THE MOBILE LEARNING EDGE

TOOLS AND TECHNOLOGIES FOR DEVELOPING YOUR TEAMS

By GARY WOODILL

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Copyright © 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-07-173676-3

Contents

IntroductionAcknowledgments1 The Emerging Field of Mobile Learning2 The Mobile Learning Ecosystem3 Methods for Effective Mobile Learning: Seven Principles for Employee
Training4 Retrieving Information: Anywhere, Anytime5 Gathering Information with Mobile Devices6 Learning by Communicating, Interacting, and Networking7 Management of Mobile Learning, Knowledge, and Performance8 Developing a Future-Oriented Mobile Learning Strategy9 Creating Mobile Learning Content and Experiences10 Implementing and Managing an Enterprise Mobile Learning OfferingAppendix: Resources for Mobile LearningBibliographyIndex

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The Emerging Field of Mobile Learning

“All learning is mobile”.

—Tétard et al. (2008)

I live in the country in an old house overlooking a 23 mile-long lake.Occasionally I take the train to the big city about an hour away. During thispleasant trip I’m able to enjoy a cup of tea and to work on my laptop, withsatellite access to the Internet. This means I can prepare for meetings later inthe day, and can look up information I need in order to have fruitfuldiscussions with the people I’m meeting. While I’m searching for a statistic, Ispot an article on a breakthrough in solar power transmission. I read it. I’mlearning as the train moves.

A young woman on vacation with her family in Florida goes to the Cocoa Beachpier. She watches the surfers paddling their boards out into the swells waitingfor the perfect wave in order to stand up and enjoy a few seconds of freedomthat comes from riding the waves. After a while, she turns her attention to thepier itself. It is made of wood and is anchored in concrete pilings that riseabove the water. Curious about how and when the pier was built, she takes outher smartphone and starts its Web browser. While standing and listening to theocean, she discovers that Cocoa Beach itself was founded by freed slaves afterthe American Civil War. She also learns that the pier was built in 1925.

The CEO of a large bank and the architect for its new headquarters meet at thebuilding site to examine the progress for the planned tower. The architect, whohas previously loaded “augmented reality” software into her mobile phone, pointsit toward the large excavation just in front of where she and her client arestanding. The phone “knows” exactly where it is located and in which directionit is pointing. It takes a picture of the excavation and then superimposes, toscale, a picture of the tower as it will look when it is finished. The CEO isimpressed, and more importantly, now has a very good idea of how the tower willlook in relation to its surroundings.

These are just a few of the exciting ways mobile learning can improve our lives.The first phase of MOBIlearn, a European program for supporting mobile learningin the workplace that involved over 1,000 work-based learners, found thatlearners and their trainers used mobile technologies for all of the followingactivities:

* Learners communicated with peers, tutors, and assessors.

* Learners collected video, audio, and photographic evidence for theirportfolios.

* Tutors and assessors assessed portfolio evidence and provided feedback.

* Learners gained access to learning content through the virtual learningenvironment or the Internet.

* Additional resources and instructional materials were provided through videos.

* Learners completed “written” work using Internet access for research, and theyused software to type up their tasks or assignments. (Savill-Smith, 2009)

In this book, I provide over 50 different ways that learning technologies canwork with “learners on the move,” giving them up-to-date, personalized, andrelevant information when they need it. Many people, especially in the businessworld, have not even heard of mobile learning. Its development over the past twodecades has mostly taken place in the context of mobile teaching for K-12schools or higher education. This book is among the very first to look at theapplication of mobile learning in businesses and large organizations, and toaddress how mobile learning can provide many businesses with a competitive edge.There are powerful business drivers pushing mobile technologies as a replacementfor traditional classroom-based training in order to create a workforce that ismore efficient, flexible, and informed.

The New Nomads

For the past several hundred years most of us in Western societies have beenbound to a series of places. We have a place to sleep, eat, and be with ourfamilies called home; we have a place where we go to earn money called theworkplace; we have places we go to learn called schools or universities; and wehave places to go for enjoyment such as movie theaters, sports centers, or “thegreat outdoors.”

All this is changing with something that Economist magazine calls “thenew nomadism” (Economist, 2008), where we are constantly on the movephysically, but still also connected to our friends, families, and workplace(s).Bryan Alexander remarked on this phenomenon on college campuses as early as 2004when he wrote: “… since this technology is mobile, students turn ‘nomad,’carrying conversations and thinking across campus spaces, as always, but nowwith the ability to Google a professor’s term, upload a comment to a classboard, and check for updates to today’s third assignment—all whilestriding across the quad” (Alexander, 2004). Today, we are all nomads. For manypeople, such as sales staff, transportation personnel, and top-tier executives,being mobile is the very essence of their work environments. And, for most ofus, commuting to work is an unavoidable fact of life and takes up a significantpart of the day.

