eLearning Roadtrip

Putting the Internet of Things to Work

I've been interested in mobile learning solutions since 2004, when our VP of Macromedia Solutions Marketing wanted to see if there was market for mobile Flash in education. The short answer to that question was a big N-O. Lots of interest - but the ecosystem wasn't ready. Very different from today, when everywhere you look there is a new development or announcement or app that makes physical location irrelevant. (Sidenote: some of the work we did at the time got boiled down into articles published in 2005 - one in  Educause Review, and another one in ASTD T&D. Still relevant).

That market research experience changed my world view about mobile learning solutions from worrying about the tools and tech to being more focused on considering enterprise requirements of mobility. A little more than a year ago I shared some thoughts in a blogpost entitled Mobile Learning and the Internet of Things, about developments in the networked objects arena that seemed to have some fascinating implications for vendors interested in working with the mobile learning community.

Cut to 2010 - I literally just finished reading a GREAT McKinsey Quarterly newsletter article written by Michael Chui, Markus Löffler, and Roger Roberts entitled Internet of Things.  If you care about mobile support and services including elearning and performance support you should take a look. There's no point in my summarizing too deeply when you can click on this link. But I do want to provide enough to tease you into wanting to click. So here are a few high points:

"Predictable pathways of information are changing. The physical world itself is becoming a type of information system. In what’s called the Internet of Things, sensors and actuators embedded in physical objects—from roadways to pacemakers—are linked through wired and wireless networks, often using the same Internet Protocol (IP) that connects the Internet. These networks churn out huge volumes of data that flow to computers for analysis. When objects can both sense the environment and communicate, they become tools for understanding complexity and responding to it swiftly. What’s revolutionary in all this is that these physical information systems are now beginning to be deployed, and some of them even work largely without human intervention."

Got you hooked yet? Here's a bit more: The six areas where the Internet of Things is already being put to work:Information and Analysis

• Tracking Behavior

•  Enhanced Situational Awareness

•  Sensor-driven Decision Making

Automation and Control

•  Process optimization

•  Resource consumption optimization

•  Complex autonomous system

Take a look - it's a fascinating read. Just seems that with some much converging interest in the mobile web in general and mobile learning in particular, that there are quite a few learning solutions ideas lurking in here just waiting to hatched.

Mobile Services Taxonomy

Here are several of the featured slides that were included in the deck uploaded in last night's blog post. These all have to do with making a case that (1) mobility is a way of life (2) the mobile internet is changing the way that we do just about everything and (3) it might be helpful to have a taxonomy for determining where in the mobile services value chain one might be at any given time. It's hard to get people interested in systemic mobile learning adoption if we can't connect learning to other mobile drivers at the enteprise level. 

First thing is to consider the current state of  network/equipment adoption. There are 6.7 billion people living on the planet. There are 1.6 billion people connected to the internet (Parenthetically - we conduct more than 635 million Google searches every day. More than 115 billion emails every day. The fact that 70% of the world's emails are spam is one of the true marvels of the world.

One of the other interesting statistics noted below is that more than 1.8 million cellular telephones were sold today. More than all the new book titles for all of last year. I know, that's like comparing apples to zebras. But it's still fascinating to think about that many phones.

 

The fact that there are currently more than 4 BILLION mobile phone subscriptions speaks to the growing  ubiquity of mobile telephony. As mobile phone services attach themselves to the Internet, they are becoming today's Internet. The Mobile Web is becoming obvious and self evident.

 

The more I have reflected on the growing demand for mobile services, I keep thinking about how we have not yet really seen a dedicated rush to the market for  mobile learning (at least not in any systematized way, efforts of #HHL and #mlearn notwithstanding) I was reminded of a diagram I had sketched out to describe a mobile services taxonomy so we new-to-the-mobile-market types could get a better understand what the movitators for adopting mobile anything might be at the institutional level.

We know that people will respond to an emergency. The infrastructure required for providing emergency notifications uses the same basic foundation  as do other kinds of mobile services - weather and safety alerts to notifications, reminders learning services and social network services used by engaged communities of interest and practice.

Every time I hear innovators talk about the obvious self evident value of mobile learning I am reminded that it may take a few more steps in-between where most universities start with their institutional mobile services investments.

