Week 1: Mobility Perspectives

I began my career as an astronomer, and was once Director of UBC’s Astronomical and Geophysical Observatories. When I think about “mobile and open learning” I am reminded of ‘cannibal galaxies’: the fact that most large galaxies are so because they have gradually gravitationally consumed smaller nearby galaxies, to the point that nobody looking from the outside could see any obvious evidence of the consumed galaxies. Our Milky Way galaxy has consumed others, and will likely consume the beautiful nearby Andromeda Galaxy (long after we’re dead!).

Both open and mobile learning are huge and nebulous, like galaxies, and they are young (lots of star formation), and there is so much overlap between their potentials that it seems certain that they will eventually merge – that they will consume each other.  Which one is the cannibal?  Not that it matters, but I would say it is mobile learning.  Open learning existed before mobile learning, but it is mobile that is accelerating and transforming everything about open.

So be careful.  In this course I have mostly, and too often, contracted the two and speak of “mobile learning” as if the merger were already done.  It certainly isn’t.  I will welcome every challenge to the fact or inevitability of that merger: please don’t hesitate to be the voice for “open learning”.

Good “experience design” in the mobile digital world is about setting a stage rather than writing a script. Its about giving user-actors just enough direction to author meaning for themselves.

For example, electronic games employ experience design, as do immersive worlds. However, all kinds of non-digital sectors also employ ‘experiential marketing’ tactics to seduce people with opportunities for self-definition. Humanity is addicted to identity-fulfillment: we are experience junkies craving meaningfulness in a world where most of us feel that traditional social and cultural sources of identity have become significantly fragmented.

The web didn’t take long to learn this. The Internet was first about information (a giant brochure rack), then about interaction (click to watch something happen), and is now about participation (the “social web” where value is generated primarily by users). It is addictive because participation breeds identity. But is it really “social” when no other real people are tangibly nearby?

Stepping way back, you could cynically observe that the last 600 years of humanity’s major media have been increasingly asocial. The invention of the printing press took storytelling off the streets, reducing it from a communal event to an isolated activity. Then the invention of film took us off the streets again, scores at a time, to put us in dark places where we don’t talk to one another while the media plays. And radio and TV did the same thing in our living rooms, stifling family dynamics with attention-demanding media. And most recently the web isolated us further into bedrooms and offices, as solitary media consumers, even as we pretend at being ‘social’ online.

There’s no conspiracy here: it is simply that the technologies underlying our major media have had inherent social limitations. That’s one reason why mobile media are so special: they can spill out into our streets to serve the valuable purpose of reconnecting people & revitalizing communities in tangible and authentic ways. It is the first digital medium with “real” social potential. This is the vision behind the collaborative innovation program your instructor launched in 2004 called the Mobile MUSE Network (MUSE being an acronym for “Media-rich Urban Shared Experience”) – pioneering new forms of social interaction, cultural expression & community development involving mobile media.

The big challenge is our fallow ability at experience design. For centuries our major media have domesticated our imaginations: we think in terms of monolithic linear narratives, of the ‘closed’ story. That’s why mobile devices can also be deeply asocial when the media they serve, derived from content created for their sibling technologies, are also closed. So how can we learn to design open-ended, participatory, socially-engaged, real-world adventures staged via mobile media? It isn’t a creative Everest. Good teachers have been doing it forever – in their classrooms, without digital media. You’ve heard of the “flipped classroom”, we just need to flip far beyond classroom walls…

Do you feel naked, adrift or lost without your mobile phone? This is another facet of what makes mobility distinctively special: our smartphones have become more intimate to us than our best friends, even our lovers. While we’re quite happy to leave our televisions, desktops, laptops and even tablets behind on many activities, we’re less comfortable about ever being without our smartphones. And unlike other essential objects such as keys, wallets and purses, our relationship with our smartphone is about being connected, about presence management, about identity. In other words, more than a best friend, our devices are becoming extensions of ourselves.  A past 523 student termed it the “phantom mobile”, as existing without your device is becoming literally indistinguishable in your brain from having lost a limb.

