In thinking about mlearning, I have characterized the possibilities of mobile as augmenting formal, performance support, social, and contextual. It occurs to me, as I continue to think mobile, that there is another way to view it.
The realization came from the fact that you can use social for both augmenting formal learning and performance support, just as you can with content (both media files and interactive experiences). Which leads to a different way of characterizing the space. Thus, social versus content is a different cut through mobile than is formal learning versus performance support.
An interesting other cut is that you can do something contextual for any or all of these areas as well: you could provide a contextually relevant or local directory of mentors for formal social or collaborators for performance support. For formal content, you could leverage contextual elements with associated content, or even create an alternate reality game playing off the context. And for performance support, you might customize job aids to point to local resources, or provide augmented reality to annotate the world.
What I’m doing here is revising the way I cut through the space. Social plays a role in both formal and performance support, as does content. Contextual is really a third dimension in addition to the other two dimensions.The older characterization was useful for thinking through design, but I think this is conceptually cleaner.
I’m always trying to get better, and this seems more accurate. So, does it make sense to you? More importantly does this help, or only confound the space from the point of view of doing good mDesign?
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