Ok, hang on ’cause this is going to be a dozy of a walk through my brain on mLearning, small chunk content and reading all churned up through what was the most annoying day of the year that came on me yesterday.
As I started the day, I was getting ready to update my Bold to the newest version of RIM’s official release for Rogers… not Roger’s official release of the BB 4.6 OS. Confused? So apparently was one of the CSRs who I called into for help after the first try at updating my device bricked my phone with a “507 No OS” error. Apparently this can be caused by having more than one handset version installed on the updating system. Lucky for me the solution was fairly simple as I knew where the temp files were all going to land so I was able to recover from the automatic backup that the process does after simply doing an “Add/Remove” from my desktop manager. So this got me thinking – if smartphones are going to take off anywhere, to say nothing of classrooms, would it not be nice if the hardware people and the network people agreed on what was “official”? But beyond that, there needs to be a way to ensure that updates can be done easily by lay people. Sure, enterprise has systems that will remotely update and otherwise maintain handhelds, but the average joe (six pack/wine box or otherwise) doesn’t have this available to them – or do they? This may be the one advantage that Google and Apple have as they seem to have as they are newcomers to the mobile market and don’t have any “legacy controls” imposed on them by the networks – something that I would have thought RIM would have been able to break free of by now. But moving on from there, I kept thinking about how, if a school got past the niceties of updates, how would they make use of mLearning for their students?
Well it would likely be expensive to set up their own CSC (common short code) and content server system, so they would likely defer to what was “publiclly” available. Making resources for Google or other SMS accessible services seems to be a much more managable task. But then, if they go this way, they land in the same puddle that sees online content move and shift (even for this post, I’ve linked to a Google Cache version of a page) or even evaporate, and they are again tied to the wireless providers (a theme?) who may all of the sudden decide to up the delivery rates for mobile terminated messages like Verizon has suggested (and if history is any teacher, suggests that other providers will also do).
Believing that there is indeed some good in the world (hard after being attacked – rammed from behind – by another driver last night), one would hope that for the suggestion makes it no further than a suggestion on the board room table, or if it does arrive it is only for the services that you have to pay to send to first. This way Google’s services could remain free (and you know Google can’t really afford to pay anyway ;)) and schools (and others) could continue to get to the information that they want and or need (or think that they want/need). This idea cut through the haze of yesterday to clarify itself somewhat as a thought that mLearning might best be characterized not by the device that facilitates it, but rather by the types and timing of questions and answers that can be expected by a competent student. Such a student would be able to quickly identify the type of question that they would need to ask and then be able to ask a service to deliver a response that fills in the knowledge gap in the fewest attempts. For example – you are on a field trip and a student falls and is injured, what without escalating to 911, what is the best way to deal with what happened? Call information (411) for a telehealth line and then talk to the nurse to get through how to treat the injury. This might be trivial, but this is the sort of thing that I think mLearning will be about – it will be on site learning that is very contextual, it may/should be based on the idea that there are other people who know the answers can deliver information better than static content delivered without context or a filter as is often the case with regular eLearning resources. These regular eLearning resources, delivered over broadband, are certainly effective as students can “carpet bomb” searches to find what they believe to be an answer. Eventually over 3/4G networks, handsets may allow the same manner of “carpet bombing searches”, but until that day the short and to-the-point question and answer will likely rule the roost on mobile, Google certainly hopes it will be.
But wait – when you drop your penny into the big G, it isn’t a person that replies, it is a machine – so what is with the idea that I started with about a person being able to answer? Well that leaves us to the now increasingly spotlighted microblogging services like Twitter. Knocked for not having a “grand narrative”, one can look at services like Twitter as providing a direct link to an expert, or within a few friends link to one directly. Or, if you just want to “listen” to the twittering of a mass of interested individuals, you can see a “grand narrative” emerge from the myriad of points ala pointillism. This seems to have certainly been happening with the Canadian and US elections. A question gets dropped into the twitterverse and if the tweeple out there decide it is worthy of an answer, it may be answered generally for the good of the ‘verse or directly. And it seems that Twitter and its kin are certainly optimised for the mLearning idea.
Ok, so we’ve got a shiny solution that can be projected from the barrel of a launch system right? Not quite… people are then going to complain that “googling” is in fact making people dumber (really? Also fits with the mLearning idea from before), or smarter (again) and that reading is/is not the same (or just different) when done online or offline. But I’m not going to go there… not now at least.
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