Mobile Web Statistics

Thanks to Dr. Kim Foreman and the crew from San Francisco State University's #ITEC830 class for the opportunity to spend last Thursday afternoon with them. 

Dr. Foreman had asked me to focus on the state of mobile learning and to share some of my views on the subject.  It was a great opportunity for organizing links and charts I've been collecting for the past several weeks in a somewhat cogent slide deck for the students to download. I've uploaded a PDF of the deck here. Help yourself. The materials contained in the deck include statistics from AdMob and ComScore, among others. Everything from stats on Twitter to the distribution of mobile operating systems in the US and India.

Download Mobile.SFSU10.08.09.final.

For anyone interested in some of my articles on the subject of mobile learning I invite you to click the Publications Tab in the right column of this blog. You will find several links to articles from the past few years.

It happened that we were meeting at the same time that #Lrnchat was scheduled. I generally try to sit in on #Lrnchat for at least part of the time so I fired up Tweetgrid while we were all talking in the classroom, and tried to follow along while sharing what was going on in the back-channel around us. But to be honest, I was busy with the face-to-face discussions. Are you kidding? Putting a former professor back in a classroom with students in it? I love the distance/virtual/distributed thing as much as anyone, but still...

Hope you enjoy the slides and articles.

Mobile Momentum

The past few weeks have represented a true watershed for the mobile Web, for the mobile networks/carriers/device ecosystem and for application developers who have been trying to figure out how to jump on the mobile content creation bandwagon. Still a bit of a stretch to make a direct positive correlation to mobile learning, per se. But the more that mobility is a no-brainer for everything else we do in our work and consumer lives, the more obvious and self-evident is the value of mobility for learning and performance support.

The Handheld Learning Conference (or #hhl, if you follow tweetstreams) concluded mid-week with reports of 1500 pleased attendees who are still churning over the ideas and debates that were shared while F2F. Adobe's MAX, the company's worldwide developer conference, featured lots of news for mobile developers: Flash on Blackberries, mobile Connect, Open Screen Project news  and, of course iPhone Flash compilers for CS5. Not exactly the Flash on iPhone that people have been hoping for, but at least Adobe is stepping up to the fact that Apple won't play with them. I saw a number of tweets from very excited elearning types who were speculating how great this will be for mlearning. Which of course is a whole other blog post. Stay tuned for that.

There were also more company announcements than usual, along with pointers to various industry reports and post. Here are links to just a few:

• Mobile Crunch reports that the mobile internet is experiencing a 34% jump this year, thanks to women, teens and seniors
• CTIA released its Semi-Annual Wireless Industry Survey results describing the telecommunications industry (e.g. number of subscribers, number of minutes - which exceeded 1 trillion for the first half of 2009). Here's a link to their research page. Lots of good, free info. While the full industry survey *is* for sale, there is a top-line, 10 page summary available with plenty of good info.
• AdMob's Mobile Metric Report provides a detailed look at statistics describing the relative mobile usage as reported from AdMob's network. They address things like worldwide operating system share. Top handsets and smartphones for the world markets.
• We're hearing about how Microsoft is going up against the iPhone and Android, Google's open source operating system. And seeing questions such as "Is Windows Mobile’s Relevance Gone Forever?" 
• We're reading about how AT&T Reverses Policy on iPhone Internet Calls - which is code for saying that you can now use Skype from your iPhone in certain markets
• The FCC is jumping into the dust-up with Apple, Google and AT&T regarding Google Voice.
• Verizon Wireless and Google ink a collaboration pact. Next up - Google Voice support. 
• Palm announces that they are offering review free app distribution for the Pre.
• Verizon is investing $1.3 billion USD in LTE. And yes u should know what that is.

What does this mean for learning and elearning professionals (remember, IMHO there *is* a difference, and there are a number of Roadtrip posts that have beaten that topic into the earth) who are trying to figure out how to integrate mobile learning into the toolset? 

Stay tuned for Part 2.

There's an App for That

Apple Computer announced today that their App Store had surpassed its 2 billionth download. As the article reporting the announcement observed, that's 6.6 million downloads a day. For 85,000 different applications. A major content pipeline of free and paid apps, produced by over 125,000 amateur and professional developers in more than 75 countries. 