From an education perspective this special relationship is significant in numerous ways. First, learning happens across a continuum of thought and experience, so the ever-present availability of this tool makes it immediately most ‘handy’ to the learning purpose. Second, in an emerging era of cloud data and visual analytics this device is the best positioned to gather data from all sources in order to enable the personalized mirrors and portraits of a well-supported learning experience. Third, individuals are highly unlikely to lend (or permit shared use of) their device, enabling simpler and more flexible ‘source validation’ processes. Fourth, as this is such an intimate tool, individuals are more inclined to ‘be themselves’ (and any of their complementary selves, depending on the audience) while using it, channeling honest and authentic expression more reliably than in a real-world conversation. Further nuances of this talisman-like relationship are still evolving, emerging and looking to be understood. The caution for educators and experience designers is not to abuse the special relationship: people are more offended about spam, as well as clumsy, unwanted or disrespectful connections, occurring on their mobile devices than with any other medium.

The phrase “Content Rules!” communicates a truism that, no matter what the medium or flashy presentation, the power of a good story counts most. With mobility there’s much more to that story.

An amazingly special thing about mobile media is that, unlike any other digital medium, a great story can been woven tightly into the fabric of my daily existence. This is “context”. Traditional stories and media don’t care about me. Within a context-aware medium an experience designer can entwine a narrative together with ‘where I’m at’ in terms of identity (e.g. personality, preferences), place (physical locations, virtual locations, people I’m with, people I’m connected to, bystanders, politics, time), community (friends, family, colleagues, services), and purpose (work, learning, recreation, entertainment, shopping, commuting).

You’ve heard of ‘adaptive learning’ (learning software that changes directions based on every individual learner’s actions)? Context-aware media can take adaptation to a much deeper level of personal engagement. Another way to think about context is that other media have never been able to ‘touch down’ – without contexts they can only offer essentially identical experiences to everyone. It’s as though traditional media have been autistic – unable to discern or respond to the social motivations of the people around them.

Context rocks!

The entertainment industry is currently battling the proliferation of media channels and types with a “storyworlds” strategy whereby they deliberately and creatively embed different parts of a story property into magazines, books, movies, comics, retail, web, etc, all at the same time in order to have a much better chance of touching a broadly fragmented and distributed audience, and then drawing them into a primary medium, such as television, where they hope to make money.

Now think of all the media in a typical learner’s world, and imagine where they naturally converge. Where will a person’s media nexus be? Another very special aspect of the mobile medium is that it will inevitably be at that convergence point, if it isn’t already. It is therefore a brilliant place to focus an educational strategy.

A further way to frame the storyworlds argument is in terms of the future of work. The “office” and “cubicle” were originally designed to optimize productivity through proximity to the information, tools and communications required for efficient work. The office and cubicle are essentially obsolete now; they represent expensive overhead as the world transitions to a global knowledge economy, and continues to reinvent itself following the recent pandemic. Mobile devices are once again the inevitable best solution for the ‘transclusivity’ (the instant, seamless meshing and augmentation of all dimensions of digital information streams and communications) required for effective knowledge work. It isn’t that face-to-face social engagement isn’t also increasingly essential for successful work, only that with mobile media, as in “The Social Narrative” discussion above, the effectiveness of social engagement can be significantly enhanced as well. So mobile education is special once again because of the workplace advantage and readiness it can offer learners.

A hot topic in global computing is the “Internet of Things” (IoT), which seeks to understand our part of an emerging conversation between literally trillions of inanimate objects as everything from fire hydrants to refrigerators get connected to the web over the next few years. Transpose this thought onto the concept that “it takes a community to raise a child”. Education was considered a vibrant three-way partnership between community, school and home, yet in recent times schools have suffered as the pressures on homes and communities have made them less attentive to the partnership. With mobile devices acting in a very special way as passports, field guides and personal LMSs, we can expect that objects and organizations will be able to participate more readily in an Internet of Educational Things.

Virtual Reality (VR) is when you put on goggles to become totally immersed in an artificially rendered reality of some kind.  Given that you’re not actually in motion, and might trip over something and kill yourself if you were, a purist might say that this can’t ever be “mobile learning”, perhaps hoping that it must involve breaking out beyond the walls of the classroom to connect with the real world in some authentic way.

The favoured counterpart is Augmented Reality (AR), now with glasses, where real world experiences can be overlaid with virtual enhancements.  You might still trip and hurt yourself, but at least you’re out and moving around.

VR enthusiasts would claim that VR isn’t just about vision – we’ll be able to hook up input devices for all of our senses so that eventually we wouldn’t be able to distinguish real from rendered (“The Matrix” offered a dystopian version of this a couple of decades ago).  Could this then be exemplary of mobile learning?

