Who are the key players in m-Learning content development?
PC: So who do you think are the key players right now in terms of content development for m-Learning?
Well, companies are doing their best to make sure that they’ve got content that can be accessed by their subscribers. So the big push at the moment is from the phone companies and their subsidiaries, which are going to be aggregating and distributing content being produced by other folks.
Right now we all know that ring tones and games are among the most commonly downloaded types of applications for our mobile phone. My hope is that in very short order we’re going to start seeing a demand for personalized content. And it will probably be more entertainment-based types of content first. The iPod has done a lot to both socialize and revolutionize mobile Learning. The iPod phenomena was started with music because people wanted to buy music and Apple came up with a really, really wonderful micro-economic model charging 99 cents a song as a single file download, and having a mass storage device that people can use to copy their favorite files and then stick the device in their pocket. I think we’re going to see a lot more development of content distributors and providers pushing content to devices like the iPod — not just around mobile phones.
I don’t know if you have been following the “podcasting” phenomenon lately, but I think that this is an excellent example of what is happening around mobile learning that is taking people by storm. Podcasting lets you set up your networked computer with a feed reader that will search the Internet for audio programming that you specify. Let me tell you about Jennifer Reeves. Jen is an Assistant Professor of Broadcast News at the Missouri School of Journalism, and the Executive Producer at KOMU-TV. As she tells the story, she first heard about podcasting on January 3rd. She and her broadcast news students produced their first podcasts at a conference on the 23rd of January, they posted the news stories on the Web and within hours programming was being pushed out to feed subscribers. By the beginning of February, she was a national model for podcasting. We have probably all been hearing more about podcasting these days. Almost out of nowhere, podcasting is a viable way of being able to produce a lot of learning content. (See Sidebar 1.)
Think of podcasting as Tivo for audio. You select criteria for the kind of audio programming you want to listen to, and then you can have your computer search for audio programming that fits those criteria. You can have it pushed to your computer, which can in turn be synchronized with your MP3 player of choice. Individuals can produce audio programming with relative ease and make that audio programming available as a “podcast.” A case in point, there is a radio station here in the San Francisco area that has stopped producing their own radio programming and is moving to an all-podcast format, where individuals will submit podcasts to be considered for distribution over the radio. The station will help people produce their programs, record their audio and help them with the sound mixing. These files will then uploaded to a server and broadcast just as the radio broadcasts the regular radio programming.
You can think about it as “time shifting.” If you can’t be around for your favorite NPR program, you can tell your computer that you want it to go out and pull the program down and have it waiting for you. The next time you synchronize your computer and MP3 player these programs download to your MP3 player of choice.
Paul Clothier suggests readers check out:
PC: Wow, podcasting and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds. Looks like I’ve got a bit of research to do there — leveraging iPods as m-Learning devices.
Yes, podcasting is very cool. And there is even a newer phenomenon that is taking place right now called “VODcasting,” Similar to podcasting but with video-on-demand. So what we’re really talking about here is not just phones or computers. We are looking at personal digital devices that people are going to carry their audio files, their photo files, their documents, their books, and their videos in. They’re going to be able to carry those files, store them, disaggregate them, and reaggregate them. They will choose their information sources and figure out how they want to have that information pushed to them and stored for them on terms that they define.
(Editor’s note: Please refer to the definitions of RSS and podcasting at http://whatis.techtarget.com)
Macromedia support for m-Learning
PC: Can you say a few words about what Macromedia is doing in the arena of m-Learning? I know that the Flash player has been available on certain mobile phones and PDAs for some time.
I think it is fair to say that Flash Player revolutionized the Web by enabling rich multimedia experiences online. Today Flash player resides on 98% of the computers that are connected to the Internet. We’ve been working very actively with handset manufacturers around the world to license Flash Player on mobile handsets so that as 3G networks expand, mobile online experiences are as rich
and robust as desktop online experiences. We have agreements now with close to seventy companies that are licensing the Flash Player on everything from game devices like Leapster, to PDAs to telephone handsets. If you go to http://www.macromedia.com/mobile/supported_devices/handsets.html you can see the list of devices that support Flash. Samsung and Nokia are just two of the very influential companies who are now embedding Flash Player on handsets. What that means is that just as we have been able to play animations on the Web, we are putting that same rich experience on whatever mobile device people want to use, whether they are connected to the Web or not.
Factors driving m-Learning adoption
PC: It seems that with the ubiquity of personal digital devices such as iPods, PDAs, and mobile phones, m-Learning is going to be more and more an intimate part of what we do.
