September 2011 - Page 2 of 2

This is a copy of an article I’ve written for a Wiley newsletter to promote my mlearning book.

The indicators are clear: the world is going mobile. Mobile subscriptions in the developed world are flattening out, not from lack of interest, but from saturation. People are accessing the internet more from mobile devices than desktops, and some people only access the internet via mobile! And when a small company like Google says that they‘re designing for mobile first and the desktop is an afterthought, it is safe to say mobile is on the move.

And the opportunities are huge. Through the centuries, we have continually extended our physical capabilities with tools: we‘ve developed more capable clothing to let us go to further extremes, more powerful transportation that can let us travel thousands of miles in a matter of hours, tools that can let us work on the scale of mountains or of molecules. We‘ve also used tools to augment our brains: books to serve as external memory, calculators to support our computational capability, phones to allow us to communicate at distances. Digital technology has proven to be the ultimate cognitive augment, doing exactly the things that our brains don‘t do well, so together we‘re truly formidable problem-solvers. And now, we have that capability wherever and whenever we need it. Which has important implications by itself, but there is more potential, too.

Don‘t be mislead by the label, mLearning is about so much more than courses on a phone. In fact, that‘s almost contra-indicated. What mobile learning really is about is augmenting formal learning, and augmenting performance regardless. The old â€˜event‘ model of learning really doesn‘t work very well, as our brains only can handle so much at a time. With mobile, however, we can extend that learning over time. And over space: we can turn the entire world into part of our learning environment, or to think about it another way, we can spread our learning environment over the world. Beyond learning, we can bring specific support to wherever we are: accessing information to make our shopping more effective, our understanding deeper, our interactions richer. We can access information, support our decisions, and share our experiences.

But there‘s also something unique to mobile, beyond a pocketable desktop. As the devices get more capable, they begin to know where we are, even which way we‘re facing, and they can start adding unique information specific to our current context, location-aware. We‘re just beginning to explore the possibilities, and you really do have to think differently to take advantage, but the potential is exciting. Are you mobilizing?

In an earlier post, I tried to convey the advantages of social activities in formal learning from the cognitive processing perspective, but my diagram apparently didn’t work for everyone. I took another shot for a presentation I gave on mobile social at the Guild’s mLearnCon, and I thought I’d raise it here as well.

I’m going through this diagram line by line, from the top.

If you go from just having an idea (first line) to trying to capture it as a product (next), whether a diagram or a screed, to communicate to some hypothetical reader, you find out that you might not have thought it out fully (the first benefit to having a personal journal, e.g. blogging). And you do some processing to generate that product.

Then, if someone actually reads it, they do some processing.

If they write a response, they do more processing to crystalize their thoughts.

Then, the author, when reading it, also does some more processing.

If someone else reads it, that person does some processing, and if they write a comment, well, the process continues.

The author could then write a reply to one or both, and that causes even more processing. And so on.

And this is good. Processing is part of learning, and focused processing is part of good learning design. So, having learners capture and communicate their thoughts is a valuable learning activity. It can be personal reflections, e.g. “what does this explain in my past” or “what will I do differently in the future”, or responses to a question.

If other learners are asked to read and constructively comment (not just “great post”), you can get valuable learning outcomes.

This extends to the social learning situation. Here, you have every learner contribute their initial thoughts on a group assignment (recommended).

Then, every learner reads the other proposals, and they start to put out their integrated ideas.

As they negotiate a shared understanding as a group response, some great processing is happening.

Ultimately, they create an outcome that’s richer than what they’d create on their own.

If you’ve created the right amount of ambiguity in the project, you’ll get some great discussions. The processing benefits here are because the learners will bring somewhat different interpretations and experiences to the project, and that diversity allows a mre robust understanding to emerge.

Consequently, I suggest that social learning adds benefits to the learning experience beyond what individual assignments can achieve. You can mimic some of these effects by staging additional information, but it’s not quite as effective as individual learning (nor near as engaging).

So, does this make sense? And, hopefully, inspire you to find ways to add social interaction into your learning experiences? It’s not unique to social media, but social media give you a channel to bring these benefits to learning whenever and wherever.

Archives for September 2011