Quickstart your Android application development

Ever wondered what it takes to create an application that works on your Android device? Well there are two possible routes - one is to learn the tricks of the trade and second is to look out on Google and get caught in a medley of information that will do anything but confuse you more and more. You will hear words like Ant, Android SDK, FLEX, AIR, ADT etc that will frighten you in the first place.

Android is based on Java and many people will tell you that you need to know Java to be able to develop Android applications. But this is not true at all. Of course you can develop Android apps in Java and it is not the only way to develop an Android app. 

The first thing you need to know before getting involved in something new is to get to understand the underlying conceptual framework and to grasp the ABC of the thing. Once you get started in this the rest becomes quite easy. 

In this article we will look at the ABC of deploying a simple app on android device. You do not need to work on JAVA or use Java programming language. If you are familiar with Flash then this is more than enough. If you know some ActionScript then this is better. However, you need bear in mind that you need use ActionScript 3.0 for deployment on an Android device.

An Android application takes the form of an Android package with an extension (APK). An APK file is a package that can be opened with either Winzip or Winrar so that you can see what in. 

An APK file once deployed on an Android device will be recognised by the device as an Android installable application. You can install or uninstall the application in the normal way. 

Assuming you know Flash, here is what it takes to make it an Android app:

1. Open Adobe Flash, and make your simple Flash animation. You may or may not use Actionscript 3.0 in the application depending on the complexity of your application and the knowledge of Flash that you have. 
2. Publish your Flash file to SWF.
3. Convert your SWF file to an APK package using either an IDE (if you have the Flash extension called Air to Android) or you can do it from the command-line if you have a packagae called the Flex SDK.

Of course this is the big picture and to really achieve this you will need some technical elements to be defined, such as creating a digitallly signed certificate to enable the application to be compiled for the Android device. 

These details will follow in forthcoming blog posts.

Tackling Flash Player Security Issue

The flash player security settings is a headache for many developers who do not want users of their products to go through the ordeal of having to play with the security settings to allow a SWF object to ''communicate with an internet location'' especially when they are accessing the object locally (on hard drive, pendrive or a CD-ROM). The message will read like Flash is having to do some potentially unsafe operation and something is trying to connect to an internet location bla bla...

Users will then either have to edit the security settings to make the location from where they are accessing the SWF (hard drive, pendrive or a CD-ROM) a trusted location, or to access the adobe site and to change the settings from the panel provided on the Adobe site. If the security settings are not edited then buttons or actionsripts might not be able to run thereby creating usability problems in the applications.

(http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager04.html)

  

 If the product that is developed will later be hosted on the web, then users will not have the issue of trusted file settings. However if the product is to be deployed on CDROM and accessed via a browser (offline browsing) then it may experience issues.

We have found a more elegant solution than having the user to manually change settings. However we need to admit it is not the best one and not necessarily acceptable to everyone. It is rather strange. 

After searching a lot on the computer, we have that the Flash player has a folder on the computer where trusted file settings can be stored. If you go through to the 
c:\windows\system32 folder, there is a folder called Macromed and inside it a folder called Flash. This is the folder where the Flash player is installed. Now to make a particular location 'trusted' manually, there is a folder called FlashPlayerTrust in the folder Flash. If the folder does not exist create a folder called FlashPlayerTrust. Then insert a text file in that folder with the locations that you want to be termed as trusted. Let us assume that the file you create is named myTrust.txt and the content you want to trust is the whole of the C: drive, the file will contain only one line of text and it is 'c:'. This means all folders and subfolders in the c: drive will become trusted. Of course you can also specify only specific locations rather than the whole of a drive. To add other locations just press enter and write in the path in your text file. 

Now the issue is how to automate this process if you are packaging your product on a CD. The solution is to include the text file on your CD and write a batch file that will copy the text file (through an xcopy command for instance) from the CD to the  

 c:\windows\system32\macromed\flash\flashplayertrust folder when the CD is autorun. If you have a 64-bit windows 7 OS, you need copy to sysWOW64 folder instead of the system32 folder.

The problem that your batch file will now face is that you will get an access denied message because of permissions to write to the system32 folder. To achieve this, you will need use a professional  autorun software like autorunpro.exe and it will work fine.

Your autorun.inf file will be as follows:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Autorun]
; /s parameter no longer needed for version 1.2
open=AutorunPro.exe
[AutorunPro]
; Here are some sample uses for Autorunpro. It keeps processing Them in Run1..RunN order until it doesnt find one.
Run1=install.bat
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Now create your file supposedly called trustfile.txt 

The problem now with XCOPY is that if the directory FlashPlayerTrust does not exist, it will prompt the user whether it is a directory or a file. We do not want this to happen as we want the process to be as smooth as possible for the end user.

