Mobile Learning: 500,000 Blackberrys and Counting
I read an astonishing statistic recently. Over 500,000 employees of the US government are each provided with a Blackberry.
Actually, perhaps I shouldn't be surprised. After all, if you take all the various branches of any government, you are talking big numbers.
But when you begin to realise this is the scale on which mobile devices are being deployed throughout many organisations, you can begin to see why so many are, at the very least, thinking about mobile learning.
So what other factors might be driving the interest in or uptake of mobile learning? Here are three important ones:
A mobile workforce
I don't have the exact figures for the UK, but in the US the estimate is that at least 40% of the workforce is now 'mobile' (i.e. they only spend a small part of their working week in a fixed location). No question about it, getting these folks to fit into a fixed learning schedule is only going to get more challenging.
The daily commute
For those of us who do the daily grind into work on trains, trams and buses, mobile devices provide one means of distracting us from the potential horrors (or boredom) of that commute. So encouraging people to use a mobile device to learn (as well as check the footie or the latest celeb gossip) makes perfect sense.
Demographics
There's no question about it, the younger you are, the more likely you are to use your mobile in most aspects of daily life.
So to put it bluntly, people leaving full-time education now and coming into the world of work will find it extremely odd that mobile devices aren't being used as a means to deliver some aspects of learning.
I could go on, but I think you get the idea. Love them or loathe them, mobile devices are here to stay.
Personally, I hope more organisations will start to give themselves the mobile learning edge by embracing the medium and creating learning solutions that people really enjoy and get great benefit from.