Mobile Learning

According to Associated Press, (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060719/ap_on_hi_te/snail_e_mail):

Email is so last millenium. Young people see it as a good way to reach an elder — a parent, teacher or a boss — or to receive an attached file. But increasingly, the former darling of high-tech communication is losing favor to instant and text messaging, and to the chatter generated on blogs and social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

With email becoming increasingly susceptible to spam and junk mail, inboxes can be a pain to wade through. The article continues:

Beyond that, e-mail has become most associated with school and work.

“It used to be just fun,” says Danah Boyd, a doctoral candidate who studies social media at the University of California, Berkeley. “Now it’s about parents and authority.”

It means that many people often don’t respond to e-mails unless they have to.

This trend towards instant messaging, like SMS and MMS, means that mobile phones will become increasingly preferred as a communications platform, and educators will need to adapt to this preference. While the article makes the following prediction in the context of work, the word “companies” could just as easily be replaced by “educational institutions”:

“Like parents, they try to control their children,” [a senior design anthropologist at Microsoft] says. “But companies really need to respond to the way people work and communicate.”

technorati tags:messaging, mlearning, mobilephone, cellphone, m-learning, mobilelearning, im, instantmessaging, sms, mms

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