At the One Infinite Loop Building at Apple's Cupertino campus, past the security gate, near the coffee shop, is a big display showing what looks like an electronic mosaic. There is a small image, a "tile" for each App in the Apple App Store. Every time someone downloads an App, its tile blinks. As I watched, some tiles barely blinked at all, while others were glowing steadily thanks to the number of hits they received. It was pretty amazing, really gives you and idea of the scope and scale of what the App store phenomenon looks like in real time. (Parenthetically the heat generated by the display was noticeable enough that I moved to another table.)

The Apps phenomenon has completely defined the market differentiation for a successful mobile product launch. "There's an app for that" has become a part of popular culture. Even so, apps aren't the only mobile device differentiator. Choice of carrier still matters, a lot. Earlier today I was reading an e-Week article talking about how the Palm Pre may end up being the "Smartphone Flop of the Year" because they are yet to hit 1 million sales in sales, and Verizon seems to be getting cold feet about providing network services (which is one of those chicken-and-egg situations...frankly, I've been waiting for the Verizon announcement to buy a Pre. I expect I'm not the only person in that situation. Sprint is just not a dominant carrier in my part of the world.)

Lest you think my data is call coming from Apple friendly sources, I should tell you that one of my favorite sources for mobile web statistics is admob.com. For example - In July they surveyed over 1,000 of our iPhone, iPod touch and Android users to find out more about their interaction and download behavior with apps. The report is now available on the admob.com site. Here are some highlights:

• Android and iPhone users download approximately 10 new apps a month, while iPod touch owners download an average of 18 per month
• More than 90 percent of Android and iPhone OS users browse and search for apps directly on their mobile device instead of their computer
•  Upgrading from the lite version was the top reason given when users were asked what drives them to purchase a paid app
•  iPhone and iPod touch users are twice as likely to purchase paid apps than Android users.
• Users who regularly download paid apps spend approximately $9 on an average of five paid downloads per month.

The tug-of-war between Apple and Google over Google Voice has continued to keep me from switching  from my Blackjack to get a new iPhone, but I don't think I am going to hold out much longer. The iPhone "App-eal" is just wearing me down. Any one of us who is interested in mobile experience needs to figure out why Apple iPhone members are such a disproportionately large percentage of the mobile internet.

...I'm sure there's probably a few apps for figuring that out.

mLearning at the Tipping Point

A few months ago (March 4th to be exact) I asked a question in this blog about whether it was possible to successful deploy mobile learning and performance support initiatives at the enterprise level. I am happy to say that, thanks to ongoing developments in several key market segments, we seem to have reached a tipping point for mobile learning. After years of watching and waiting and poking and pushing, the market variables that needed to be in play to push mobile learning over the top of mainstream awareness and adoption seem to have finally converged.

I was pleased to be at BlackBoard World 2009 this week for Michael Chasen's announcement that Blackboard has acquired TerriblyClever Design LLC, makers of MobilEdu((TM). As noted in the PR release, MobilEdu apps "allows education institutions to deliver a rich set of campus life services and content to mobile devices, uniquely branded for each institution, to better connect current students, parents, faculty, prospective students and alumni to the campus experience in a way that wasn't possible before. With an Apple((R)) iPhone, iPod Touch((R)) or other device with a mobile Web browser, MobilEdu users can navigate course catalogs and campus maps, e-mail professors and classmates and get real-time updates on their course schedules, campus events, news and sports teams."

When a mainstream company like BlackBoard makes an investment in a small edgy mobile apps company like TerriblyClever, LLC, that's a big deal. It means that there is finally enough evidence that the education market will support demand for mobile applications. I also like that Blackboard is strengthening its previous commitment to mobile services that it initiated with its acquisition of ConnectEd, now known as Blackboard Connect. This successful emergency notification business now has a number of use cases that point to how higher education customers are deploying notifications systems for campus security and operational announcements, as well as now extending their infrastructure to do more with student services, enrollment management, business continuity, and even with learning support and campus community-building. 

