M Is For Maybe

More than half of the knowledge workforce is on the move, their only connection to the electronic universe through small, portable, wireless devices. The race is on to use these devices – with all their not inconsiderable constraints –- to provide mobile workers with the knowledge and skills they require to operate at the coal face. And reluctant to saddle themselves with that somewhat tarnished ‘e’ prefix, they gave birth to a new buzzword – m-learning. In this chapter, I assess the arguments for mobile learning whilst trying to stay grounded in reality. Just maybe …

On the move

Everyone’s on the move, or so it seems. Even sad people with nowhere to go still ring their colleagues from home using their mobile phone just to give the impression that they’re out being important. And being important means you need your own letter of the alphabet to distinguish you from your desk-bound colleagues. When ‘e’ is no longer enough, only ‘m’ will do.

M-learning is not just electronic, it’s mobile. It’s e-learning for people who have learned the lesson that it’s hard to hit a moving target. Clark Quinn, director of cognitive systems at KnowledgePlanet, explains just what this really means: “M-learning is the intersection of mobile computing and e-learning, that includes anytime, anywhere resources; strong search capabilities; rich interaction; powerful support for effective learning; and performance-based assessment”. Phew!

Quinn goes on (doesn’t he?): “It’s e-learning through mobile computational devices: Palms, Windows CE machines, even your digital cell phone. Let’s call them information appliances.” Whatever we call them, the reality is that m-learning is just another channel, as Donna Abernathy rightly points out in ASTD’s Learning Circuits: “Relax, the ‘m’ represents the backstage delivery technology. Learning and performance are still the big stars.”