Today, our friends at iPhone Atlas report that AT&T has introduced a new Text Accessibility Plan (TAP) for the iPhone developed with the help of representatives from the hearing and speech impaired community. The plan was developed for people who are deaf, hearing impaired or have another speech or hearing loss disability.

The cost of the iPhone only TAP is $40.00 per month, which pays for unlimited SMS messages, unlimited data usage (email and web) and Visual VoiceMail (which would have limited use for the hearing impaired). Voice calling is available at $.40 per minute on a pay-per-use basis. So phone calls can be placed in an emergency if needed.

Customers need to qualify for TAP by submitting an application to the program. Once the iPhone is activated the customer can call the AT&T National Center for Customers with Disabilities to learn more about the iPhone TAP program.

This type of plan will certainly be essential if iPhones are to be implemented as teaching and learning tools on college campuses.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project along with the National Commission on Writing for America’s Families, Schools and Colleges recently released findings from a study entitled “Writing,Technology, and Teens,” which involved 700 students aged 12 to 17 and their parents.

Among its most interesting discoveries, the study suggests that students see a distinction between the writing they do in school and the writing they do in their personal lives. While the vast majority of 12 to 17 year-olds (85 percent) engage in some form of electronic writing—IM, e-mail, blog posts, text messages, etc.—most (60 percent) don’t consider this actual writing.

Amanda Lenhart, senior research specialist at Pew and co-author of the report, asserts that “there is a raging national debate about the state of writing and how high-tech communication by teens might be affecting their ability to think and write. Those on both sides of the issue will see supporting data here. There is clearly a big gap in the minds of teenagers between the ‘real’ writing they do for school and the texts they compose for their friends. Yet, it is also clear that writing holds a central place in the lives of teens and in their vision about the skills they need for the future.”

Speaking of the significance of the report for educators, Richard Sterling, chair of the advisory board for the National Commission on Writing, states: “We think these findings point to a critical strategy question for all educators: How can we connect the enthusiasm of young people for informal, technology-based writing with classroom experiences that illuminate the power of [well organized], [well reasoned] writing?”

To learn more about the study and its implications or to download a PDF of the final report, be sure to check out T.H.E Journal’s full article.

Recently, Science Daily posted an article about a new image-recognition system designed specifically for mobile devices. This program, which was a regional winner in the European Satellite Navigation Competition sponsored by ESA’s Technology Transfer Program, is able to provide information about what you see when you see it.

Cleverly dubbed “the eye-Phone,” this system combines satellite navigation localization services, advanced object recognition and relevant information retrieved from the Internet to send real time preprocessed information on the selected object to your mobile phone. This novel use of satellite technology, created by Ernst Pechtl and Hans Geiger, uses Apollo, an artificial intelligence system that can carry out object recognition within images. Pechtl asserts that Apollo is “self-learning and after a short and very simple training session it can identify any object in the world.”

Pechtl goes on to suggest that the identified object “could be a building, a mountain, a tree, plant or a special event such as a local festival. The amount of information you receive depends on you, if you want to know more you just click the ‘more button’ and you trigger a more detailed search responding to your profile of interest. Applications include tourism, education, remote healthcare, security, science, etc.”

Pechtl and Geiger’s company, SuperWise Technologies, plans to team up with mobile phone operators, who would provide the eye-Phone functionality as an additional function for subscription. It will be partly located on the phone and partly in a central processing system of a cooperating image archives.

Science Daily reports that a prototype should be ready sometime in the middle of this year, and Pechtl expects that it will take another 12 to 18 months to work out deals with mobile phone operators, find partners and negotiate agreements with database information providers before the eye-Phone functionality can be offered to mobile phone users.

Campus Technology recently posted an excellent mLearning article by Ruth Reynard, which discusses the nature and effect of multiple connections in customized learning spaces. Reynard suggests that because they are connected wirelessly in any situation and for any reason, today’s students are “essentially nomads when it comes to their life ‘space.’”

Reynard asserts that within higher education, instructors are beginning to realize the impact of constant connectivity both positively and negatively in creating communities of learners within their courses. Students bring to the course an extensive network of information input, peer connections, and the potential of a wider scope of application than what has been the case until now.

On the negative side, Reynard suggest that instructors are facing the unprecedented challenge of “managing” not only the multitasking of the students but their insistence upon continual connectivity even when participating in a physical learning space with an instructor and other physical peers around them. Some instructors have seen this as something to be controlled through disabling access for the duration of the class while others are trying to integrate this reality into the learning environments.

Ultimately, Reynard asserts that whether you choose as a professor to exclude the connectivity from your classroom or to include it, there exits the potential of creating learning communities with broader impact than ever before possible, enhancing any course of study or academic field.

Be sure to check out Reynard’s full article in Campus Technology.

Many people subscribe to RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to keep up with the latest news, and now iPhone users can check their favorite RSS feeds natively on the device by way of Google Reader.

The native iPhone Google Reader is in beta right now, but—according to iPhone Buzz—the app is looking very promising. Conveniently, when you set up the reader, you don’t have to manually re-subscribe to your feeds or import an opml file. All you have to do is enter your Google Reader user name and password, and you’re in. All your feeds are there and are synced back to Google Reader, so when you read an article on your iPhone, Google Reader reflects it.

This is a pretty cool application, and it will be exciting to see what features it brings when it comes out of beta. To get Feeds on Installer, you will need to add this source:

http://424f.com/iphone/repository

After you have added this source, Feeds will show up under the Network category.

