Is Mobile Learning Already Dead?
There was a piece on the BBC news website a couple of days ago, "Ten 100-year predictions that came true"?
It was looking at predictions made by an American civil engineer in 1900 about life in 2000. He got a good deal right - although he got one or two predictions spectacularly wrong. (If you want to read the article you can follow this link:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16444966).
It got me thinking back to a book I read in the early 90's, called "The Media Lab" by Nicholas Negreponte. At the time, it was a truly exciting read because it was predicting the near-future of technology. It's main theme: convergence.
Broadly, it was predicting that different forms of existing media and communication would converge into a kind of digital whole. At the time, a radical thought. Today, now that Negreponte's prediction has largely come true - we don't give it much of a thought.
But it struck me - one area of life where convergence has been strikingly absent is in the world of learning. We still tend to put different approaches to learning in very clear boxes with little cross-over between them.
So I begin to wonder if 2012 will be the year when this really starts to change. Here's why.
If you had asked me this time last year what the big theme of 2011 was going to be, without a moment's hesitation, I would have said mobile learning. But really it didn't happen. In fact I now find myself wondering if mobile learning as a discrete concept is dead before it's even got started.
When the term was first coined, the mobile world was a very simple place. It consisted of - well, mobile phones. Several years later and mobile devices come in all shapes and sizes and each new innovation just blurs the line between what's mobile and what's not.
Instead of talking about e-learning and mobile learning as separate concepts, it seems to me we are moving into a world of digital learning which will be available across a range of devices - some more mobile than others.
And it may not just be e-learning and mobile learning where the lines will blur and the content will start to converge. Recently, I read Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs. Apparently, he had his sights set on doing something radical with textbooks. Who knows what that will involve, but at the very least, it will surely be about enhanced digital content provided on iPads and iPhones. More blurring, more convergence.
For sure, we have a long journey ahead (with plenty of compatibility hurdles to cross along the way) but I wonder if 2012 will be the year when the view of the road ahead starts to become much clearer?
