The closing session of the eLearning Guild's Strategies and Techniques for Implementing Mobile Learning session was presented by Brent Schlenker, a research and emerging technologies evangelist for the eLearning Guild. His topic was the Trends and the Future of m-Learning. Rather than focusing on individual elements of mobile learning Brent looked at the bigger picture and had the participants thinking about the implications of information transfer to mobile devices.
Hinging his talk on the appreciation that technology does not stand still, Brent noted that "yesterday" technology (i.e. the internet) was about consuming – the read-only internet. Today we can interact with our cellphones by sending messages, sending images and video, etc. In the future a server will send information that it thinks we need.
This last concept is one that was touched upon in one of yesterday's sessions, a new "push" learning concept. I suppose the one area that scared me came from the chat pod where people were suggesting a workaround to the small screen in most mobile devices would be projection technology. The question is will businesses want their people to project their information in public? Does that then defeat the purpose of mobile technology? do we want to risk projecting the wrong kind of information in public? Do we want to be inflicted with other peoples videos? Its bad enough that we have to listen to their cellphone conversations.
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2 comments:
Hi Dennis! I hadn't thought about the security risk of projected video, but that's a great point. The technology is very cool though and maybe people will simply need to be careful where they play it. Another alternative for secure info may be some sort of headset/goggles that displays the info.
No matter how it turns out there will be very cool solutions being tried over and over again in the next few years. Its a very fun time to be alive.
Cheers!
Brent
elearndev.blogspot.com
It's interesting that you suggest headset/goggles as an alternative. I just finished reading Halting States by Charles Stross. A futuristic thriller revolving around software companies that design multi-player computer games.
In his novel Stross has almost everyone wearing what he calls "specs," which are special glasses that provides all forms of heads-up display information. Of course, that opens up a whole new bag of worms as people get distracted from what's happening in the world around them and accidentally step out in front of a moving bus.
Sorry for the less then cheery thought, but all sides of technology need to be considered before implementation.
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