Then how about Mixed Reality (MR), which is VR augmented with piped-in aspects of the live, real world?  You’re still wearing goggles, but you could engage with, and have effect upon, the real world (a dystopian example here might be military drone pilots, safely away from the action while observing and firing upon their targets).  Could this be mobile learning?

And VR/AR/MR is only one dimension of mobile learning.

My point is that “Mobile Learning” does not have an absolute definition: it is emergent on the one hand, and on the other it means different things to different people.  For this course I’ve tried to create a temporary definition to guide our studies (example: “Exemplary Mobile Learning is any learning experience supported by wireless networks and mobile devices that is unambiguously superior to an equivalent learning experience available on fixed devices and wired networks”), but I haven’t composed one that I’m totally happy with.  And this one doesn’t include sufficient appreciation of “open” learning. If anyone wishes to offer a useful definition, or wants to take on the authorship of one as a project in this course, I’ll be delighted.

Given that this course is about the scholarship of what is exemplary in mobile learning, you will only be successful if you’re constantly mindful of, and carefully articulate about, what you mean by “mobile learning”, and by “exemplary”.

There are now more mobile phones on the planet than people.  Smart phones are becoming more essential to trending human existence than computers, televisions, cars and even homes. This makes mobile devices remarkably special. Two decades ago educators began to imagine that elearning would become truly transformative when every learner had at least one single connected device of their own. A smart phone is hardly a perfect learning device (could it ever be “perfect”?), but within a Bring Your Own Device universe it may be the best threshold upon which education systems can begin to manage digital divides, total cost of ownership (TCO) and other infrastructure impediments to learning.

Not to worry if you’ve never encountered the term “tribology”.   You might guess it refers to “the science of human tribes”, which is on target with the point I’m about to make.  But actually it is “the science of friction”, which curiously is even more relevant to my point.

Allow me to set this stage a little further.  Ronald Coase won the 1991 Nobel Prize in Economics for explaining why corporations exist.  The basic idea is that completely free markets are slowed down by the multiple transaction costs that occur between two individuals doing commerce, such as haggling over price, ensuring supply, confirming quality, resolving disputes, etc. Corporations exist to reduce such “friction” by pre-negotiating a majority of these transactions on a massive scale.  They make getting the things we want faster, easier and cheaper than we could on our own by internalizing the friction – it doesn’t disappear, they’ve just hired lots of people, designed complex systems, and built large organizations to remove friction from our path.

To put it another way, corporations embody friction.  That’s why they are so ripe for disruption – so endangered – by new corporations that manage friction more efficiently.  Great examples in the modern world are companies like Uber and Airbnb, which break out of the complexity boxes of their industries.  They reduce friction much better with fewer people, less systems, and smaller organizations.  How?  Two primary strategies, both on even more massive scales.  First, they employ “big data” globally as a lubricant (more on this later).  Second – and remember those two individuals attempting to do commerce? – they employ mobile technologies to enable instant, seamless ‘handshake’ transactions between buyers and sellers, anywhere and anytime.  Incumbent corporations will fight hard to survive, but in the long run they can’t if they end up being – relatively speaking – a drag on your dreams.  The simple truth is that the device in your hand is reinventing global commerce.

Now transpose this entire argument onto education.   Universities and schools exist to reduce the friction of learning.   They are massive, complex organizations, employing so many people that the joke too often is that they really exist to employ teachers.    And yes, schools embody friction – no educator would pretend they aren’t burned by the constant rubbing.  For me, this is the raw, exciting confluence of mobile, social, flexible and open learning – it is about more than breaking out of the limitations of the classroom, it is about breaking out of the complexity box of the entire education industry.   It is about the opportunity of placing the full potential of knowledge in the hand of every learner.  This is what 523 invites you to explore.

From my humble perspective, data and mobility will inevitably reinvent learning.  They are an irresistable force just beginning to exert itself on the seemingly immovable edifice of education. It will be slower than with commerce because education has never been a free market, but it will prevail because of “pull”, because the world and individuals everywhere have an enormous, growing, and dire need for learning.  Our current systems are a relative drag on their dreams.  So we could channel our best King Canute and command the waves to stop, or we could do our best to understand both the perils and benefits of reinvention, and do our best to imagine our role and responsibility in ensuring that learning does better than thrive in the process.  I believe this is possible, and offer this as our mission over the coming weeks.