The eLearning Guild publishes several “Getting Started…” reports to help organizations launch new initiatives. On Wednesday afternoon, addressing a tough, “after lunch” crowd, Dr. Patti Shank discussed her and the Guild’s findings regarding mobile learning. Below is my somewhat live blogging notes that I have had to publish after the conference, but the information is still very timely.
Bottom Line Takeaway? Mobile devices are valuable tools that we must be using right away.
Guild Research to Help You with Your First mLearning Initiatives
Dr. Patti Shank, PhD, CPT
Dr. Patti Shank, Ph.D., CPT
President, Learning Peaks LLC LearningPeaks.com
Patti’s slides are available to mLearnCon participants via the mLearnCon mobile app (EventPilot by ATIV Software). Download the Guild report (PDF file format) either from eLearningGuild.com (you’ll need your Member login) or from Learning Peaks at:
The 50-page report is based on the Guild members’ survey responses. (Note to self and to you fellow Guild members…when the eLearning Guild requests that we complete a survey, do take time to do so. The information and data we provide will make the Getting Started reports even better!) Okay… here are my rapid-typing notes. Feel free to post your feedback in the Comments.
Session Notes
mLearning refers to any handheld device used on a wireless or cellular network.
Mobile is really different from elearning.
Responses to the survey within the last year. 10% answered the survey, of the members who usually answer Guild surveys. N=684.
87% said it’s useful
66% said it has to be a part of their offerings.
Members are learning they have to align mlearning with their bus. objectives.
Stage?
45% are starting to explore
15% are doing, or already have done, mlearning
By Sector?
* higher education has done the most
Stage Now
Members are starting to build their business cases, is seeing an increase in percentage.
GuildMember Smartphones
Gartner Research says that by 2013, the majority of WWW access will be via a mobile device. Will overcome PCs.
Blackberry is the most common device used by companies of Guild members. Some are thinking of changing to iPhones.
NOTE: Don’t base your mlearning strategy on a single device.
Email can be mlearning.
Cameo. Email and text. Build text based scenarios, they answer, and they get email feedback.
SnapAsk. Short messages; learners had to read text and they respond with an answer. (For example: Directions to the airport). Similar to KGB.
Mobile Web Content
Easy for first entry into mlearning as web development has already been done in organization. Mobile web apps.
PDFs
Adobe has (URL fm patti in report) an article on how to make your PDF for mobile devices.
But, our discussion is that PDFs good on tablets, iPad… but for handhelds/phones, will need to use minimalism on the content. AND DO NOT SCROLL left to right, only up and down.
Podcasts.
David Penrose – microlecture. 3 bullet points
minilecture 1-2 minutes, no longer.
Social Networking.
Provide updates from the field. Q&A. Expert insights.
Send photos of product placements on customer site and send back to marketing, and then map that to sales.
Field technicians send data back to Product Dept., who makes changes as needed to resolve problems.
Jenise here again… as you can see, mlearning is being used, and it’s still being defined. Academia seems to be ahead of the private sector, but probably not for long. You can start small with SMS (text messages) and podcasts. Good luck and have fun!
The eLearning Guild’s first annual conference on mobile learning, mLearnCon, was a busy event. Sometimes, instead of live blogging, it’s better to post the speaker’s own notes once they’re published on the Web. After the conference, I had some family-life events to deal with, and am publishing this post a bit after the conference. If you’re reading this and you attended the Keynote, please feel free to use the Comments to add or clarify what I wrote below. Thanks!
Tomi’s mobile credentials from his time at Nokia make him a person you want to watch, read, and listen to if you have any interest at all in mobile devices and how people use them around the world.
Click the link below to view Tomi’s slides from his Keynote presentation.
You and your organization are thinking about mlearning or mobile learning. Should you implement it as a part of your learning and performance initiatives this year, next year, or ever? One of the first steps to take is listen to those who have already begun the journey. Qualcomm in San Diego, California, shared a few of their experiences at mLearncon from their mlearning journey.