Evolution Robotics in partnership with Bandai Networks Co. Ltd. recently announced a new ‘Visual Pattern Recognition (ViPR)’ software that allows you to take a picture of an object and email it to a ViPR server to receive information about it, including links to iTunes (for music), YouTube (for video), and the web. The software—which will be offered on the new Spring ‘08 line of KDDI corporation camera phones—identifies distinct and recognizable areas in the select image and compares them to a remote database server, which houses a catalogue of existing pattern specimens.

ViPR is able to learn new objects and images without the need for any special encoding, such as barcodes or watermarks, so that users can take new pictures of objects, images, videos or even locations and tag them with links and content to expand the database. User-generated content will then show up in the results returned to other users who take similar pictures, creating an extensive world-wide visual database for communities to develop and access.

Fortunately, ViPR reportedly performs well on low cost components such as the cameras used on most mobile phones today, even when lighting and other visual conditions are poor. According to iPhone Buzz, Evolution Robotics claims an 80-100% success rate for visual searches.

Here is a pretty nifty demonstration of Evolution Robotics’ visual search technology running on Apple’s iPhone:

Macworld reports that Evolution Robotics is developing a native iPhone application, which they say is due out in June. Because Apple’s iTunes media store is already equipped for wireless purchases and downloads and has a large number of preview tracks and artist information, ViPR and the iPHone would seem an ideal match.

It is not hard to imagine how this software might be used in an academic setting for library searches, building/landmark identification, textbook purchasing, etc.

Our friends at TUAW.com recently posted a handy recommendation for a new tutorial written by Rachel Greenham called ‘Subversion for Writers.’ As you may know, the popular version control system, Subversion, allows you to work collaboratively with a group of people on the same files (codes) without fear of overwriting their work. Subversion tracks all the changes made to those files along with who made them, and allows you to rollback changes or branch-off into different directions without having to worry about wrecking the entire project.

Greenham’s tutorial walks you through Subversion, explaining how to install it on your Mac (if you’re running Leopard it is already installed), how to use some apps to make interaction with Subversion easier, and how to track your changes.

TUAW cautions that Subversion is not for everyone. They suggest that if you aren’t comfortable with the Terminal you should steer clear of it, and if you don’t revise the same document over and over again you’ll have no need for it.

Last week, Hanwang.com.cn announced a new unofficial third-party application designed for iPhone handwriting recognition and conversion into typed text. The “HWPen,” was developed to allow Chinese character input on the iPhone, but works equally well with Latin characters.

As we’ve suggested in previous posts, to take advantage of the iPhone’s tremendous potential as an educational tool, students and teachers must be able to quickly and efficiently share ideas via digital discourse, which means (or meant) mastering the device’s relatively small touch-screen type pad. Perhaps the HWPen will provide a handy alternative for speedier digital communication

In order to install the HWPen, you must enable third-party apps on the iPhone, then use Installer.app to add the source: iphonecake.com/src/all.

For detailed installation instructions, visit our friends at iPhone Atlas.

As the student media organizations at ACU mull over how to serve 1000 iPod touch/iPhone-enabled students with campus news when they arrive this fall, it may be informative to look at what some professional outfits are doing with their handheld and mobile sites. Below are links for news from a wide variety of sources, each of which have developed touch-practical interfaces for this new generation of devices.

Some of these sites are content with just a list of the top stories appearing on their Web site, while others have engineered some pretty snazzy pulldown screens and graphics that really help on a handheld. If nothing else, the sites on this list offer a helpful set of examples for how a variety of news organizations are conceiving of touch-ready interfaces — and that may prove handy for you as you consider interfaces for your own projects.

And though it’s a small thing, the best part about this may be the custom icons many of these sites sport. Now the New York Times and Fox News can sit side-by-side in non-partisan solidarity on your home screen for easy access, each with an attractive button. Unfortunately, prettier icons don’t equal better news…

Just to help you get started, here’s a roundup of some of the more popular iPhone-formatted news sites, with data on which sites feature true mobile interfaces (as opposed to no-frills text lists — often used with OMA/WAP interfaces) and whether they automatically recognize when viewers are using iPhones or iPod touches (the “device meta-tag”):

CBS News (mostly AP text stories)
Mobile interface: yes
Device meta-tag: yes
Customized icon: yes

CBS News video (companion video site for mobile CBS News; videos are in 3gp format — technology by Transpera)
Mobile interface: no (OMA/WAP)
Device meta-tag: no
Customized icon: yes

Chicago Sun Times (headline browser with content links to regular site)
Mobile interface: yes
Device meta-tag: yes
Customized icon: yes

The Chicago Tribune
Mobile interface: yes
Device meta-tag: yes
Customized icon: yes

(more…)

As you know (especially if you frequent this particular blog) a number of universities are currently engaged in projects to test the viability of the iPhone as a tool for teaching and learning, and as you may suspect, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is among that group.

In collaboration with other departments, MIT’s IS&T formed an iPhone Evaluation Team to test various aspects of the iPhone within MIT’s infrastructure. The evaluation included email, calendar, contacts, certificates, web browsing, and other features classified as essential to MIT mobile-device users. The project also investigated ways to make the iPhone work with these features and document the findings.

The Team’s report asserts (not surprisingly) that the “iPhone contains a number of breakthrough technologies that will interest many users at MIT. It includes a number of revolutionary features that might benefit MIT mobile device users. These include the ‘full’ web browsing capability, robust email client, mult-touch user interface, etc.”

In addition to an extensive “iPhone Evaluation Project Notebook,” MIT’s Team has constructed several Mobile Web UI Mockups. These resources are certainly worth checking out if you’re interested.