Periodic Fable

This is a 2D barcode of the URL of the ELKS community.

Apparently these barcodes are all the range in Japan where people use their web-enabled mobile phones to read them and then surf to the URL. They are used, e.g., on a poster for a radio station to encourage people to listen, on the doors of public libraries to direct users to a page that shows opening hours, or on tutor’s offices to direct students to a page that shows opening hours.

As 100% of students have web-enabled mobile phones and data transfer is cheap, they can be used for all sorts of learning applications from voting on which of the videos shown in the lesson they preferred, to assessment quizzes, to sending a question randomly to one of the students in the class (of course – you could just point at one!).

Thanks to Keiso Katsura for introducing me to these tools in a seminar at Leicester University yesterday.