Ready for mobile? If you want to have lifetime (24/7) learners, you need lifetime (24/7) teachers

EduCause has an interesting article available – it’s long, so here are some carefully stolen points:

To keep up with this changing phenomenon and to effectively facilitate mobile learning, argued Sharma and Kitchens, it is imperative that instructors learn about and adapt to the changing environments, when and where appropriate. Naismith et al. (S. K. Sharma and F. L. Kitchens, “Web Services Architecture for M-Learning,” Electronic Journal on e-Learning, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2004, pp. 203–216.). hypothesized that mobile technologies will have a huge impact on learning; they made the following predictions based on emerging trends:

• Learning will center on the individual learner’s environment rather than the classroom.
• Learning will involve learners making meaningful connections to resources and other people.
• The ability to instantly publish their observations and reflections as digital media will empower learners to become investigators of their own environments.
• The ability to easily capture and record life events will assist learners in recall and collaborative reflection.
• Distributed collaboration and mobile team opportunities will be greatly enhanced.

These predictions, if accurate, have significant pedagogical implications that are both a consequence of, and an opportunity for, mobile learning. Educators will have to shift from being transmitters of knowledge to facilitators of learning in order to create new learning pathways that are more situated, personal, collaborative, and long term. To help educators make the transition, Naismith et al.¹¹ offered the following suggestions for adapting mobile learning to the six major types of learning:

• Behaviorism: Quick feedback or reinforcement can be facilitated through mobile devices.
• Constructivism: Mobile devices enable immersive experiences such as those provided by simulations or games.
• Situated learning: Learners can take mobile devices into authentic learning environments or “context-aware” environments, such as specially equipped museums.
• Collaborative learning: Mobile devices provide a handy additional means of communication and a portable means of electronic information gathering and sharing.
• Informal/lifelong learning: Mobile devices accompany users in their everyday experiences and become a convenient source of information or means of communication that assists with learning.
• Support/coordination: Mobile devices provide just-in-time access to learning resources, news, information, planners, address books, calculators, and so forth.

and

Podcasting enables faculty to incorporate on-demand audio recordings into their curriculum. While it is relatively easy to produce a podcast, instructors will have to rethink their approach to packaging instructional content so that students are eager to listen to it. “The droning voice of a professor reading from yellowed lecture notes will not be so affecting,” according to Gardner Campbell, “…but a voice that creates a theater of the mind…can connect with the listener on a profound level.”¹³ The Division of Information Technology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison offers the following guidelines for creating podcasts¹⁴:

• Avoid overly complex material that includes lots of facts and figures. Complex subject matter is often more effectively conveyed through handouts and readings than through a podcast. This is because most students will listen to podcasts as they perform other tasks (i.e., riding a bus, driving, exercising, walking to class, etc.). In most cases they won’t be taking notes as they listen. Always keep in mind the learner’s context when selecting content for a podcast.
• Recordings of classroom lectures may not be the best use of podcasting. Podcasts of entire lectures often come across as overly formal and boring. Important visuals are excluded. Only use lectures as podcasts when you have a strong pedagogical rationale for doing so.
• Narrow the focus of a podcast. Limit the scope of the content to only a few main themes. Don’t try to communicate too much material in a single podcast. Instead, identify important concepts or issues students tend to struggle with and develop a podcast that addresses each one.

By convention, most of the just-in-time podcasts (such as CNN news and NPR news) last about three to five minutes. Perhaps instructors can make better use of the limited time and only provide the information that provokes students’ thoughts. Instructors are also advised to focus on one theme, topic, or issue in each podcast so that learners have options to download the needed ones. Also, information about each podcast event’s file size or time duration should be provided.

With the challenge of new mobile technologies for podcasting comes a great opportunity for providing new types of services for traditional and distant learners. Meng believes “the greatest opportunities for these technologies are in the ways they will be used that have not yet been imagined.”¹⁵ The potential offered by podcasting makes it worth the effort of learning and using.

So the take home message that I get out of this – if the means of accessing information becomes ubiquitous, so does the accessing… so this means that teaching will have to become more of a lifestyle, so will teaching – instructors will certainly have to start to practice what they preach.