I wanted to learn more about the field of mobile learning (m-Learning), what’s happening on the street, and what Macromedia’s m-Learning vision was, so I called one of Macromedia’s learning gurus, Ellen Wagner. Ellen is Senior Director, Worldwide Education Solutions, at Macromedia where she shapes the strategic directions of Macromedia’s post-secondary education business. She graciously gave me an hour of her time for a Q and A session on m-Learning.
PC: Hi Ellen, maybe we could start by defining what m-Learning is. What is typically meant by m-Learning?
M-Learning is one of a variety of terms used to talk about the phenomenon of unplugging people from their desks and from their computers, and putting them in touch with their information resources on whatever device they choose to use. Some call it mobile learning. I’ve also heard it called nomadic computing. Back in 2000, Clark Quinn suggested that m-Learning is e-Learning delivered through mobile computational devices. Regardless of the name we use, what we’ve seen is that mobile learning typically involves strategies and tactics for connecting just the right person to just the right content at just the right time, on just the right device, something that Wayne Hodgins, (Strategic Futurist at Autodesk), has been saying for years.
PC: Sounds very similar to what we heard when e-Learning first appeared.
The interesting thing for people to realize is that what we’re talking about here really isn’t all that new. What is new is that we’ve got technologies that are more robust, we’ve got connectivity that does allow us to do “anytime, anywhere,” and we have more connectivity to choose from than ever before. More of the promises of e-Learning can now come true with m-Learning.
We’re also starting to find that people’s sensitivity to unplugging themselves from their training rooms and their classrooms has been mitigated quite a bit by the last five years of experience with e-Learning. So the good news for all of us is that m-Learning is really the next step, or the next wave, of using technology to provide a channel for access to learning and performance support. Many of the activities with which e-Learning professionals have already been involved, such as working with learning objects, or even working with content and learning management systems, all lead us to this point of seeing the value in disaggregating content from classes and courses and using smaller bits of information that can be accessed on whatever device people want, as they want and need access to that information
Is m-Learning a way to support e-Learning, or is it a new category?
PC: So do you see m-Learning as an “add-on” to what we typically call e-Learning? A way of supporting existing e-Learning, as opposed to a separate mode of learning delivery?
I think it is more than that, and it is going to depend on how people decide to implement their m-Learning initiatives, but yes it will look a lot more like performance support than it will look like an online class, at least for a while. I think the most logical and the most self-evident uses of mobile tools right now are for things that actually put the training and information wherever people want it — the shop floor, the patient bedside, or wherever in the field it is really needed. One of the areas where there has been much activity in m-Learning, at the moment, is for performance support in the healthcare industry. Also, probably the biggest emerging trend for m-Learning right now is related to educational and training games.
PC: So, m-Learning is used for postlearning or post-training support?
I see it more for connecting informal learning with formal learning experiences, and I also believe that it needs to be relevant throughout a learning experience. I have seen some figures that talk about eighty percent of the learning that most of us do is learning that takes place when we are not in a formal learning setting. So it just seems that we are really filling in all those white spaces that wrap around formal learning; or for training experiences that may not be a formal class, or as a game used for training purposes, or as a performancesupport tool. I think that the perceived success of mobile learning will be a function of how well designers adapt themselves to the challenges of dealing with new form factors and devices. Mobile learning will challenge designers to think really differently about their learning designs.
I recently developed a Spanish language tutorial for a mobile phone. This was exciting for me. I was dealing with Flash Lite, and I was looking at design variables in very different ways. As a long-time instructional designer I found that while putting together the learning experience in and of itself wasn’t that hard, coming up with a good mobile experience was different because the form factor is really different — the whole relationship we have with our phones, which are used for communicating, is very different than the relationship we have with our computers which are used for creating, producing and distributing information. So I think we will see more performance support tools, and game type tools, until learning designers develop the sophistication to really leverage what the mobile devices are going to let us do.
How does m-Learning change the designer’s job?
PC: One of the things that I was thinking about recently was that due to the form factor of m-Learning — the limited space and time considerations — content developers would need a very different approach to instructional design than the traditional e-Learning. We won’t have the luxury of time and available space as we do when designing content for say, a Web page.
Yes, and even with that, being able to take that content from the Web page and push to a device of one’s choice is also part of what people want to be able to do with mobile learning. There are a couple of Flashenabled mobile phones that I have been working with lately that have a remarkably good screen design. As a “digital immigrant,” I’ve been pleasantly surprised at what a good interface they offer. After playing with it for just a while I am a lot less reticent about using mobile phones in learning settings and situations. I really do think that it is going to be more a matter of adapting our thinking to see the device that we happen to be using for communication purposes as the device that now can also serve our computing needs.
Most of us have relationships with our phones already. The promise of m-Learning for smart phones and other digital devices such as iPods lives in the fact that those phones and iPods are already part of our social practice. My hope for mobile learning is that we can give people more things to do with the communication devices with which they are already fairly competent.
PC: So what you’re saying is that one advantage of m-Learning is that the user interface navigation is a given, as people already use these devices.
We’re used to talking on mobile telephones, and now we are starting to get used to using them with our ear buds on while interacting with a screen as we are talking, all on the same device. What we are really doing is putting a computer in our pocket and figuring out that we can talk to it, we can look at it, we can interact with it, we can use Graffiti to take notes with it, and we can type into it with our thumbs. If we have several devices, they can talk to each other using Bluetooth. With wireless communications, we can always be connected to our network and always have access to our data. As the devices get more powerful and flexible, I think we are going to find that our ability to produce increasingly robust mobile experiences will quickly expand. We’re at the very, very early stages of being able to look at really integrated m-Learning types of applications.
Why is the U.S.
PC: I’ve noticed that, in many cases, Europe and many parts of the world seem ahead of the
Well, the irony is that the US is behind the curve now as a consequence of an enlightened public policy that promoted universal phone service and created a regulatory environment that helped pay for pushing phone service out to everyone. We have such a really great landline telephony system in the
PC: Do you think then that, in terms of m-Learning, the
When it comes to mobile phone based learning initiatives, I think the
Phone providers here in the
(Editor’s note: Please see the excellent discussion and definitions on 2.5G, 3G, and WiMax in Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3G.)
