ‘but can’t you do that on a laptop?’ The example above points to a good opportunity to create a course app that is multi-platform but optimized for tablet/mobile use rather than for laptop/classroom use. The simplest functions work well on both devices (reading assignments, downloading files, browsing course content) but as my colleagues observed, the tablet allows you to do these things in non-traditional environments, enables the student to engage with new types of course material that rely on navigation or geo-location services and allows the student to complete their work without having to be worried about if they are currently online.