Mobile learning and personal metrics

On the back of yesterday's #learningpoollive related blog posts from myself and Andrew Jacobs, and having just read the blog post entitled 12 principles of mobile learning, I was prompted to write some further thoughts:

Mobile learning is becoming one of the most prevalent forms of learning in the western industrialised society, due to a number of trends including smaller, more affordable devices, ubiquitous (more or less) universal connectivity, an increasingly itinerant work force, and the desire to connect with communities on a global as well as local basis. The rise is also due to people's desire to develop their learning informally. There are formal contexts for mobile learning, but it is in the leisure time/travelling/down time that mobile learning still comes to the fore. The first principle in the article above relates to access, and states:

"A mobile learning environment is about access to content, peers, experts, portfolio artifacts, credible sources, and previous thinking on relevant topics. It can be actuated via a smartphone or iPad, laptop or in-person, but access is constant–which in turn shifts a unique burden to learn on the shoulders of the student."

I couldn't agree more with this, but would add that there are also other elements that influence access, including the ability to download apps holding content that can be used in situations where there is no access to connection. Mobile devices also afford users the ability to annotate, organise and share content once they have found it, within their community of interest.

The second principle is perhaps even more interesting and relates to personal metrics:

"As mobile learning is a blend of the digital and physical, diverse metrics (i.e., measures) of understanding and 'performance of knowledge' will be available."

Metrics, or in common parlance, measurement of data, is going to be increasingly important not only for organisations who want to track their employees' performance, but also for schools, colleges and universities who want to maintain records of student achievements. We can go further than this and assume quite confidently that most people who interact with their mobile devices each day want to keep a record of the best content they have found, and also have an idea of how that content is impacting upon their daily lives. With the advent of augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality, the introduction of mobile apps such as Layar and Wikitude World Browser enable mobile device users to interact more with their physical environments.

Metrics gathered from these kind of interactions will be quite valuable, not only to retailers who want to harness direct marketing ("forget your problems John Anderton...") based on personalised identifiers such as your mobile device, but also for individuals who are monitoring their health, fitness or consumption of calories, for example. Gathering 'big data' from learning analytics is perhaps the motherlode for most large scale course providers such as EdX, Udacity and Coursera (MOOC platforms). Such large data sets can conceivably be sold on for a sizeable profit to companies who are interested. However, looking past this approach to monetisation and regarding the long term prospects of personal metrics, I see a bright future for those learners who wish to monitor how well they are doing, and to what extend they are able to perform their knowledge within their communities of practice.

More on this tomorrow.

Photo by Steve Wheeler


Mobile learning and personal metrics by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.