What makes us successful nomads is not the fact that most of us these days areequipped, from our early teen years, with several mobile devices, but that allthese devices are now connected from almost any physical place we want to be, aslong as they are in range of mobile phone services. It is mobileconnectivity that allows us to move around freely and still have all thelines of communication open wherever we might be located physically. We canbecome so used to being connected all the time that we become anxious if ourbatteries run out of power, or if we can’t locate our mobile phone—acondition referred to as “nomophobia.”

Relatively seamless mobile connectivity is now available on trains in Europe andNorth America (Economist, 2006), and recently became available in flighton selected airlines. In these cases it is the user’s environment that is mobileand connected, allowing interaction with mobile devices such as notebookcomputers and smartphones.

John Traxler (2009a) has noted that “mobile technologies … alter the nature ofwork … especially of knowledge work.” These new technologies alter the balancebetween the need for training and performance support, and the provision ofthese services through traditional means. Traxler adds that “mobile learning isemerging as an entirely new and distinct concept.” Of course businesses, andeven departments within a business, vary greatly in terms of their mobilityneeds. In some businesses, such as delivery services, workers are mostlynomadic. In other businesses, most workers are sedentary—for example,employees at a call center usually do not move around while they work. It isimportant, therefore, to analyze the mobility profile of your company before youundertake to deliver mobile learning in a systematic way. Even in businesseswhere employees stay in one place, mobile learning can be used when workers arenot at their workplace. The need for speedier training is one of the maindrivers for the development of mobile learning. Unlike in past decades, thereare simply fewer opportunities to take time out for training. But the increaseddemand on workers for higher levels of performance also means that therelatively small amount of time set aside for training often takes a backseat tothe need to meet production goals. Hypercompetition and the resulting demand formultitasking means that companies are often constrained to do more with fewerpeople. The result is less and less available time for training. In 2005, forexample, it was estimated that the average number of training days completed inthe United States “per person per year” was down to two days (Edwards, 2005).All this means that training often has to be done “on the fly” or outside workenvironments. Mobile learning provides a solution to which many companies areturning.

A Brief History of Mobile Computing

The history of mobile computing is the amalgamation of three separate historicalthreads—the history of telecommunications, the history of radio, and thehistory of computing. It is not my purpose in this book to present thesehistories, but only to note some milestones along the way (Fig. 1.1).Technologies like the telegraph (both wired and wireless), the telephone, andradio needed to be in place before mobile communications could be developed.Like many innovations, the invention of mobile phones was a “mashup” of severalseparate technologies that came before.

In 1906 Lee de Forest, a radio engineer, sent a radio message to an experimentalphone in a car idling on a street in New York City. In 1910, in Sweden,electrical engineer Lars Magnus Ericsson, who had retired from the telegraph andtelephone business, built a telephone into his wife Hilda’s car. The phone inthe vehicle was connected by wires and poles to the overhead telephone linesthat were spreading through the Swedish countryside. The power for the telephonewas generated by cranking a handle. It wasn’t a mobile phone, but it was one ofthe earliest examples of getting a phone out of a static location and movingaround with it (Agar, 2005).

In 1946 a “mobile telephone service” was launched by AT&T in the United Statesusing bulky radiotelephones where only one person could speak at a time. Thesewere expensive accessories for cars, trains, and boats that only a few companiescould afford. The first of these phones weighed 76 pounds and could beconsidered “mobile” only in the sense that they were installed in various modesof transportation and not because they were actually portable. By the early1970s, various companies in the United States and Europe had pioneered cellphone technologies, bringing to the public true mobile phones that actuallyworked while their owners walked down a city street. Dr. Martin Cooper, aresearch scientist at Motorola, made the first “cell phone” call from a New Yorkstreet in 1973 (Fig. 1.2). The first cell phone network was set up inTokyo in 1979.

Within businesses, however, the adoption of mobile computing has been arelatively slow process. Even today, a company-provided mobile phone is oftenseen as a status symbol rather than a necessary business tool. Changingcorporate culture isn’t easy.

Commercial enterprises organized as corporations have been around for a fewhundred years. Their form and processes have been described and studied indetail. Up until the end of the 1960s, people “going into business” would havebeen expected to start at a relatively low status position and then to worktheir way up through the ranks until they rose to their highest level ofcompetence. The famous “Peter Principle” notwithstanding (i.e., that they wouldrise to their level of incompetence), most working people traditionally lookedforward to a long career working within one company or to building their ownbusiness.

What seemed to change everything was the advent of computer networking. Earlycomputers can be seen as giant calculators, working through formulas via a setof off-on switches. But it was the development of computer networking in theearly 1970s that helped push business into the constant state of flux that it isin today. The first computer networks were developed by the U.S. Department ofDefense laboratories (DARPA) and a few U.S universities.

