Combined Mobile Answers
First of all, I just want to say thanks to the mobile team as you have pulled together a wealth of information on the subject of m-Learning. It’s impossible for me to get through all of the content, by this I mean following and reviewing all of the linked in information, so I’m glad it’s getting published to the Navigator so I can come back to it post-MET and review the links.
All the discussions about mobile learning made me think of trying to learn other languages which I have been trying to do for years, unsuccessfully I might add, using mobile devices. This includes the CD player in my car. I have bought language learning CDs for my car from French, to Japanese, to Spanish. I haven’t been successful at any of them. I wonder if it’s because when I try to learn on the go that I’m not stopping and focussing on the learning but rather trying to learn through some type of osmosis. I guess then this means that we need interactivity with our mobiles or it will just become more background noise on our daily commute.
I did a mobile application review of the Skill Pill website and demos. I didn’t go as far as purchasing the $4.99 app because I had seen enough on the demos and going by that and the description new that it wouldn’t be worth the time or the money. Skill Pill looks like it focusses on redesigning traditional format to fit the display screen of the mobile application. Actually, this is pretty much what they market themselves as, they say that they will animate and do voice over but the traditional content stays the same. This is not an effective use of the mobile technology. It looks like the company is more focussed on selling consulting services which aren’t well positioned if they cannot even demonstrate how they would take advantage of the affordances of the devices. The Pocket Guru, available at the app store, uses the motion sensor of the Iphone, true enough, but it is just to generate random content. I liken this to having your iPhone serve up the Dilbert cartoon of the day. It is enough to keep one amused on a dreary commute but not much more. I had high hopes when I read the name ‘pocket guru’ but unlike Siri, a true pocket guru, serving up just in time information directly applicable to the question asked, this application looks like it is just a shake and serve way to serve up static content.
If I were to make a change in order to adopt m-learning it would be to have more apps developed to actually take advantage of the affordances that the technologies offer rather than just repackaging traditional static content. It looks like, on the business side anyway, many mLearning companies are just reformatting the display as if that is all there is to do. I think the one thing that would need to change for mLearning to be successful in the workplace is the fundamental development platform. It’s just not easy enough for business course developers to develop for yet. Until this underlying critical component is addressed it will remain a costly undertaking to develop business applications and there probably won’t be a critical mass adoption until this changes.
I’m interested in the potential interactivity of m-learning so I decided to take the development testing a little further and went to Lynda.com, a software training site, to see if they had a course so that I could check out how challenging it would be, and sure enough they did.
I spent a few hours working through the course “Create an Interactive Map with jQuery and Dreamweaver” the course format is the typical format of published videos, but I did learn that developing for multiple devices shouldn’t be that difficult. I didn’t get everything perfect when I did the course but I went ahead and published the final project from the course exercise files here.
I could successfully view and interact with this content on all my devices, the Iphone, Ipad, and my laptop. This is the type of design that is needed before we start seeing good m-learning content developed, but the learning curve is still pretty steep so I think it will be a while yet before this really takes off. Course designers should not have to be concerned about all the technicalities of publishing to multiple devices, the software development platform should be doing this for them.
Personally, I am setup pretty well in the device department but although I have an Iphone and Ipad I am already stale dated because I don’t have 3G or video on my Ipad and I don’t have Siri. I think both of these could offer a lot of possibilities for business applications from video role plays to e-Mentoring that taps into the Siri AI… if that ever becomes possible. I look forward to the possibilities of m-learning as the affordances are utilized to their fullest extent in future applications.
David William Price 12:07 pm on November 18, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Thanks for the comprehensive post.
As for learning languages, I share your pain. I think we often try to do too much and we stay at a very superficial level. My own efforts to learn Japanese have not made me a speaker. The issue is I learned a lot of vocabulary (although a lot of it was highly esoteric, a bad design decision!) but I didn’t practice it in authentic contexts. A proper mobile resource might help scaffold me before and during conversations… beyond a simple phrase book.
Corporate is late to the party with mobile. My own talks with a multinational about their mobile strategy show that it is very much in progress and there are few mature service providers available who can scale solutions on a global basis. Content is focused on performance support, meaning it’s highly domain-specific. Content can also be highly culture-specific given that major corporations have distinctive cultures. This means their content is pretty much beyond our reach… it’s designed in house for in house use. The multinational I spoke with however indicated they are focusing on providing performance support and knowledge refreshment for use in taxis and waiting rooms… when professionals are just about to meet clients and solve problems or explain complex regulations or other requirements.
I wouldn’t worry to much about being stale-dated. Corporate focuses on a chosen lowest-common denominator to ensure they will work over a broad set of devices. Churn in hardware and operating systems updates doesn’t help corporate sales… it drives their IT departments crazy– how can they support everything? It seems the idea of buying everyone a device may be dated… employees have their own devices and want to use them.
Very cool that you tried development! No Canadian cities??????
Julie S 2:56 pm on November 18, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Hi David,
I think you are right about the language learning in an authentic setting and the mobile application could help a lot – if designed well. I went to Japan for two weeks with my Japanese friend and her family and I was speechless for most of the time because I felt pretty overwhelmed. I would have loved to have a mobile app to help decipher phrases. Even being able to punch in the menu items would have helped so my friend didn’t have to order for me most of the time.
I agree about the content problems in the corporation and my venture project for this course has been focused on researching possible approaches to the challenge. Particularly the metadata which is needed to expose the company specific content in order to take advanatage of it in e-learning applications. I think that the web has really taken off with the concept of folksonomy and something like this is needed to replace the metadata management platform in place in the corporate world. This would mean getting the employees involved in update and maintenance where now there is currently mostly corporate control to ensure standards and accuracy. Which you have to wonder, why bother if there is not content or if the content is so out of date because the limited resources can’t keep up.
Very good point about not needing to worry about the stale datedness of my devices with respect to the corporate enviornment. You are exactly right. Corporate IT hates change and they can’t possibly keep up with the demands of such rapid change.
As for the development – You’re right! No Canadaian cities – these are the training files so you can tell it’s a U.S. software training company! I am using it as a base for my demo as part of my venture program that won’t have anything to do with geography 🙂