I also enjoyed and was encouraged by HandHeldLearning 2007. However I (old cynic?)
do not think everything in the garden is as rosy as it might be. I wrote this before I read Dan’s more optimistic piece here in FLUX.

Can we have innovative mobile learning? Is the fact that it is on a small pocketable device innovative enough? Will teachers be able to innovate “mobile learning”. Some weeks ago I wrote about an article on “heuristics for innovation” that started from reading Suw Charman’s blog. I asked if it the rules discussed there applied to teacher innovation. I have since attended a number of events and meetings on mobile learning. Based on my recent reading and listening I think there is a problem in providing truly innovative mobile learning – unless we look at the Apple iPhone.

Sue Charman says…. “I think it’s quite hard to predict who’s going to be innovative – sometimes, it’s not the people who think they are innovative. But the best innovators I know do have one thing in common – they are all at the coal face, facing problems every day and spending time thinking about how to solve those problems. They are steeped in technology. They eat, drink and sleep it. They understand what it can do, what it can’t do, and what it could do. They understand what is possible. This is absolutely essential for innovation – there’s no point having an idea if your idea isn’t actually technically feasible.”

When I really started in this game I could have a Sinclair or Acorn of my own. I could even take the RM380Z home for half-term in the car boot. All I required from my managers was that they did not stop me (a rare but possible occurrence). That technology along with my “free-time” and the opportunity to associate with interested others was all I needed. The technology of delivery was also the technology of authorship. The technology came with a relatively easy to use authoring environments (eg BBC Basic) . Thus equipped, many (not lots) teachers were able to explore and experiment and deliver interesting applications. Many young people were similarly empowered and gave rise to UK’s game industry. The development of tools like Apple Hypercard made it even better. The cycle between idea and exploitation was short. I contend that this happy band of tech-savvy teachers directly or indirectly were responsible for most ICT and learning practices (good or bad).

Today life is more difficult
- authoring tools (such as VLE tools) limit you to what THEY want you to do. Their vision is limited.
- Programming is a whole lot harder. Further, if you have written a program, there are a bunch of people with their own good reasons who do not want to put YOUR program(or that of any other unofficial innovator) on the school/college/LA network.

If you are working in the mobile environment it is even harder to “play” with new ideas.

The business model is getting in the way of innovation. Most solutions on offer, are offered by “solutions providers”. You have to buy in at a high level – that means school-wide is the minimum.

I’m not implying that the current solution providers are providing a bad solution- there are some well intentioned, intelligent, hard working suppliers out there and they are making some excellent products and services– however they may not perceive the problem.

For the interested unsupported teacher there is not much you can do. There are very few “let’s get my toe in the water and play” opportunities. In most cases the authority or school or college has to buy into the idea of mobile learning first first. This is a mistake in so many ways. Unless you have a trenche of committed, willing-to-experiment teachers where is the drive for new practice and product going to come from? We end up with a vendor-lead approach that we have in the current provision of learning platforms – and this is unsatisfactory. Setting up Mobimissions is way beyond any experimental teacher.

The worst case scenario – and it exists – is that weak teacher/lecturer lead, teacher’s-notes, practice – that moved from textbook (in the print era) to worksheet (in the reprographic era) to electronic page (in the VLE era) is now on the mobile phone. I almost cried when the institution’s logo took prominent place on a screen on a mobile-VLE demo – especially when the course was on human-computer interaction design.

Where are the exciting new practices that make real use of the unique affordances of mobile devices going to come from?

Apart from government or LA sponsored projects where is the diversity of potential practice going to come from?

Currently there are few exceptions to the top-down approach. For 30 days you can experiment with HotLava’s authoring environment- but to deploy you need site licenses and your experimentation dries up in 30 days. Futurelab’s Create a Scape will enable you to experiment within what it will allow you to do. There are mobile social media sites (like TWINE as suggested by Dan) – that let you do what social media will do. But where is the playground? Where is the LEGO?

We now have the Apple iPhone (yes it is expensive- but much, much cheaper than my first floppy disc drive in real terms). We have a different business model. Apple have made the development platform for iPhone open, familiar and relatively easy. They have used Safari – their web browser – as the main interface. They have use Canvas – their tool for creating web applications on Safari pages. What this means is that if you can design web content – you can make sophisticated mobile applications. The innovator is back in business. Anyone can develop for iPhone. I have a Mac or PC, my internet provider has given me webspace I do not currently use – I can be up and away.

There are of course critics the iPhone business model. You have to be committed to Apple’s chosen networks. However a lot can be done with the iPodtouch.

Hopefully (and this will be US driven) this will re-shape the market for everyone. There are already some great applications a few months after the launch – just follow these Techcrunch 4 pages.

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