Yes, I think so, too. I have a piece of paper in my home office from about 1991 which I mailed to myself, that says some day we’re not going to put “distance” in front of “learning,” we’re just going to focus on learning. We have said the same thing about e-Learning — that one of these days we’ll not be so concerned about the “e.” It is going to require some skill for people to create a mobile learning experience that is of the same quality and the same richness and level of engagement that we have come to expect from good e-Learning. Ultimately it’s all about the experience that designers must create.
I often find myself sitting on an airplane, or at an airport, or on a campus, or in shared work spaces such as Café Royale, at Macromedia, and I watch what people are doing. And they’re usually on their hand held, or on their phone, or they’ve got a laptop with them. People really want to have information where and when they need it. Over time it is all going to be integrated to the point where we’re going to look up one day and realize that it was not so much about mobile learning as it was about having better relationships with information.
We’re going to see that we can have whatever kind of information we want, on terms that we’re going to be able to define for ourselves. Organizations that are savvy enough and clever enough to provide people with that type of access and give them resources for accessing information are going to be successful. I don’t think people realized the impact that the Apple iPod was going to have on shifting perceptions on the relationship that people have with their information. It’s because they’ve made it not so scary anymore and they’ve made it a consumer device. I think that we all need to look to Apple Computer as a good model for the “productization” of m-Learning.
PC: So looking five years down the road, what is Macromedia’s vision with regard to mobile learning?
Well, our plans will be to make sure that Flash Player is embedded on as many devices as is reasonable. We also want to make it easier for technical developers and non-technical subject matter experts alike to see that our tools provide a continuum of solutions for producing high quality content. Flash is a de-facto content creation standard for interactive content, and our plans would be to extend that into the world of both occasionally-connected, and alwaysconnected devices. For us it is about leveraging the ubiquity of Flash. We’re focusing on Flash as a presentation layer development platform with products like Flash, Flex and Flash Communication Server. Flash Lite is the development tool for creating mobile content. Products such as Flash Paper, Breeze Presenter and Captivate all produce output that is Flash-based so non-technical subject matter experts can also be more actively engaged as content creators. So in addition to embedding Flash Player wherever we can, we are focused on tools that provide professional developers with the control that Macromedia Flash has always let us develop, while also helping non-technical subject matter experts produce professional looking Flash content without knowing how to program.
I don’t think I’ll be working in ActionScript again. But I can produce some darn good looking mobile content when I’m working with Captivate. As soon as the processing power improves a bit more you will be able to participate in Breeze meetings from your smart telephone. We want to offer an array of tools so that people of all technical abilities can produce learning content and create learning experiences on terms that matter to them.
PC: You were talking about Apple earlier on. Do you see Macromedia looking toward any relationships with Apple regarding Flash content on the iPod?
Well, you know that Flash plays beautifully on Mac OS X already, and that Keynote now produces Flash output. My hope is that we see Flash Players embedded in as many devices as we can. Sure we’re always talking with companies like Apple about ways that we can make sure that the tools work with their platforms and operating systems. Our customers want to have the flexibility, and we certainly don’t want to constrain people.
I have great admiration for the very good way in which Apple Computer has figured out how to do something that many of us in e-Learning have been talking about for a long time — which is, how to monetize content creation, exchange and distribution in the digital content development world. They’ve done something that most of us in the e-Learning world tried to do a few years back, although in those days we pushed content out and crossed our fingers and hoped that people wanted it. We really hadn’t accounted for ways that people would need to buy it, distribute it and to manage the digital rights. So it is beyond the metadata, it really gets into digital identifiers that ultimately help people commercialize and productize information — something that we really weren’t able to do very successfully in the first round of e-Learning back in the 1997 to 2001 period.
Will learning design ever catch up with technological potential?
PC: Do you ever worry that the quality of the learning design never quite catches up to a new technology? In other words just when we feel our current learning model with one technology is maturing, along comes another and we then rush towards it and start the whole process again —more of a reactive approach to developing learning where the technology drives the content rather than the other way around?
As you know, that’s the agony and the ecstasy of working with technology-mediated learning designs. In a previous life I was an instructional design professor and I remember those days when we would talk to the students about the right medium for the message and how to improve outcomes. For me the biggest eye opening experience during the dot-com period was realizing that, in spite of what we know about good instructional design, consumer demand for devices
and for innovation will trump effective instructional design practice almost every time. Most of us really are simply fascinated with new tools. So we cannot ignore this phenomenon. We need to get smarter about factoring this fascination with tools into our learning designs more deliberately.
For those of us that have been working in the field for a while, the joke on us is that we still haven’t dealt with a lot of the human issues that impact effective technology mediation to support learning. So, yes, the technology does get in the way sometimes, and probably we learning designers will always feel like we are one step behind. But frankly, the technologies that don’t work get dropped like hot rocks, so that does help level the field.
Future directions
PC: Do you have any other comments or particular areas that we’ve not talked about that you’d like to chat about?
