from jburston <[log in to unmask]>

Dear Colleagues,

I am writing to see what suggestions you might provide to support the archiving and management of text messages (SMS) used for language teaching. The scenario I have in mind is for students to use SMS on their mobile phones to collect and share data for a foreign language learning task.  For example, a small group of students (2-3) could have as a task to select a gift for their best friend.They would have a fixed budget and would have to shop around to find something appropriate they could afford. They would text each other in the foreign language to describe what they find, the cost, and negotiate the final selection of the best choice. Eventually, this might also be supplemented with MMS; but initially only text messages would be involved. Each task could generate 20 or more messages (i.e., 6-7 per student group member).

Students would need to work with these messages later (to correct any language errors and reuse the text in a follow-up assignment) and the instructor would also need to have a copy of everything for monitoring and assessment purposes. So the technical question is: how, regardless of the particular kind of mobile phone that is used, can SMS be archived to a central location for later retrieval to a PC so it can then be made available to students and instructors?

Obviously, students could include an instructor in any message sent to the project group and everyone would thus have a copy of the discussions that took place. However, this would not get the text messages off the phones and onto a PC so they could be re-edited. An instructor would also need some kind of text management system to organize all these messages by groups and individual students.  Checking on the Web, I have found a number of free/cheap SMS backup/extraction programs, but these are all platform dependent (i.e., Apple, Android, Windows, Nokia, etc.) and require the individual user to do the backup/extraction to a PC. The solution I am hoping to find would avoid the operating platform problem by sending a copy of all messages to a central server location in the first place, with message management facilities, from which an instructor could extract the compiled texts and send them on to students via email or a virtual learning environment system like Blackboard or Moodle. Do such systems exist? If so, how costly are they? Can they reside on a local server or be hosted somewhere else? If there isn’t already something off-the shelf, what alternatives might there be?  With thanks in advance for your bright ideas,

 Jack Burston 


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