As computer networking grew and spread throughout the world, the computersthemselves became smaller. In the 1960s, computers were known as mainframes andtook up several air-conditioned rooms. The interface between computers andhumans at that time was either a teletype machine, punched cards, or tape. WhenI was a Master’s level graduate student in the 1970s, minicomputers, such as theVAX, provided computing at a much lower price. With the use of “acoustic modems”(equipped with rubber cups that fitted over the phone), I could communicate withterminals from anywhere with a telephone line. As I was completing my doctoralstudies in the early 1980s, I witnessed the growth of personal computers such asthe Commodore PET and the IBM PC. It was during this time that I first saw theApple Lisa computer, which later became the Apple Macintosh. A lot has changedin a few decades.

Similarly, the history of mobile computing went through a set of stages startingwith heavy metal-cased television sets with a slot for a large floppy disk,accompanied by a bulky keyboard. We used to call these computers”luggables”—the first one I owned in 1983 was a Kaypro portable computerrunning the CP/M operating system. A year later, in 1984, the Psion Organizerwas released as the world’s first handheld computer or “personal informationmanager.” That same year, I bought one of the first laptops—a Radio ShackModel 100 with 24K of memory, and a 300-baud modem. It ran on batteries, anearly example of being “untethered” to a larger computer or an electricaloutlet, but its tiny LCD screen was not very useful to me while I was sitting ona beach in Southern France. Essentially, it was mostly a portable word processorand calculator, but its painfully slow modem (by today’s standards) showed thepower of e-mail and computer networking. In the summer of 1984 I was teachinggraduate classes in education at Memorial University in Newfoundland, and wasable to send the last chapter of my doctoral dissertation to the VAX computer atthe University of Toronto over the phone line. At the time it was magical, eventhough it was so slow that I could see the individual words scrolling across thescreen of the Model 100 as it communicated with the larger computer thousands ofmiles away.

The first educational uses of computers can be traced back to the history of”teaching machines” starting in the 1920s and “programmed instruction” methodsdeveloped in the 1950s. But true computer-based learning programs really beganwith the PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations) systemdeveloped for mainframe computers at the University of Illinois atUrbana-Champaign in 1960. The PLATO system featured multiple roles, includingstudents who could study assigned lessons and communicate with teachersthrough online notes, instructors, who could examine student progressdata, as well as communicate and take lessons themselves, and authors,who could do all of the above, plus create new lessons. There was also a fourthtype of user, called a multiple, which was used for demonstrations ofthe PLATO system.

The 1960s saw the development of many innovations that we now take for granted.The first graphical user interface, called Sketchpad, was invented in 1963 byIvan Sutherland, who published a description of it in his Ph.D. dissertation atMIT. In the same year, Doug Engelbart invented the computer mouse. By 1969 thefirst computer network was set up with funding from the U.S. military. Known asARPAnet (ARPA stands for the Advanced Research Projects Agency), it connectedfour computers at the University of California, Los Angeles, (UCLA), StanfordUniversity, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University ofUtah.

The suitcase-based computers, with their built-in television screens, wereexamples of portable computers, but they still were not really mobile. The userhad to carry these monsters around and then set them up on a desk or table inorder to work. The computers that came next were known as laptops or notebooksbecause of their small size and the obvious fact that they could be operatedfrom a lap. As laptops and notebooks were made smaller, the term subnotebookcame into use to refer to the lightest and smallest among them. Still smallerwere the 1980s’ programmable “pocket computers,” “personal informationmanagers,” and “electronic organizers,” and “personal digital assistants(PDAs),” introduced by Apple in 1992. Finally, smaller and more powerful mobilephones appeared, such as the Nokia 9000 Communicator, introduced in 1996. Thesewere the immediate precursors of today’s smartphones, and really opened up thepossibilities of mobile learning.

The Beginnings of Mobile Learning

The idea of mobile learning can be found in the science fiction of the1960s. By 1968 computer guru Alan Kay had proposed a portable personal computer”for children of all ages” called the Dynabook. In 1972, Xerox built a prototypeof Kay’s vision that could store up to 500 pages, or several hours of lowqualityaudio.

As Marshall McLuhan once remarked, “We look at the present through a rear-viewmirror. We march backwards into the future” (McLuhan and Fiore, 1967). So, it isnot surprising that the first metaphor for learning with a portable computer wasa book. Computers gradually got smaller in the 1980s, and Apple introduced itspersonal data assistant or PDA, called the Newton, in 1992, and followed upthroughout the 1990s with several model upgrades. In particular, a model calledthe eMate 300 was a version of the Newton designed for the school market.Smaller PDAs such as the Palm Pilot, introduced in 1996, took off in terms ofsales and captured the imagination of the public, including business executives.

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