I’ve certainly got absolutely no objections to people hooking up to a wireless internet connection in a cafe to engage with learning… perhaps that’s the way they learn best, with unlimited steaming lattes at beck and call. I just feel that mobile learning has much greater potential than turning a cafe into a serviced computer lab.

I think there’s a place for enabling convenience in mobile learning, such as working from a cafe, or listening to a lecture while jogging; but if convenience was the be-all and end-all of (by way of comparison) online learning, we’d just have a bunch of uploaded Word documents for students to print at home or view at a cafe, instead of exploiting all of the interactivity, communications, and multimedia capabilities that the online environment supports to make online learning the best it can be.

Likewise, for me at least, mobile learning is about exploiting aspects of learner mobility to make learning the best it can be, and less about simply making resources portable.

For example, what if your always-on, GPS-enabled PDA could *tell you* when you were near a landmark or point of interest, relevant to your learning needs? You’re an architecture student, and you walk along the street with this thing in your pocket. It vibrates to alert you of a learning opportunity: “The building on your left was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright; the Catholic church straight ahead is based on a Gothic design”. You can click through the links for more information on the subtopics. You walk up to the church, and it continues “The Annex section you’re looking at was completed 50 years after the rest of the church, and shows simpler ornamentation”.

There’s no reason that this exact scenario couldn’t be done with current mobile technology.

Likewise, using handheld devices, learners can record their own learning and immediately share it with others. For example, you’re in the church, and you notice that the interior of the church is definitely not Gothic. You read a plaque on the wall, and it turns out that the interior was renovated in the 1930’s in an Art Deco style. You record this into your handheld device, along with a photo of the church interior, and it’s immediately uploaded to the online database, along with your GPS coordinates, so that future learners can benefit from this insight. It’d be way more difficult to achieve this kind of thing booting up your laptop, attaching your webcam, taking a photo of the church with it, and uploading it.

Best practices and quality resources in online learning are full of interactive activities that engage the learner; many educators are going nuts over the ability to “walk around” in virtual 3D worlds in SecondLife. Yet mobile learning can provide the ultimate in interactivity, with learners engaging and interacting with the real world; and the ultimate in 3D worlds in this “FirstLife”, with textures, smells, and feedback that aren’t even a remote possibility in virtual ones. Shouldn’t we be using those opportunities?

I could see that the convenience (or otherwise) of carrying a laptop around being an issue but given the way laptops pop up in cafes and such now and the early stepsbeing taken to connect entire cities with wireless broadband, it seems like something that people are just going to get used to.

It’s perhaps a less spontaneous form of mobile learning but surely it’s going to keep on coming.

Let’s consider the ramifications of that statement though. If it’s really all about the learner and not the technology, then the ideal m-learning “technology” should be as “invisible” (transparent, easy-to-use, facilitative, and unintrusive) as possible, so that the technology itself poses the least possible resistance to the process of learning.

If the learning technology or approach is clumsy, inconvenient, or socially unacceptable, then the technology itself imposes barriers to learning. This is why ubiquitous, “social” devices like cellphones and iPods can be attractive platforms for learning – they’re always available and discreet enough to be always on, allowing the focus to be on the learning, and not on the technology.

What do you think of this interpretation of Prof. Mike Sharples’ assertion?