The mobile agenda

2013 was quite a busy year for me. Alongside my own commitments to teach and research, I was also invited to participate in events held in several countries outside the UK. During the year I found myself travelling to Singapore, Las Vegas, Doha, Riyadh, Ljubjana, Oslo, Brussels, Berlin, Prague, Cairo, Sligo and Malta. I also presented over a dozen live webinars, including keynotes for the excellent Reform Symposium on the future of education and the influential eLearning Guild. However, it was a short series of events held in the UK that arguably provoked my most productive few weeks, at least in terms of thinking and writing. I was very pleased to be invited by Learning Pool to headline their autumn tour, at venues in the cities of Sheffield, Cardiff and London. During the conference series, I worked closely with Denise Hudson-Lawson and Andrew Jacobs, two of the other invited speakers, in workshops on mobile learning. This was a subject high on the agenda at Learning Pool, and remains a very important trend for work-based learning. Mobile has interesting implications for the compulsory and higher education sectors too, not least because untethering learning has radical consequences for the future of resourcing, curricula development, teacher roles and autonomy for learners. It also presents new challenges for organisations around interoperability, data protection/security, personal metrics and privacy.

Working with Andrew and Denise was a lot of fun - we were involved together in 3 excellent panel debates during the Learning Pool tour - and it was also creative and thought provoking to such an extent that between us we were inspired to generate several blog posts around mobile learning. Here are a few of Andrew's thoughts on our collaboration. The posts I wrote during this period are listed below, complete with the ensuing conversation from readers. I hope you find them as thought provoking and relevant to your own work as I have. As ever you are very welcome to leave your own comments on these posts and the ideas that they represent.

• Mapping mobile learning 
• Mobile learning and personal metrics
• Self actuated mobile learning
• Mobile content curation
• 'Always On' learning
• Mobile learning and blended interaction
• Courses or learning episodes?

Photo by Steve Wheeler

The mobile agenda by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.