It's taken long enough to get to this point of recognizing the value and impact of enterprise mobility. I had my first real brush with mobility and learning in 2004 when my former boss at Macromedia asked me to take a look at scoping out the mobile market for education, to see what we could do to support Macromedia's agenda for getting Flash on mobile handsets around the world. I was thrilled. I worked with Bob Regan (now Director of Adobe's Worldwide Primary and Secondary education marketing) and Adi Sideman (CEO of Oddcast) to develop a Spanish language tutorial called "Let's go to Peru" for deployment on my Flash-enabled Nokia phone. We featured mobile learning at our Macromedia Higher Education Forum. I carried a variety of Nokia mobile phones that were loaded with Flash apps that I could demo at a moment's notice. I gave a presentation on mobile learning during a somewhat infamous Forum session with Curt Bonk and Chere Gibson at the University of Wisconsin Teaching and Learning at a Distance Conference.  I submitted an article called "Enabling Mobile Learning" to EDUCAUSE Review in May of 2005, and was very pleased when it was accepted for publication.

And then we waited. And waited. And wondered why mobile learning wasn't the killer app we thought it was going to be. It's not that individual innovators didn't keep trying to do cool things with mobile phone apps - it was just that individual pockets of innovation don't make a very good business case for supporting enterprise or institutional deployment. I wrote an article about THAT particular phenomenon in June, 2008 that was published by the eLearning Guild. The biggest reason, in my humble opinion, was that we completely "mis-underestimated" the complexity of the infrastructure - and organizational change and IT support required -for enterprise mobility to be achieved. Also the need for many early adopters to craft their own, "gerry-rigged" solutions for making their mobile services/ apps come together in any meaningful way limited adoption to those organizations with the tech capacity for building one's own mobile apps. And guess what else- it wasn't as much about Flash as many of us had hoped.

We in the US are still somewhat constrained by the need to choose either a handset OR a carrier. For example, I've had my eye on a Palm Pre. Problem is, the Pre only works with a network carrier that I don't currently use. I have resisted getting a new iPhone because AT&T has made it fairly unattractive for current subscribers to purchase a new phone, given the required service contract.

But regarless of these little irritations, it is really nice to see manufacturers taking smart-phones seriously. There are lots of choices, whether you are looking for an iPhone or a Pre, a Blackberry or a Nokia or an HTC Android phone. Depending on whether you want ATT or T-Mobile or Sprint or whoever else happens to be in your area there are choices for phone plans and data plans. I suppose it's not surprising that that phone companies are the largest advertisers when it comes to Internet ad spending (Download ComScoreDataPassport_1H2009).

It is also really wonderful to see that the market for mobile apps has been exploding thanks to the very successful Apple iPhone Apps portal. It is clear that mobile infrastructure needs to be robust enough for apps to be reliably connect users and distribute apps and content on demand, but that the real differentiators are the applications themselves. When the Apple App Store team celebrated its 1st birthday a few weeks ago they could point to more than 1 billion downloads of more that 50,000 different applications.

It's fantastic to see the number of mobile app designers and developers growing, seeing how many design schools are featuring mobile app development as part of their curricular offering. It's also especially nice to see more instructional designers who have specialized in mobile learning applications receiving more and more attention in the literature and on community websites.

And it's great to see a mainstream provider of learning management, transaction and notification solutions giving "the mobile lifestyle" such a vote of confidence. In tough economic times, people want to stick with enterprise solutions providers that can weather the slings and arrows of recessions and hype cycles. Looks like Blackboard has voted with its venture capital.

Will mLearning stand on its own? Frankly one of the big problems with enterprise adoption of innovations is that until there is a clear differentiating reason for people to change at an enterprise level innovation is not likely to get the kind of attention and support it needs to be successfully deployed. We've learned the hard way that mLearning will be successful when enterprise mobilty makes it economically feasible to do so. But it sure is a lot easier to consider when there is an enterprise-ready platform to help with the aggregattion, distribution and management of mobile experiences.

Notes from the Road

I had the opportunity to spend some time with my ID "peeps" at the eLearning Guild's Regional Instructional Design Symposium in Chicago this past Friday. Today have been getting smarter about the evolving world(s) of learning content, commerce and connections while attending BlackBoard World 2009 in National Harbor, MD.

