Future Learningscapes

Yesterday we had another CloudBank presentation at the Future Learningscapes: a 21st Century Challenge e-learning conference at the University of Greenwich. Lyn did the talking this time, pointing out that like other technology trends before (e.g. multimedia) mobiles must find their niche in the larger learning landscape through applications that play to their specific strengths as personal, ubiquitous and mobile devices that are used in context.
As always attendees seemed to love the CloudBank concept and offered great feedback, which was even more appreciated as much of it came from language teachers and language learners.

Phones are here - woo hoo

It's been a long battle but here they are, neatly lined up and charging. Can't wait to see them used in the field with international students filling up the CloudBank content repository! It's going to be very interesting...

CloudBank Poster

The short-listed CloudBank poster for the the University's recent Research Showcase event. Click to download as print-quality PDF.

Nearly there

The picture of our Agile Wall clearly shows we are getting close to completion (of this phase at least :) Despite constantly adding new requirements based on feedback from our user sessions, all but two tickets have been completed. Not implemented are mobile alerts and content editing in the web interface, both of which are low-priority and will have to wait until the release version.

Research Seminar

Today we had a research seminar at the University of Brighton about CloudBank. As always when talking about the project, we had very positive feedback, offers for collaborations, and interesting new application ideas. It's a shame the project is nearly over with no follow-up funding agreed to develop it further. The project receives local, national and international attention, and a well-researched public version would be just a few months away.

CloudBank Research Seminar

Android XML parsing

CloudBank communicates with a REST server to read/write application data from/to the cloud. As our server speaks XML, we need to parse XML on the Android client. However, a quick look at the documentation reveals that Android has no less than three different XML parsers: the traditional DOM and SAX parsers plus the recently added XML Pull Parser, which promises to deliver high performance at a small memory footprint.

Great, this is exactly what we want: higher performance with less memory!

But does the promise hold up? Too lazy to set up my own performance test and confident that others have done that already, I dug up a recent article on Android XML parsing by Shane Conder. It describes a performance test for all three parsers with different data volumes, which surprisingly found the SAX parser to perform best on all three data sets.