eLearning Roadtrip

Mobile learning at last?

Today, the more than half a billion mobile telephones connected to the Internet every day have changed expectations about what it takes to capture and share “occasionally connected” digitally distributed experiences involving images, animations, games, movies, videos, and music regardless of physical location. Texting and instant messaging have replaced e-mail as the preferred mode for personal digital communications for the under 40 crowd. Portable, relatively inexpensive personal GPS (global position services) devices continue to proliferate. Location-based services that can ride on the same technology infrastructures are making it possible to “smart-find” the ATM, restaurant, or service provider of choice, just as one can get directions while driving across town.

The IBM Institute for Business Value recently predicted that nearly a billion people would access the mobile Internet by 2011, engaging in transactions and interactions representing $80 billion in Web services revenue using mobile devices. When queried about the kinds of mobile services people are most interested in purchasing, respondents indicated that mapping (68%), banking (56%), and IM (Instant Messaging) (56%) topped the list of preferred Mobile Web features, followed closely by news (55%), mobile television (53%), and e-mail (52%). Many of us have had a taste of the conveniences and efficiencies that these mobile services promise, and there is a growing sense of anticipation about what these services will include in the near future. Disappointingly, mobile learning applications and performance support tools did not appear on the published list.

What is the Mobile Web going to mean for learning? While the jury may still be out on whether (elearning) courses on cell phones will generate much enthusiasm for mlearning, the fact is that the market for mobile content and services for learning and performance support is showing signs of growth, even as the cell phone market seems to be flattening. These days mobile content for learning may look more like a video, or a game, or a sim than an online tutorial that has been squished into a 240 x 480 screen. One of the ongoing debates in education circles is whether or not a video “mobi-sode” or a game delivered via a mobile phone likely to impact or influence a learner’s performance on a test. In fact, some even go so far as to say that mobile learning really isn't learning, that it's more about performance support and informal learning. (Which...I guess...somehow means that it's not learning?)

Perhaps the better question is whether or not a video accessed just-in-time was able to help a learner perform a task when it was needed, or if a particular portable game had helped the player rehearse key information so that he or she was prepared to respond in an emergency.

It may be that the success of mobile learning, with a stronger focus on enterprise mobility, will depend on finding common ground among learning designers, enterprise IT managers, line-of-business stakeholders, and enterprise end-users. Learning designers must balance their hopes for solutions for connecting people with information, ideas, and each other regardless of physical location, time of day, or choice of digital transmissions and reception, with the realities of what it takes to support the needs of mobile workers, students, and citizens. The degree to which an enterprise is willing to support its mobile stakeholders’ needs will be one of the most significant factors in determining whether or not mobile learning will provide a viable solution for serving its distributed performance support and professional development needs.

Mobile Learning and the Internet of Things

Several friends have teased me about my various tweets regarding the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last week, saying that I've sounded as if I were still working at Adobe. Ironically, it's only been since leaving Adobe that I can again focus on all of the technologies that are most likely to determine where learning - and elearning- are headed. One of those areas happens to be mobility: ubiquitous mobility, the mobile web, and mobile learning. So I have been watching the news about Adobe and so many other contributors to the mobile industry with much interest.

I have been following developments in mobility since right around 1992. General Magic's personal intelligent communicator operating system had just been released, while Apple Computer had just introduced the Newton. Anne Derryberry's team at Informania, Inc. demonstrated the potential for personal hand-held communications devices for learning and performance support at an ISPI conference that spring. It was the first time I had considered the possibly of situating learning at the point of need, moving from the desktop to devices that we would be able to carry around with us wherever we went.  

Shortly thereafter, my interest in mobility waned for a variety of technical issues (e.g. the handwriting recognition on the Newton was a bit primitive, the power of the devices were limited, transmission networks were still being built). Apple got cranky with General Magic, things got tied up in lawsuits. PICs became PDAs, mobile phones started to work better. But then the Internet got really interesting. Technologies like Flash and Dreamweaver started showing people the possibilities for creating rich engaging Web experiences on the Internet. Lots of excitement, lots of energy, lots of risk-taking.

After the dot.com bubble burst, all that innovation and excitement came to a grinding halt. Nobody was buying much of anything. Smart companies cut back on sales and marketing and started investing in whatever they thought their next big thing was going to be when the economy turned around. This was right around the time that Macromedia started the research and development to make Flash ubiquitous. Not just on computers but also on mobile phones, and game consoles and screens of all kinds.

