I try to be fairly broad with my resources as I research mobile learning and the mobile lifestyle in general. The latest article I came across is from Information Week, here’s a link to the the “Top iPhone Healthcare Apps” article.

There are a couple of things I covered in previous posts, but I think it’s worth a fresh post since mobile healthcare is really blazing a trail for m-learning in many ways. Doctors have really taken to mobile technology in a way that most of us have not. For years, the healthcare industry has been deploying mobile technologies of all kinds to medical practitioners so they can access references, patient records and all sorts of other information necessary to them at the point of need. In the past, healthcare workers often relied on specialized mobile devices or somewhat combersome PDAs to reference topics pertinent to a patient’s condition. Now things are changing and doctors are able to use off the shelf consumer technologies like smartphones to access medical records, reference large catalogs of medical information and even push perscriptions to farmacies so the patient’s medicine is waiting for them when they get there. And using consumer technologies offers another big advantage, it allows the patient to proactively handle their health care by carrying their records with them on their mobile device.

AllOne is the application that patients use to manage their healthcare records and it even offers the ability to look up x-rays and other types of scans on the device so doctors can see them. Information Week references AllOne in another article.

I think it’s pretty amazing that we can facilitate an interactive relationship with doctors and patients through mobile technology. The applications used in mobile healthcare are also offering performance support and coaching to patients by reminding them to take medicine, record nutritional information (meals, ex. for diabetes patients) and even reminding them about appointments. Just think of how we’ll be using these types of relationships for other mobile learning tasks. If doctors can rely on mobile learning paradigms, most of us can give it a shot too.

According to this report from MediaPost (a web site devoted to advertising and mobility) mobile web usage continues to grow, which we knew. However, the report also goes on to talk about the frustrations many users experience with the mobile web. You can see the actual stats cited from Nielsen here.

Most users are probably frustrated by the “mobile web” because the web they are viewing is often the same web that’s formatted for the desktop and desktop browsers. Many of us who’ve tried to load a desktop site on a mobile browser know how poorly mobile browsers render those sites. Often you get a column of content with everything running vertically, and trying to find a link or read the text is so difficult that we just give up. Safari on the iPhone and Opera do better, but they are still not ideal for mobile users. And one thing that should be noted is that it’s not that difficult to build a mobile site. First of all, your users probably don’t want everything you are offering on your desktop site, especially if you have a lot of links and navigation. You may be able to work with a subset of content and navigation, so that makes it easier for the developer. But even if you have to provide most or all of your navigation, you can format it for mobile consumption so your users will stay on your site find the information they need. Some helpful development resources are shown below:

Great book about mobile web design:

http://www.cameronmoll.com/archives/000577.html

Some information to get you up on terminology and history:

http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/designing-for-mobile-web

Platform Specific Sites:

iPhone and Safari:

https://developer.apple.com/safari/ Note: Link is on the right side, “Safari on iPhone and iPod Touch”

https://developer.apple.com/safari/library/documentation/AppleApplications/Reference/WebKitDOMRef/index.html

animations: http://girliemac.com/blog/2008/07/19/webkit-css-animation-examples/

tips and pointers: http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/iphone-development-12-tips

simulator (will show you what it looks like in the iPhone frame, doesn’t mimic the touch, gestures, etc.) http://www.testiphone.com/

Windows Mobile:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa286514.aspx

Blackberry:

Blackberry development program area – http://na.blackberry.com/eng/developers/resources/

http://www.blackberry.com/knowledgecenterpublic/livelink.exe?func=ll&objId=800440&objAction=browse&sort=name

AND I WOULDN’T BE TRUE TO MY MOBILE DEV ROOTS WITHOUT FLASH/FLASH LITE – which should be picking up some significant steam as it gains support on most platforms. It’s still my personal favorite, but that’s the Flash Developer in me coming out, I’ve also done work on the other platforms above.

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/devices/?devcon=f2mobile

As an advocate for corporate mobile learning, I’m always encouraged when I hear about a company that takes it seriously. Lots of companies have experimented with podcasts and some have even produced html based learning content for their customers or employees, but it has yet to win broad acceptance in the corporate training community. However, there are a few exceptions, companies that have taken the plunge and they are realizing the benefits of their investment in mobile learning.

In an earlier post, I wrote about Mobile Learning at Merrill Lynch, where they’ve adopted m-Learning as a serious option for training their employees. In another, similar success story, Accenture (a large consulting firm) has embraced mobile learning for their employees and their senior executives in particular. Here’s a link to an article in Training Magazine where they discuss the mobile learning program at Accenture.