There is a trick to that. We use the parameter /I /Y but this will only work if there is more than 1 file being copied. 

So we create another file called trustfile2.txt.

When we use the XCOPY command, to specify both files we use the wildcard * after the word trust. So it will copy trustfile.txt and trustfile2.txt. In this way it will create the directory flashplayertrust without prompting the end-user to specify if its one or not.

Your batch file as follows (in this example we are using firefox portable):

install.bat 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

@echo off
xcopy /I /Y trust*.txt c:\windows\system32\macromed\flash\FlashPlayerTrust
xcopy /I /Y trust*.txt c:\windows\sysWOW64\macromed\flash\FlashPlayerTrust
cd firefoxportable
firefoxportable index.html

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The solution has worked and the flash player security message does not appear.

Is it necessary to monitor attendance in Universities?

Honestly, I do not even think its an issue. University students are adults and more and more we are enrolling students who are mature and are working professionals, and family heads etc. Yet in a University we might still find people arguing the importance to monitor attendance as if we are dealing with primary school infants (where attendance monitoring provide clues for broader social issues) and secondary school adolescents (where attendance monitoring is more to ensure that in this vulnerable age, those adolescents are safe and sound). That is all about it!

It is unreasonable to say in the 21st century, (i would even go as far as treating this absurd) that forcing a student to attend classes will maximise his chances of passing the exams. Personally if I take my own case when I was a student, if I have to agree with the belief that attendance make people pass, I will find myself in a situation where it will be more like ''fais ce que je dis mais ne fais pas ce que je fais!'' because as a University student in my undergraduate studies, I rarely attended classes and yet I passed! Afterall, why would I attend classes when all i had to do in them was to copy as fast as i can the slides which the lecturers had photocopied from books and which could easily have been distributed to students? I was wiser because I just took the notes of my friends, photocopied them and then learnt the same notes when I was in a better environment to learn!

At the same time when we think of the concept of distance education that exists for more than a century now, the concept of attendance is irrelevant. What is important is the type of pedagogical design, the way we design learning activities and get students to engage in them and most importantly is about how we empower students to become responsible of their own future. 


Look at the video below, and ask ourselves "why do we need to sit a class like in a compact farm to listen to the something of lesser quality than what can be disseminated through other media??"

When we get the lecture, interactive activities, and notes in abundance online, how will sitting in a classroom and engage in a mad race to copy faster than our peers help us to better pass the exams? May be Newton or Einstein would have been able to find a scientific explanation to that....... 
Of course the arguments above should not me mistaken as a critic for face-to-face meetings but its just absurd to take stock of the number of f2f meetings and directly relate that to pass or fail or the quality of teaching. Rather the focus should be on what is to be done to improve the quality of learning.

Inside Job - the best documentary film I watched in 2011 so far....

It talks of the financial crisis in general about all those thieves in Wall Street who enriched themselves by destroying the financial institutions they were themselves CEO and therefore making investors lose all their money....

But the most important part of all as highlighted in the documentary, was how financial institutions corrupted Economics Professors of renowned universities to make them write false reports, papers with fake results to justify the need to deregulate the financial sector and even after the crisis the corruption is continuing to make them write and take position against proposed reforms. 

Academics are receiving as much as 150000 USD to publish one paper..

When we think that we are asked to publish in those supposedly highly reputed journals to get promotion, where our work will be reviewed by possibly corrupt academics...........The same academics were supposed to have academic freedom and agents of free inquiry, but in reality the same people were members of administration boards of financial institutions...

Fun Learning for Kids - Reshaping Curriculum Elements....

The Mauritius educational system is currently undergoing a number of changes with the introduction of ICT as a major driver for educational reforms and to improve the current teaching and learning landscape. Schools in Mauritius are being equipped with interactive whiteboards and computers but the reality is that without the right pedagogical approach and the right type of content, the expected outcomes will never be achieved.

This article demonstrates a prototype story-telling cartoon that has the pedagogical objective to teach students of Standard III (age group 8-9 yrs) a simple lesson that plants need water and sunlight to grow. The original lesson is found in the students’ workbook where emphasis is laid on pictures and text. The original lesson has been converted into a story-telling script and implemented as an animated cartoon of about 5 minutes duration.