If at First You Don’t Succeed…The mLearning Journey at Qualcomm
Qualcomm Speakers (you can find them on LinkedIn… connect and ask them your questions):
Barbara Ludwig, Manager, Learning Technology
John Polaschek, Manager, Learning Technology
Session Notes
Mobile apps like Hotseat (Purdue) and .Count the Yard.
Qualcomm Lessons Learned. “qualcomm’s Adventures in Mobile”
Mobile trend is get in-get out. Learners don’t want traditional learning.
Get in for information and then leave.
Mobile Intent Index.
M used for finance and advocacy, not used for creative expression.
MobiThinking.com. Global Mobile Stats. More and more users will be accessing the web via the mobile phone.
Qualcomm used Brew to create their first app for negotiations peer support.
Tips and reminders. Then went web based with a learning portal, acronym DB, search.
Then they used SMS also.
A lot of their Employees were getting email via mobile devices.
WordPress blog used with mobile plugin … Their employees read and write from their mobile devices. Is behind their firewall so mobile device needs a VPN to access the blog. They are trying to get Single Sign-on. WordPress blog used by Summer interns, 800, they collaborated about their experiences and it created a close community.
Now the blog is used as a mobile portal.
Social Learning
People don’t want learning on their phones but they want to connect with people who can answer questions. (Yammer). Worked well as a back channel for questions during large meetings.
Jive.
A social networking or collaboration tool. Has become the hub for their management skills course. Reading lists, tasks, forums, breakout groups for assignments. Jive has a mobile client for mobile devices. All of that content is now available via their phones.
Tracking, right now LMSes aren’t doing a good job for mobile. Not yet.
Top Seven Challenges:
7. Diversity of devices and platforms (are targeting smart phones) ( or could be web based or an app)
6. Lack of mobile ready content. (skill soft, elementk)
5. Contract issues. Renegotiate for mobile content.
4. LMS integration. No one is really ready for mobile. Ask if you care. How importent is it to track and report.
3. Phones, personal vs. Company issued.
2. IP/CCI leakage… And personal devices. Best approach is communication to keep intellectual property protected.
1. Security.
My first session on the last day of mLearnCon (Thursday, June 17th) focused on JavaScript reources to use while we all wait for HTML 5 and potential WYSIWYG editors to be as robust as we will all need. Here’s my live blog of the session, and please keep in mind that I’m an isntructional designer with basic Flash timeline and AS2 skills = I’m not a programmer, but I have the heart of a programmer! I enjoy working with programmers and try to understand their world so the storyboards I write make sense from their development perspective.
HTML + Graphics
Online, static art, possibly server generated.
So-called HTML 5 -JS (On/Off-line, <canvas> tag, SVG, sensors.
Cross-platform toolkits (Common subset)
Native apps (write specifically for that platform)
Moving to JavaScript
Is very similar to AS2 and AS3. Very good resource: “Javascript, the Good Parts” by Douglas Crockford (O’Reilly) and Crockford’s YUI Theatre lectures. Talks about the danger points and what to watch out for. Free tutorials on JS. The graphics model is still the JS world instead of Action Script.
Sprite-based Animation
spritely.net (This blew me away… really nice!) The bird animations are just a 3-layer PNG file, the JS plays through the layers. (Me: Cool!) Open source, under the MIT license, even for work-for-hire. Your code can remain proprietary.
$fx() Library Sprites w/ movement and alpha
jsAnim Sprites, tween any property
Glimmer Free set of Wizards that run on Windows that create animations using jQuery, animations on top of jQuery (MS OS).
SVG
Raw XML / Using Raphael JS library Have to create without a timeline, do it all programmatically. Richard says it’s the better option, but not easy.
<canvas>
2D drawing surface in the browser. Supported by WebKit, Firefox, Opera, IE8+. WebKit is leading the charge currently.