Accenture chose to use mobile learning as an augmentation to it’s normal e-Learning platform, specifically for compliance training on a number of topics. Results from their internal surveys indicate that learners liked the new mobile training modality and they plan to offer more of it in the future. Highlights from their internal survey of learners include the following observations:

- more than 1000 completions of 7 courses
- overall satisfaction rating of 4.4 out of 5, compared to 4.0 out of 5 for traditional e-Learning
- 92% of those surveyed would like to use their mobile device for training
- most executives who took the training would prefer their mobile learning in chunks of 10-15 minutes
- over half of the respondents would prefer an option to download their courses so they could take them when not connected to the Internet

An important thing to note here is the fact that some of the findings reinforce many of the guidelines we’ve been given when designing mobile learning assets. Those guidelines include keeping your mobile learning assets between 5-15 minutes (small chunks) and the suggestion that you consider the fact that the learner may not have a good connection/or any connection to the Internet. It’s good to see that the designers in this case took the time to consider these guidelines when designing their courses. You can read the whole article (here), make sure you read the “Quick Tips” section for some valuable insight into their design process, perhaps it can help you with your own designs. I really liked the idea of bookmarking all the pages, that makes a lot of sense for a mobile learner who may be intermittently engaged in your training.

Thanks to Training Magazine and author Sarah Boehle for this article.

I was reading Chris Dawson’s post on zdnet and it got me thinking. He posted about a new service called eduFire where educators can focus on teaching, and students can sign up for inexpensive courses on a wide variety of topics. The topics at eduFire are only limited by the subjects that people are willing to teach about. Basically, if you want to teach a topic, you teach that topic and you decide how much to charge for that course.

The idea of a mobile learning marketplace is exciting for me. I go back to the concept of what I call the “point of want” which is different than point of need learning. While learning at the point of need is very important and mobile learning can be leveraged very well for point of need learning, point of want learning deals with moments of inactivity, boredom and relaxation. Even though you may be relaxing with friends, you may want to learn how to cook a turkey or the intracacies of hybrid car. These are not topics you need to know at that moment necessarily, but they are topics that interest you and you would take advantage of the opportunity to learn about them when you have a moment.

I think a mobile learning marketplace that offered up inexpensive short courses on topics of interest would do well. People would be willing to pass over $1 or $2 for a bit of information catered to their mobile device and their current mobile status. A short 5-10 min, fairly self-contained learning bite would fulfill the need to feel productive even when you can’t be (or choose not to be), as learning often makes us feel a little better when we finish. As a developer, I would push for a standard look and feel for these objects and build a brand reputation for solid bits of learning while on the go. Certain standards would probably need to be enforced to keep each learning object at the right size and each would have to cover a topic in it’s entirety without the need to send learners out to view a lot of external resources (no constructivist approaches, this would have to be fairly passive from that perspective).

I am just starting to think about the potential of a market like that. Of course, there is an even bigger need for essential learning objects at the point of need, but we shouldn’t forget that learning can be a fun and leisurely activity for some as well.

If you haven’t seen this new technology being promoted by NVIDIA, you should check it out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cix3Ws2sOsU

This is a partnership between several organizations as you can see from the video, and it adds another layer of depth to the mobile augmented reality experience. I’ve written about other amazing technologies like the Layar Browser in previous posts, and this technology is similar but adds another element by allowing the user to interact with a fictional environment in the physical space. This is the type of technology that really showcases the things you can do with mobile devices. You couldn’t do this with a laptop or a desktop, you need the mobility to move your body around a fictional world. These augmented reality technologies are very interesting when we consider the applications for learning and for productivity in general. Imagine several executives standing around pointing their mobile devices at a point on the floor where an architect could begin to put things together as he shows them layout options for their new office building.

I try not to point out technology strictly based on it’s cool factor and the advancement of mobile learning is my focus. So I will again offer up a scenario, and I would like to point out that this level of augmented reality is really a new step in interactivity, one we haven’t seen with gaming systems or computer-based simulations because it allows us to map the virtual world into the physical space at any place or time, you are not tethered to a living room or classroom. A teacher or trainer could potentially bring a mobile device to any part of the world to work with a group of students using this technology.

So here’s your scenario: You are a trainer charged with teaching field technicians the features of your company’s new wind turbine assembly. You head out to meet the field techs armed with some reading material, a small plastic model of the assembly and your mobile device with a pre-programmed model map installed. When you get to your location, you give the students an orientation of the assembly by having them aim their mobile device’s camera at the model which renders a 3D model map of the assembly on their mobiles. As the students walk around the small plastic model, they are mimicking what it would be like to walk around the actual assembly, they see the parts and the operation of the assembly when it is in motion. At the end, you test the students by asking them to label the parts of the assembly and type in descriptions of each part and it’s functionality into their mobile device before sending off the results to you. You consolidate the results and score each tech, then provide feedback and remediation links to each student, linking them to parts of the assembly they missed.

We may begin to see this type of scenario in the coming months and years as the technology becomes more pervasive.