Yes. Actually I’m curious about some of your views on these questions. You look at these issues from a very different perspective than I do, and I know you’ve been following and writing about e-Learning and Flash and rich engaging content for quite a while now. I guess I’m curious about what you’re seeing on this?
PC: Well one of the things that I think is very interesting on this topic is what you call the “form factor.” In the case of mobile phones for instance, I believe two of the major challenges are size and time: the size of the viewable screen area and the slices of time that people will be interacting with a device. You don’t have the luxury of all the real-estate you have on most laptops or PCs. Trying to have people interact in a similar way on a mobile phone as they currently do with e-Learning content isn’t going to work. I think we’re going to need to develop a very new approach to designing instructionally sound mobile content.
In addition to size we have the factor of time. The time frames we use for delivering e-Learning aren’t going to work with a mobile phone. People interact with their phones in a much more sporadic and timeconstrained fashion. We are going to need a very different learning or information transfer design. In fact I think that because of these limitations it may even force instructional designers to be more aware of cognitive chunking and presentation of information ... more so than with standard e-Learning design because the users will
already have experience of the interface and content design, and have higher expectations. I think users will recognize bad m-Learning on a mobile phone much more readily than bad e-Learning in a browser.
Oh absolutely, I think that this is where the consumer savvyness is right now ... people aren’t going to put up with bad experiences. One of my projects of late has been looking at the “experience design work” that the software industry has done. I have started thinking about experience design for learning. I think that what instructional design did was great, back in the computer assisted instruction era, and with so much of software design focusing on experience design, being able to adapt some of those experience design principles for learning is going to be a really big opportunity in our field.
But there is a really interesting thing that I heard from Eilif Trondsen, the Director of the Learning on Demand program at SRI (SRI Consulting Business Intelligence). Eilif has noted that the relationship that young people have with these digital devices is a very, very different relationship than most of us older users have. Bryan Alexander has come to similar conclusions.
He talks about how students in
PC: Right, and when you talk about some of us seeing limitations rather than opportunities I realized that I’m probably guilty of doing what I used to accuse early e-Learning designers of; and that was taking the then existing paradigm of instructorled training and trying to fit it into e-Learning, rather than looking at the new medium and seeing all its learning possibilities.
Yes, devices are better connected, are getting smaller and fitting in our pocket, and they combine internet access with mass storage, email, and calendar integrated with phone. It seems obvious that we will need to do our work differently, but it is hard to break out of the old paradigm. In spite of our good intentions, we designers could be the biggest barriers to integration. Consumer level interest in using these devices is going to push us away from the more formal way that we designers have thought about it, and that is going to be a real education for us.
I did my own little experiment recently. I gave my eight year old niece a 3G phone, and I asked her if she would co-author an article with me. I wanted her to help walk me through what it’s like to not think of limitations. I’ve realized that I am having a hard time imagining what this looks like through eight year old eyes, and those are the eyes we need to be paying attention to. These kids have no clue that folks of our age are sitting around being nervous about this, because for them, it is putting them in touch with information and their friends in ways that for them are completely natural. Still, it is unlike anything most of us have ever experienced. So, we’ll see how my little experiment goes, I expect that she is probably going to shock me and I’m going to have to put her as the first author.
PC: So what are you most excited about regarding what’s happening in m-Learning?
The idea that I can actually have access to information when and where I want it is life changing for me. It’s weird to say that, but as somebody who travels a lot, the fact that I can participate in real time meetings and I can sit at an airport and I can collaborate with my peers and my colleagues no matter where I am in the world is absolutely remarkable. So the thing that excites me the most is that I really am living in a time where “anytime, anywhere” makes sense. I sometimes laugh about the fact that I don’t like to stay in hotels that don’t have broadband access anymore and I have a GPS system in my car. I mean the fact that I can literally have this stuff when and where I need it — that for me is probably the most exciting thing.
PC: Well, thanks so much for your time and your insights into m-Learning Ellen —you’ve given us a lot to think about.
Useful links on m-Learning:
Enabling Mobile Learning, an Educause article by Ellen Wagner http://www.educause.edu/er/erm05/erm0532.asp
LiNE Zine article by Clark Quinn http://www.linezine.com/2.1/features/cqmmwiyp.htm
Pan-European research and development program. http://www.m-learning.org/
m-Learning articles/papers from Learning and Skills Development Agency http://www.lsda.org.uk/files/pdf/1440.pdf
m-Learning consortium from McGraw Hill http://www.mcgrawhill.ca/college/m-Learning/ (Editor's Note: As of December 29, 2009, this article appears to have been removed from the Web.)
m-Learning article by Jill Attewell, Technology Enhanced Learning Research Centre. http://www.lsda.org.uk/files/pdf/041923RS.pdf