Will it Run?
Basically, everyone is adopting WebKit; maintained by Apple but is open and supported world-wide. WebKit for iPhone is one version behind for desktop, so you have to test on both devices. That’s the way the build cycle is currently. Android is about 2 versions behind. Animations caveat… processing on the handheld devices is slower than on the desktop (hardware acceleration). May need to scale down for mobile.
Moving from Flash Development
From timeline to code… Use the Graphics class in AS3 to practice inside Flash.
Design for sprite-based animation when possible (avoiding drawing at run time).
Consider Glimmer wizards
Mock-up in Flash, export the tweens to XML (XFL in Cs5)
Separate content layer from the presentation layer
Automate unit testing (QUnit),
Use source code control (Subversion, Git)
Summary
Cross the gap
Learn graphics programming
WebKit and Opera are your friends
Evaluate the JS graphics libraries (see if they do what you need to do)
Richard Clark
NextQuestion
rdclarck@nextquestion.net and rclark@intrepidls.com
Ph: 1.408.605.2653 http://nextquestion.net
I really respect Cammy Bean and others who live blog the conferences they attend. It’s not that easy for me because I want to sit and listen, soak it all in, yet I feel a responsibility to share with you in the blogosphere and Twitterverse. My fingers didn’t always keep up with the speakers or facilitators. So, here’s the “raw” live blogged post from Wednesday’s Keynote Speaker. If you’re reading this and you attended the Keynote, please feel free to use the Comments to add or clarify what I wrote below. Thanks!
What the User Wants in mLearning
Dr. Mimi Ito
Research Scientist
Dept. of Informatics,
Univeristy of California, Irvine
Keynote: Dr. Mimi Ito, 16 June 2010
Dr. Ito began with photos of what Japanese teenagers carry in their purses or backpacks. Typical is two of each device.
Multimedia is enjoyed on one device while commuting on the train and they text friends at the same time using the second device. Device proliferation: teens consume information, capture and produce their own media, and stay in constant ambient contact with each other.
People will go to great lengths to have personal content at hand. Users customize their media environment themselves, filling in gaps inherent in devices. We can harvest this drive this potential.
Social Media, Mobile Media, is highly personal content shared with others. They want to, they need to share it with their mobile community (friends, not necessarily their parents).
Good to look at Japanese youth to monitor future trends as they’re about 10 years ahead of US youth.
Information is flowing across institutions, and the mobile youth culture is the center of innovation. The kids have incubated the trends that have spread globally.
The social context is as important to them as the content you want to deliver to youth. The device is a proxy for the social relationships those devices connect people to.
Youth are not only media consumers, they are media producers. And higher ed professors are struggling with a mobile-media-driven lecture hall.
Question from Dr. Ito: “How many of you checked your iPhone in the first 5 minutes of my talk?” (Lots of guilty chuckles in the Hall.)
Today’s multitasking students and teams are tomorrow’s multitasking workers.
We need new mechanisms for managing and focusing attention of these new learning styles, instead of enforcing the old learning model.
Video: A Vision of Students Today
Dr. Ito played this YouTube video that I’d seen before and continues to amaze me. It was produced by Kansas State University, Professor Michael Wesch:
We need to use these new flows of knowledge for lifelong and ongoing learning.
Social Media = Social Communication + Personal Media. It’s you, making a personal pathway in the mobile world, and sharing with others. Adaptive learning in a world of constant change.
The Mobile World/Social Media Space: Peer sharing. Social viewing. Locative Media. Transmedia
Peer Sharing
Primary tool for personal communication. A portal that links the individual to the Mobile World. A powerful motivator of adoption, individual’s ability to access this world. The small screen of the mobile is not a limitation, it affords privacy and personalization that produces a sense of intimacy, much more than a laptop’s screen. The teen’s SMS messages seem silly, but it’s all about sharing presence not information. A shared meaning of activities they are pursuing. The full-time, intimate community. They text, voice call, get together in RW (real world), then text about the event, voice call, text again. Starts again the next day. SMS drove mobile internet adoption in Japan. (Mixi, most popular social website in Japan). Mobile is the most preferred way to access community/social websites instead of via a laptop.
