Mobile Learning Study Group

Like many other schools, folks in my community are quite interested in learning more about the possibilities of highly portable mobile devices like the iPad, cellphones, iPods, etc as tools to personalize, customize, deepen and amplify learning. As a result, we recently launched a study group that is dedicated to learning more about mobile devices like the iPad. Teacher participation in this group is totally voluntary and I’m pleased to say that we have 16 participants!

In exchange for participation in the group, all members were given a small budget to go out and purchase an iPad model of their choosing, some accessories, and software (we're fortunate to have a GREAT relationship with the Apple Store on University Avenue in Palo Alto). Most participants chose the 16 GB model, but a few upgraded to the 3G capable models (some teachers went over budget and had to go into their own personal budgets to pay the difference). The expectations for the participants are posted over at the ‘About’ section of our blog. We chose this hardware/software distribution model because the iPad is a VERY personal device that is nearly impossible to manage using traditional IT practices. If this goes well, I might recommend that our school scale this distribution model to teacher laptops-eg, instead of the school’s IT department giving each teacher a standard hardware/software configuration every four years, we’d give folks a stipend of a certain amount so they could go out and choose the hardware/software mixture that works best for their needs.

One of the requirements for participation in this group is to submit blog posts to our group blog throughout the year. Stop by our blog and subscribe via email or RSS to keep up with our group’s progress and thinking throughout the year.

*image courtesy of FoxyCroxy on Flickr (Creative Commons License)

Operating System Wars are Back...this Time on Mobile Phones

I'm very excited about the promise of highly mobile, inexpensive phone devices as learning tools. Incredible learning applications like the gFlash flash card application and the Stanza eBook reader seem to appear at the iTunes app store on a daily basis. But here is my hang up...if members of a learning community build up a collection of flash cards with gFlash and publish them, those flash cards are only viewable by folks who have an iPhone or iPod touch. The flash cards created via gFlash aren't even available to view via a desktop or laptop computer. As a teacher, I would like the educational content that I post for my learners to be accessible via a variety of platforms and devices (wouldn't it seem odd, for example, if I created a review game that could only be viewable on a computer running windows xp??)

Now throw in the mobile devices of other members of the learning community - these devices might run different operating systems such as Google's Android, the Blackberry OS, or Windows Mobile. To my knowledge, there is very little interoperability of applications amongst these devices. From what I can gather, iPhone application developers are not necessarily making their applications available in the Android Market/Store, for example.

Perhaps it is a pipe dream, but I believe these applications should be developed with standards that allow them to be easily purchased and installed on a variety of devices. Until this happens, I think we're going to be back where we were at in the 90s with applications that only ran on specific operating systems.