Spent some time today trying to set up my daughters Telstra ZTE USB MF626 modem on her new Macbook Pro 13 laptop.  NOt exactly easy and Im not sure Ive got the best fix, but its the only way I could get it to work.

1. I plugged it in and installed the software which appears on the disk image mounted after the USB modem is inserted. Telstra Turbo Connection Manager version M02
2. After restarting and plugging in the modem the software started up but couldnt detect the modem and the connect button remained greyed out.

   

3. In System Preferences > Network Settings, the modem wasnt even listed.
4. A search online indicated that for OS X Lion I needed to install the latest software from Telstra which included new drivers from ZTE (maybe 64bit??).
5. So I downloaded the new software from a link here – http://www.zte.com.au/telstra/faqs.htm
6. Then I used AppZapper to remove the previously installed software from Telstra which I installed at step 1.
7. Then I installed the new software and restarted.
8. After restarting I inserted the modem, the new software started up and the Macbook mounted the disk image which is installed on the USB modem by default, which I ignored.  But the new software failed also to detect the modem I had plugged in.
9. I ejected the disk image which is installed on the USB modem, then within about 5 seconds the new software detected the modem and I was able to connect.

I cant work out whats happening or causing this but the workaround seems to be ejecting that disk image before the USB modem is detected by the software.

Works now!

I read an interesting blog post this morning which shifted my thinking totally on mobile learning.  Ive always thought of mobile-learning or m-Learning as learning involving the mobile phone. Until now, when its like the lights were just turned on!

Donald Clark wrote about m-learning being learning that we do while on the move.  I love that definition.

For me at the moment Im doing a lot of learning while moving – podcasts and sermons are usually what I listen to while riding or running or travelling. They’re on an iPod though not on my mobile phone. My teenage kids learn what many of their friends are up to via mobile versions of The Facebook on their mobile phones – for them iPods are just for music!  Whenever I travel I see people using Kindles, iPods, phones (not making phone calls), books, documents….. all sorts of media.  Some of these folks are using that tool to enable them to learn something.

Im glad my mlearning definition was challenged – I think it’ll help me think broader than simply a mobile phone when it comes to developing learning experiences for people on the move.

For people living in isolated areas in some of the remotest locations in the world their learning is not much different to those in cities commuting or learning while we are on the move.

They have to contend with power issues, accessing learning material, require a mobile connection to the internet, have limits on data storage, and the learning material needs to be in a format they can access and interact with on a mobile device.

What’s mLearning for you?  Is it learning access and interactions with a mobile phone?  Something different?

After getting into a couple of situations where I was asked all about MAF (Mission Aviation Fellowship) I thought it would be really convenient to have resources on my phone which I could use to tell the MAF story.

I could use the phones browser to look up www.MAF.org, go to Youtube.com and search for some MAF related videos, maybe even use Google Maps to find the nearest MAF base.  But it would all be a bit fiddly and figured that I should try and make an app which makes all that easy.

I hadnt created any phone app before and havent done much programming apart from a handful of VB apps and some website development so it was a little daunting and there was a lot to learn and make sense of.

I found a site called Buzztouch which I could use to create the app that I had in mind to develop and using the features available set out to create “MAF Advocate” and get a tool into the hands of someone with a phone wanting to share what MAF is and does, with someone who wants to hear the story.

MAF Advocate in an Android version is available to download now from the Android Market.  This is the first version and is based on Buzztouch 1.4.  I have since been using Buzztouch 1.5 to develop the app and am working on iPad/iPhone and Android version using the upgraded development options, so more features are already available to me.

I ran into this issue when setting up my iPad 2.  I setup my email account as an IMAP account because I wanted it to sync from the mail server with my iPad and my Macbook.

I setup the account on the iPad which wasnt difficult but whenever I tried to delete an email I got the error message “cant move message to trash”.

To correct this I went into the mail settings again and checked under the Account settings > Advanced > Deleted Mailbox settings.

By default I think, it had selected “Trash on my iPad”, so I changed this to “Trash on the Server”.

Problem Solved……