Shared collaboration and participation…tech support/dispatchers used mobile to share information with each other. Knowledge transfer via exchange of tech info. Their team becomes their “always on” community. Co-consulting. Collegial communication. Ordering parts. Contacting the sales rep. Asking Qs, getting As, sharing learning with others. Reading and learning from each other.
Mobile builds shared awareness, learners benefitting from knowledge gained from each other’s work.
Locative Media
Linking mobile media to specific locations. Use of camera phone. They capture their relationship to things and places. Always take photos of themselves with friends and create sticker albums. They document their social gatherings in urban spaces, and they share the photos. They are always carrying their friends around with them (photo stickers applied onto their devices).
AMBIENT STORYTELLING… USC is doing: (Disclaimer: Dr. Scott Fisher, her husband, is leading this). An effort to invent stories that is used only in one space. For example, architecture. The Million Story Building Project. Playful interaction with the building and learning its history. The building has its own Twitter stream (tweets about the temperature, etc.), QR codes in different parts of the building where people can gain more detailed information. Residents and visitors can also add to the database of information.
Social Viewing
Niko Video is a very popular Japanese YouTube but different in that people can post comments at specific time points w/in the video. It’s like sharing the video on your mobile device with an entire community. Creates a social layer. K-Nect project… a major contributor to the students’ access via the e-classroom support structure via 3G connectivity. Allowed students to connect with peers, tutors, professors 24/7 and anywhere (outside the classroom walls).
Transmedia
Pokemon. Today’s college graduates are the first Pokemon generation to move into the adult world. Portable media. Gaming changed the social landscape. New mode of interaction. No longer strange to see young people in social gatherings with their gaming devices. Huge volume of esoteric knowledge generated while the player progresses through the game. Content that’s about gaming and social interaction. Mobilizes kids to do something with the knowledge. Social glue. Flocking: when a child pulls out their game boy they flock around the device. Context of learning and social sharing help the kids to learn the game boy; there’s an assumption that there’s a social wrapper because one child cannot master Pokemon alone. Nintendo has taken advantage of this social media. (DS Ware – learning platform by Nintendo) (Brain Age, appealing to older learners) Now, professors are using DS Classroom to use DS Ware devices for education. Early stage.
New Youth City Network. Eric Sanderson. NYC and it’s original flora and fauna before it was developed. Students can use mobiles to learn about the previous rich ecosystem of Manhattan. In the MannaHatta Project, they explore, share, interact…
(Dr. Ito thanked/acknowledged: Daisuke Okabe. HeyRyoung Ok. Becky Herr. Ellen Seiter. Miranda Banks. Joi Ito. Scott Fisher. Diana Rhote.)
The wrapper of peer mobile sharing will make mobile learning happen and be effective.
Q&A
Middle School is the age when they can be captured to stay on the academic path. The Quest to Learn school in NYC, using gaming and mobile in their instructional models. Different from traditional classroom learning. The kids are building things together. The kids just finished their first year, and studies continue regarding results.
Q: What will these youth be like in today’s traditional Workplace?
A: We don’t know yet. Referred to research and studies going on at The Quest School in NYC, see above.
Q: Big risk in the shared knowledge ecosystem with sharing of ideas not based on fact that become a truth.
A: Like Wikipedia, needing more mentors and an established vision to self-edit and confirm information. It’s not there yet. Needs to be.
Management of personal attention is a new Competency. Youth may need to acquire this.
Q: What ways do you see higher ed changing due to these youth?
A: Higher ed is being more responsive. Extension Colleges. Innovation begins at the margins, or youth don’t show up for classes. Both provide pressures to change the University’s core functions. Faculties are trying to adapt and change.
