Yesterday, I got a chance to sit in on a webinar hosted by David Metcalf of Mlearning: Mobile Learning And Performance in the Palm of Your Hand and Blended E-learning fame. Overall it was a decent look into the “only if” world of mLearning in North American Higher Ed by showing some examples from corporate and military as well as from just about any other part of the world that has a better wireless infrastructure and rates for service that don’t make the use of this technology in schools restrictive. He lost some points for having dark blue text on a purple background on on slide and jumping around many non connected ideas. But here is the take home message that I got.
85% of students bring a cell phone of some sort to campus (mobilecampus), of those maybe only 30% have enabled features other than voice (though I’m thinking that there is a far greater portion have enabled at least SMS). At the current CTIA Wireless convention, one of the issues that has been brought up is the cost of service, and with any luck, that will go down. In terms of using these devices for education, one has to think about ways of using the device for more than it’s screen – so with the camera, with voice or with SMS. You need to have some manner of support from a provider or have access in some manner to a SMS/CCS server (Short Message Service/Collect, Convert and Send). In Europe, there are a couple of projects running, MUSIS and AMULETS, both are getting help with costs from service providers.
Many of the examples that David gave for education were more akin to orienteering than anything that was truly revolutionary, but the key to them all was that the phone was a tool that would allow for context specific information as well as being a tool that would allow for the recording of basic data. Examples of these include Mystery in the Museum that has also seen involvement from Henry Jenkins and Micheal Epstine. In terms of what this means for a type of teaching, it’s using an augmented reality game. The ability to get information on demand at any location (via ubiquitous computing) is the “augmentation” and the reality is being anywhere but in the classroom to learn about the world. One can even connect the the virtual world of Second Life via Sloodle. These are all examples of not being bound to the screen of the device to deliver the majority of the information. The screen can provide prompts and the phone itself can (in a very retro way) deliver information via audio. The theory behind the use of these devices that can provide “reinforcement on demand” comes in part from the work of Will Thalheimer and his explorations of workplace learning.
These are encouraging starts to the use of a tool that education seems to be ignoring in North America – there are over one billion handsets sold every year and they are getting increasingly sophisticated and out pacing in terms of volume of units the number of computers. But if we are so slow getting on with computers in education, I think we’ll be on Mars before we get mLearning into the early adopter stage in education. I sure hope it’s not going to take that long.
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