I will have lots more to say about the conversations, the observations and insights in subsequent posts. For now I wanted to be sure to post my presentations from the two events, since several people have asked for copies. You can find the eLearning Guild presentation addressing new skills for IDs right here. Download RMID 602 Changing Role ID.2. If you are interested in knowing how notification technologies can serve as a catalyst for encouraging enterprise deployment of mobile services in colleges and universities please take a look here Download BBWORLD2009.FINAL.

More in a few days....for now, I need to get back to sessions!!

Skating to where the puck is going

I have been thinking a lot about Kendall Whitehouse's March 18th interview with Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft, in the recent issue of Knowledge@Wharton . Having connections to both men help make the interview particularly enjoyable; I had the pleasure of getting to know Kendall and his team from the Wharton School when they were the rock-star, go-to team for telling the Macromedia Flash platform story in education and I have continued to be an avid reader of their Knowledge@Wharton e-zine since those days. Stephen was our EVP of the worldwide field organization at Macromedia when I started working in solutions marketing, and my boss, Penny Wilson, was a direct report of Stephen's, so I have my "close to greatness" connections here as well. I have positive memories of Stephen's leadership at both MACR and ADBE, so it was great to catch up on what he is doing up in Redmond.

In the interview, Stephen shares a great point with Kendall, about how in tough economic times it is incumbent upon smart companies to think about where they want to be when things improve and to make investments in those areas to build future capacity. I do remember his talking on this topic in a number of education customer meetings - when there's no market for your goods, don't spend your money where it won't matter. Instead, invest in where you want to be when the markets turn around. This was regarding the Macromedia decisions to focus on Flash research. One direction, looking at RIAs Flex and AIR, is now the daily bread of many a developer. The other direction, Flash on mobile, is now coming into its own as an issue for North American businesses to attend to, finally.

Stephen's point is reminiscent of the advice that was supposedly given to Canadian hockey legend Wayne Gretsky by his father when teaching his son how to play the game. Walter's advice included to "skate where the puck's going, not where it's been."

Two parallel thoughts. One relates to the ongoing discussion I've been having with industry friends over the past several weeks about how now is the time for forward thinking individuals and enterprises to consider how to take advantage of the great economic and market changes that are going on around us. The other relates to my recent diatribes on the topic of rethinking professional preparation for instructional designers so that this profession has a shot at ongoing relevancy.

I think it would be enlightened self-interest to demonstrate the value of crawling beyond the online course management swamp, sharpen our learning, programming and production skills and reach out into the metasphere, the game zone, the mobile web and the cloud. We owe it to ourselves to learn how to flex business muscles. Big questions really need to be answered before diving into the middle of an audience analysis, like "How many people out there are likely to care about this?", and "What are the problems that my innovation can solve, and how much is it worth it to them for me to solve it?" An innovation without much likelihood of adoption may be a great intellectual curiousity, a worthy candidate for a research project. But during times when "just the right app" may be just the right thing to spark new business success stories, we need to know how to figure out "who cares" and "how much" right along with "what if". Metaphorically speaking, it's all part of learning to skate to be in just the right place at just the right time.

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?

What Do Mobile Youth Want?

 What do 1.2 billion mobile youth want?

That's an important question that Josh Dhaliwal and his colleagues at Mobile Youth have been asking and answering since 2001. In advance of their upcoming 2009 Report on Mobile Youth, Josh shared a snapshot view of what today's mobile youth market looks like today.

What strikes me about this graphic is the sheer mass of the market segment. If counted as the population of a country, mobile youth would represent the second biggest country in the world.  That suggests that figuring out what mobile youth want is a very very important thing for any and all of us who want to be successful in any kind of mobile learning marketplace in the future. And I find myself wondering if the learning and performance support community will ever be able to compete with ringtones, and music and game downloads.

I am am somewhat encouraged by a recent Gizmodo post regarding the 500,000 iPhone applications currently available, even though that same report noted more 30% of downloaded apps never get used more than once. Not sure what to say about all those fart applications, either. When you stop and think about it, it IS somewhat disconcerting to realize that fart apps represent 11% of the current total, and learning apps don't make this list.