Owing to sins in my past, I not only am speaking on mobile learning at the eLearning Guild’s Learning Solutions conference e-Learning Foundations Intensive session, but also introduced the tools section. The tools will be covered by smart folks like Patti Shank, Harry Mellon, Steve Foreman, and Karen Hyder, but I was supposed to set the context.
Now, I talked about a number of things, including vendors, total cost of ownership, tradeoffs, and the development process, but I also included the following diagram attempting to capture the layers of systems that support tools, and both formal and informal. In some ways the distinctions I make are arbitrary (not to say abstract :), but still, I intended this to be a useful characterization of the space:
The point here is that on top of the hardware and systems are applications. There are assets (with media tools) you create that can (and should) be managed, and then they’re aggregated into content whether courses or resources, that are accessible through synchronous or asynchronous courses or games, portals or feeds, and managed whether through an LMS or a Social Networking System.
The graphic was hard to see on the screen (mea culpa), so I’ve reproduced it here. Does this make sense?
If we look at our human capabilities, we’re very good pattern matchers, but pretty bad at exercising rote performance. So we can identify problems, and strategize about solutions, but when it comes to executing rote tasks, like calculation, we’re slow and error prone. From the point of the view of a problem we’re trying to solve, we’re not as effective as we could be.