Made it back from mLearnCon 2011 in San Jose in one piece, after a cooped-up 24 hours on a sardine can of a plane. It was interesting to be at the event as an exhibitor, interacting with visitors to our stall and observing other products and technology at work with the other exhibitors. Some trends seemed clear, while the direction in which mobile instructional technology is heading isn’t quite certain yet. The diversity in solutions and the ways organizations are leveraging them make for many forks in the road. Some trends that were quite obvious:
- Content still matters to an extent; and authoring it too. Content generation is moving to users/learners and not just SMEs/trainers/IDs/L&D.
- Mobile devices markets are still fragmented, differing features, screen sizes and operating systems make singular delivery of learning applications a challenge, HTML5 coupled with persistent data storage and computing in the cloud will offer solace.
- Not every element of the organization or every type of organization will benefit equally from mobile learning; certain types of organizations and certain groups of employees will see good benefits.
- Mobile is social; that’s what the devices were for and that’s how the technology needs to be leveraged.
- Lastly, mobile learning needs to address a problem; and that mobile learning may not necessarily be the answer to every learning need.
I will post detailed impressions of what I saw and heard at the exposition later this week.
A shout out to Janet Clarey, Gary Woodill, and Tribal’s Geoff Stead, ; it was very nice to meet you in person.
