In 2007, mobile learning is in its infancy. Yet predictions are that by the time children now starting elementary school are entering college, the mobile device they carry will be a primary learning tool. That device may be THE main tool, replacing the PC, laptop, blackboard, video and audio delivery and more. Who will create these changes? How will they happen?

The first steps have been primarily technological and have taken place off campus. These have been the processes of creating and maturing handheld mobile devices capable of participating learning with powerful multimedia and broader and broader band connectivity. As we have watched, what was at first a telephone has become a multimedia connective device that will soon be fully interactive with the Internet.

Important next steps in the participation of mobile devices in learning will and should be taken on campus. These will be not technical but pedagogical and collaborative. Educators will expect and want to participate in inventing these content aspects of mobile education. Historians should lead the development of mobile studies of history, physicists should be present as mobile pedagogy is designed for their science, and so too for all academic disciplines. Content experts must participate in design for the ideas learning conveys to be well delivered.

There is also a network/mechanical reason why mobile learning will not be created outside of the higher education venue and delivered to campuses as a product. That reason is the emergence nature of network content. The Amazon.com book sales phenomenon provides an analogy. The truly awesome network of books available on Amazon has grown outward from individual nodes from individual books. The books are interconnected by their meaning, with each book connected to many others and participating in many patterns of books. A key to understanding how mobile learning will emerge in coming months and years is to know there could have been no Amazon.com without the underlying network that made it possible for the books to connect with each other by their meaning.

There is no more important first step for the emergence of mobile learning than the presence of a network, other than entrepreneurial professors willing to take the risk. I guess that’s where I come in. Hank

Modified from: http://www.ravesthoughts.com/ accessed 7/29/07