The research proposed in this project is inspired from the work of Dalacosta et al (2009) who used cartoon-styled application for the teaching of elementary science in Athens. Their target audience were students aged 10-11. Their research results provide evidence that the use of animated cartoons significantly increases the young students’ knowledge and understanding of specific science concepts, which are normally difficult to comprehend and often cause misconceptions to them.

However, Dalacosta et al. (2009) focused mainly on static cartoons and interactive animations for their research. In this project, the concept will be pushed further to include story-telling dynamic cartoons that will have a context and a scenario similar to a short movie. These will then be supplemented with learning games that will render the process similar to a recreational activity for the student, but which is in reality a learning activity taking place.

The research project in its broader sense therefore aims at the development of a set of pedagogical materials for the primary school curriculum using the cartoon-based story telling approach for students. The concepts of ‘Fun Learning’ will be explored as potential innovative teaching and learning methods that can bring about significant improvement in our educational system.

VCILT's Web TV

About a year ago, we launched a YouTube channel with a few videos of the Centre. It gradually evolved when the outcomes of the SIDECAP project started to take form as a series of interactive video lectures which were disseminated as Open Educational Resources. In parallel there were some discussions with the MCA about having educational programs on the MBC knowledge channel. WIth those discussions not proceeding any further with the MCA, we decided to explore easier and more straightforward means of disseminating content. 

Rather than going to create our own video streaming server which will be most of the time overloaded due to the permanent bandwidth issues that we have to face, we decided to go for the YouTube option. We started with the first course that was converted into interactive video lectures, CSE1010e and we established a playlist to link the videos together. Gradually we had started to put other course content in areas like system modelling, system security, project management. We have recently put a whole course on database design and development and one on Interaction Design on YouTube. Over the past years, the videos have attracted about 13000 views and we now have the possibility to upload longer length educational videos on YouTube. 13000 views is far from sufficient but we do hope that the momentum will be building up.

This is in line with our philosophy of promoting the use of Open Educational Resources for the benefit of education and the lambda learner. It all however depends on the human resource that we have to keep the initiative ongoing and to augment the quality of the material that is being disseminated.

The OERs available on our YouTube channel will form according to us the next generation of the concept of open education. Any one will be able to access the courses, go through them and ultimately come to us and take some form of assessment and get certified! (against a small administrative fee). 

to be continued....

Plenary Speech at the 18th International Conference on Learning

Training of In-Service Educators through Online Activity-based Learning

The speech described the concept of activity-based learning and how it is being implemented in online teacher training courses at the University of Mauritius. 

In 2001, for the University of Mauritius to catch the eLearning bandwagon, the Virtual Centre for Innovative Learning Technologies (VCILT) was created in bid to modernize the distance education concept by fully utilizing the possibilities offered by IT-enabled networked systems and the Internet. Since its establishment the centre has brought in some non-negligible innovations in the teaching and learning landscape. Inevitably, as any innovative practices, it has also brought its share of disruption in the traditional university setting, what we term as ‘’constructive disruption’’ especially with respect to the conception of pedagogy and educational practice in teacher training.

The February 2010 issue of the Commonwealth of Learning “Connections” magazine has a few sections fully dedicated to the teacher training issue. Incidentally the articles all adopt a highly critical perspective of current teacher training courses especially within developing COL countries. While most of those articles on the topic focus on the more general issue of using ODL for teacher training and capacity building, in the article “Time for Radical Change in Teacher Education”, Bob Moon, Professor at the Open University of the UK argues that it is time to implement new technologies in teacher training courses so as to focus on the continuous professional development of educators. The very essence of the article is the belief that “education and training should be an entitlement for all teachers at all stages in their careers” and that research has demonstrated that when “this entitlement is honored, learners achieve more and schools improve”. Adopting a very critical view of the so-called brick and mortar institutions for teacher training, Moon (2010) highlights “there is absolutely no way the ‘bricks and mortar’ institutions of teacher training created in the last century will be adequate for the 21^st century needs”.

The VCILT has always invested in efforts to bring about a change in mindset in the way teachers in Mauritius perceive education especially with respect to the information revolution that we witnessed in Mauritius from the year 2000 and up. 

A number of initiatives in the form of online workshops were undertaken to initiate teachers to new technologies and innovative ways of teaching and learning. Fully concurring with Bob Moon’s perspective the VCILT has always adopted a divergent, innovative and disruptive approach from the traditional ones in terms of capacity-building of teachers and educators. The top-up and Masters level programmes in Educational and Instructional technologies have been supplemented with an online continuous professional development programme for teachers on contemporary education issues and technologies from OERs obtained from the Open University of the UK.