So here it is, years later. Have the post-dot-com investment paid off? Last week seemed to be a big week for Adobe at GSMA. It was great to see all the announcements about the Open Screen Project, and the next version of Flash Lite, and the new partnerships with Palm and Nokia. Also great to know that there are 1 billion mobile devices that are Flash-enabled.  Not so great to Apple and Adobe continue their stand-off, so no Flash on iPhones in the immediate future.  But of course the iPhone has completely changed the debate - and that's a whole other blogpost...

But what was probably the most interesting of all for me was  connecting the dots between some mobile learning ideas related to the diffusion of innovation, and my recent fascination with the Internet of Things. The illustration above comes from a report from the International Telecommunication Union entitled Ubiquitous Network Communities: Their Impact on the Telecommunications Industry, April 2005. It show how over time telecommunications power has continued to get smaller and cheaper. The illustration makes the point that over time the computing power of mainframes have passed on to PCs. We are well on the way to seeing mobile phones and smart phones become our uber-computing tools of choice. Can "Smart Things" really be that far behind?

What seems clear is that we are just now reaching a point where elearning and distance learning, - where PCs are used to connect student to learning - are now part of the core mission of our schools and colleges and universities.  If you refer to the illustration - that means that we are just about 1/4 of the way up the "shrinking devices adoption curve". It is just now that after 5 years of active pursuit of a mobile learning agenda in the US that one can see signs of growth (although mobile learning today has as much to do with video, games and podcasts as it does with mobile telephony). Which means that if we wanted to put some numbers to that time dimension in the picture we may be looking at 6 years before the Internet of Things gets anywhere near mainstream adoption.

It does raise an interesting question - If we continue to have a hard time creating engaging computer based learning experiences after 15 years... and mobile learning is still an early adoption phenomenon after 7 years,  what is it going to take to enable the adoption of smart networked objects? Beyond that, what will it take to preapre us for teaching and learning in a completely distributed, mobilized and networked environment??

Learning and the Internet of Things

The more I see regarding developments in the world of interactive networked technologies, the more I am convinced that the future of learning is inextricably tied to the Internet of Things.

The Internet of Things has been discussed in computing circles for years. It refers to the wireless, self-configuring network that can be established between and among objects of all kinds using wireless technologies including WiFi, Bluetooth, RFID and GPS. It parallels the current network of addressable web pages while also including addressable inanimate objects that could be anything from your home's refrigerator to the shoes on your feet .

Perhaps the easiest way to think of the Internet of Things is as an increasingly smart network that links objects with other objects (including personal, portable computing devices carried by people just like you and me.).

It is a different model than building a “smart” Internet using the Semantic Web.  The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined. That makes it possible for the Web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines for finding and using web content. The Semantic Web is being built using existing naming protocols, such as URI, as well as smart, more meaningful metadata. In the Semantic Web, objects themselves do not converse, but now be referred to by other agents, such as servers acting on behalf of human owners.

The Internet of Things is based on the idea that any object can be tagged and tracked as easily as we now think of tagging (digital information) objects. One tagged, objects can searched for, charged for, managed, indexed and distributed.  Another way to think about this is that the Internet of Things depends on the addressability of each object or item in the network.

The implications of the Internet of Things are huge. "If all cans, books, shoes or parts of cars are equipped with minuscule identifying devices, daily life on our planet will undergo a transformation. Things like running out of stock or wasted products will no longer exist as we will know exactly what is being consumed on the other side of the globe. Theft will be a thing of the past as we will know where a product is at all times. The same applies to parcels lost in the post.”  

These all seem like such futuristic ways of thinking about the world. Until one realizes that the Internet of Things may be here right now. Almost.

Rob Salkowitz recently suggested that the Internet of Things is ready to take off. “The enabling technologies -- RFID, ubiquitous wireless and GPRS networks, Bluetooth, and other short-range transmission channels -- have become so cheap, small, and mundane as to be nearly invisible. Appliances increasingly integrate wireless connections, IP addresses, and Web interfaces as part of their basic design. GPS services are becoming standard on mobile devices.”

Further, he noted that the storage and processing capabilities needed to churn through the data generated by all this “smart stuff” have become commodities that any business can rent from utility providers like Amazon Web Services LLC . 

I wonder how many learning professionals have The Internet of Things on his or her own radar. The more I see what is happening in the healthcare, inventory and logistics worlds the more I am convinced that smarter tools and better services are going to have a significant impact on the ALL industries as we know them.  I predict that the learning industries are going to be shocked at the speed with which the Internet of Things is going to be upon us. Not just on content publishing and distribution for digital assets and devices of all kinds, but for things like location based performance support services that activate at the point of need, a true learning and performance support personalization, and enterprise systems that help realize the strategic power of information and technology on people and performance.