Last week I was with a colleague at a client meeting just outside of Melbourne. As we walked out after the meeting, he flipped out his iPhone, opened the ‘goCatch’ app and ordered a cab in just a few seconds. And there the cab was in about 5 minutes. Easy!
I’m not telling you anything new. Such things have been possible for a few years now and we’ve all probably got used to it. There are new uses of mobile emerging every day – like the one mentioned in this article, which describes how a hotel chain wants you to use your mobile phone as the room key. There’s a whole list of creative uses of mobile phones – this Facebook page captures some of them. And if you want to see some interesting ways in which people in India use their mobile phones.
There’s one underlying theme in all the ways we currently use mobile and also the emerging uses that I just mentioned: They’re all about getting stuff done. They’re very purposeful. And interestingly, none of them is about learning, specifically. Any learning that happens while you get stuff done is almost incidental. That’s probably the key thought we need to have when trying to deliver any learning on mobile phones. At best it can be performance support.
