iPhone 3.0, mobile learning and the ID

The blogs and news feeds have been filled with news from yesterday's Apple's press event during which the iPhone 3.0 was announced and profiled. There are many learning industry practice leaders who believe that Apple's iPhone has jump-started the long-anticipated adoption of mobile devices, products and services for learning and performance support. Therefore, yesterday's press event announcing a new iPhone version certainly attracted the attention of many of us from the elearning side of life who like to keep an eye on what the mobile tech leaders are doing.

Ian Thain has written a nice summary of yesterday's Apple event.  His Apple mobile stats are impressive:

• iPhone now in 80 Countries - 13.7M units in 2008
• 17M altogether.,.. including iPod Touch 30M units
• 800,000 downloads of the SDK & 50,000 companies & individuals join the Apple iPhone Developer Program (62% never developed for Apple before)
• Over 25,000 Apps Submitted 96% approved... 800,000 downloads

This still represents a relatively small percentage of the overall market penetration for smartphones, but the growing ecosystem around the Apps developers has been seen by many to be a transformative aspect for the mobile industry at a time when the rate of device adoption seems to be slowing. In another related article Thain goes on to predict that iPhones will be the most adopted enterprise smart phone for 2009.

As a mobile learning fan, it pleases me to see these discussions taking place. As the mobile web goes, so grow the opportunities for new and improved mobile learning applications.  As we're hearing from Apple about iPhones, from Steve Ballmer and Microsoft about the improvements in Windows Mobile OS, as RIM continues to rock with Blackberries for all, more Android and the G1 phones are on the way for 2009, and as Pre may give Palm another shot, there seem to be a number of places where US-based app developers can begin to anticipate what mobile learners want.

So, back to a point I had raised in the past couple of posts - a knowledge of learning theory and practice can be a great secret weapon if you happen to find yourself in a discussion on how to design games, apps and experience. Do not assume that many of the people currently involved in developing apps for learning have any background in learning. They may be great developers - or artists - or programmers - but they may not have much background with things like performance objectives and learning goals. Game and experience developers have recently come to understand that they have an opportunity to share what they know about mobility and games with the education and learning communities, and that we have some things that we can share in return.

But the learning community often presumes that those from outside learning are hungry to learn all about learning. And that is so often not the case. They just want to know how our knowledge of learning and cognition can make the game or mobile app better. We need to be mindful not to prosletyze ID methods and to focus on results, so we can let the results speak for themselves. With all due respect to Mark Prensky and his poke at ID fun-suckers, the 2007 Slate magazine piece entitled World of Borecraft also spawned much discussion about how educators often underestimate how hard it is to create something fun that has learning objectives.

We also often come to these conversations without the technical acumen needed to understand what some of our cognitive design specs entail.  I am so grateful for my years at Informania, Macromedia and Adobe for giving me exposure to really smart engineers who helped me understand the world of IT. It's hard for an ID to be credible if we don't know the basics of the technologies affecting our practice.

Out of curiousity -- how many IDs among us have ever tried to design a mobile learning application? Would you know where to begin?  Would you know when to hand it off?

Comments

[edwsonoma]

Some believe that it is the Apple developer community driving interest in iPhones that has helped accelerate iPhone (and iTouch) adoption. So yes, to part of your question. Do I think that L&D developers will be the ones to do it? Well, I would love to see that...I have never seen learning drive enterprise IT adoption. Usually it's the other way around. But if there was ever a time to see this dynamic shift it's now, as developers with a good app or two or three can do a very nice "long tail" business

[Jeff]

Hey Ellen, I wonder how much of the adoption of SmartPhones will be driven by those who are interested in developing for those devices, especially as interest in these types of devices are used more and more for things like mobile learning. To be honest, I never considered purchasing an iPhone or anything like them (my phone calls people just fine, thank you very much!), but the prospect of developing mobile learning applications is getting me more interested.

I realize that I may be in the extreme minority, but do you think we'll get to the point where developers are driving sales of smartphones and similar devices so that the learning programs they develop will be usable by their learning universe? For example, the L&D manager of corporate conglomerate ABC decides that the company needs to implement a mobile learning program, and as a result the company provides 2,000 iPhones for the learning universe. Those sales would have been triggered by one app developer, but it would make all of those learners available for additional mobile learning apps. I see the possibility of a snowball effect here.