I've been away for a while and I've been feeling guilty about letting this Blog get away from me without contributing... In order to release some synergies with the work I am doing, I thought I should do some research on M-Learning, since it's one of those things which I find truly appealing when it comes to spending those micro-leisure times waiting for public transportation or friends to arrive...
With regards to the Wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-learning. The first application of the paradigm occurred with Microsoft and Cisco in a corporate environment training technicians on how to pass the Cisco tests.
The first interesting case study of this technology being employed to reach non-professional education is the MOBilearn project, funded by the EC in October, 2001. The intention was to use the mobile phone to reach unemployed or underemployed young adults who lacked access to a computer. They employed a variety of tactics, included "blended learning" which was integrated with formal courses, "location-depended learning" (for visits in museums) and medical information.
Of course, one can argue that the success of MLearning is predicated on how successful one considers E-Learning. People making this argument should carefully way both the universality of mobile devices (particularly among the disenfranchised and the 3rd world) compared to internet, much less, broadband connections. However, the culture of learning does have some merit as well. One cannot really help people who do not want to learn, but it does enable the ones who empower themselves to make the right moves to improve their situation.
Palm Enterprise put an interesting article summing up the situation of MLearning today.
http://www.palmpowerenterprise.com/issues/issue200106/elearning002.html
They mention two companies: KnowledgeNet (www.knowledgenet.com) in Arizona, ad SmartForce (www.smartforce.com) in Silicon Valley. The former focuses on making courseware universal. They focus on rich media content that competes in quality with PC-based E-Learning solutions. Their focus are the growing army of travelling professionals. The latter focuses on Assessment tests, and learners are presented with tests of 30 to 100 questions.
The article correctly states the current issues with mobile technologies at such a nascent stage. PDAs typically hold 2MB to 8MB of memory, while mobile devices hold next to none. This limits usage to all but the most rudimentary of content models, and relies on the content delivery solution to intelligently deliver the content to such dumb devices.
Currently, one of the biggest and most overlooked challenge with mLearning is its translation to the PDA-sized displays for the consumption of learning material. This is most easily dealt with with PDAs. PDAs are typically owned by middle and upper-level managers, which further limits the application to people with shorter attention spans and busier schedules. If the content is not formatted for ideal consumption on the small-screen, the application will be discarded. Interestingly, news content of this topic has not surfaced much lately, which leads me to suspect that the content providers are lying low for now.
The Value Proposition is certainly attractive, in my opinion, so I suspect we should be hearing more noise around this space, perhaps first from the various E-Learning vendors.
In any case, an excellent Blog for learning more around news and sociological impacts of mLearning can be found at http://mlearning.edublogs.org/
With regards to the Wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-learning. The first application of the paradigm occurred with Microsoft and Cisco in a corporate environment training technicians on how to pass the Cisco tests.
The first interesting case study of this technology being employed to reach non-professional education is the MOBilearn project, funded by the EC in October, 2001. The intention was to use the mobile phone to reach unemployed or underemployed young adults who lacked access to a computer. They employed a variety of tactics, included "blended learning" which was integrated with formal courses, "location-depended learning" (for visits in museums) and medical information.
Of course, one can argue that the success of MLearning is predicated on how successful one considers E-Learning. People making this argument should carefully way both the universality of mobile devices (particularly among the disenfranchised and the 3rd world) compared to internet, much less, broadband connections. However, the culture of learning does have some merit as well. One cannot really help people who do not want to learn, but it does enable the ones who empower themselves to make the right moves to improve their situation.
Palm Enterprise put an interesting article summing up the situation of MLearning today.
http://www.palmpowerenterprise.com/issues/issue200106/elearning002.html
They mention two companies: KnowledgeNet (www.knowledgenet.com) in Arizona, ad SmartForce (www.smartforce.com) in Silicon Valley. The former focuses on making courseware universal. They focus on rich media content that competes in quality with PC-based E-Learning solutions. Their focus are the growing army of travelling professionals. The latter focuses on Assessment tests, and learners are presented with tests of 30 to 100 questions.
The article correctly states the current issues with mobile technologies at such a nascent stage. PDAs typically hold 2MB to 8MB of memory, while mobile devices hold next to none. This limits usage to all but the most rudimentary of content models, and relies on the content delivery solution to intelligently deliver the content to such dumb devices.
Currently, one of the biggest and most overlooked challenge with mLearning is its translation to the PDA-sized displays for the consumption of learning material. This is most easily dealt with with PDAs. PDAs are typically owned by middle and upper-level managers, which further limits the application to people with shorter attention spans and busier schedules. If the content is not formatted for ideal consumption on the small-screen, the application will be discarded. Interestingly, news content of this topic has not surfaced much lately, which leads me to suspect that the content providers are lying low for now.
The Value Proposition is certainly attractive, in my opinion, so I suspect we should be hearing more noise around this space, perhaps first from the various E-Learning vendors.
In any case, an excellent Blog for learning more around news and sociological impacts of mLearning can be found at http://mlearning.edublogs.org/
