Why Should Mobile Learning Be on Your Mind?
Vubiz was an exhibitor with KMSI at the popular ASTD show in Denver this week, and Mobile Learning took center stage. Everyone was talking about the issues with Flash and new development in HTML5 for the iPad (can you believe 67 million sold since inception). See more in a great article by Anne McCourt on Vubiz leadership in this important movement, also in this issue. Vubiz was thrilled to show attendees how fantastic our courses look on the iPad, other tablets and mobile phones. Elearning is changing drastically – at Vubiz, we’re excited to be on the cutting edge and ahead of the latest trends. This article from popular eLearning blogger Janet Clarey is worth sharing and timely - really makes you think about where we’re going.
Why Should Mobile Learning Be on Your Mind?
by Janet Clarey
I read the article Here’s Why Google and Facebook Might Completely Disappear in the Next 5 Years and, coupled with some research on mobile video I’m doing, paused because I suddenly felt like I was missing something. It was one of those "wait – what?" moments that I sometimes get as an analyst because you know, I have to know this stuff.
Anyway, the author of the article, Eric Jackson, shares two schools of thought – first, the outsized influence management teams have on organizational outcomes and second, the idea that managers don’t really matter all that much because organizational outcomes have more to do with industry effects. He admits to not thinking much of the latter (which comes from organizational ecology research) until recently. He believes that…
"More and more in tech, it seems that your long-term viability as a company is dependent on when you were born."
In the tech world, Jackson identifies 3 generations: Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and Mobile and suggests that prior generations of organizations can’t quite see the subtle changes between generations. He goes on to say that social companies born since 2010 (i.e. Instagram), view mobile as the primary (often exclusive) platform for their application.
[Those companies born since 2010] "don’t even think of launching via a web site. They assume, over time, people will use their mobile applications almost entirely instead of websites."
There’s an interesting tidbit in the article that comes from Tim Cook (CEO, Apple) about the speed of change…
"…through the last quarter [Q2 2012], I should say, which is just 2 years after we shipped the initial iPad, we’ve sold 67 million. And to put that in some context, it took us 24 years to sell that many Macs and 5 years for that many iPods and over 3 years for that many iPhones."
We don’t know the reason(s) why Facebook bought Instagram (born after 2010) for $1 Billion. Plenty of folks have opinions about it. Perhaps it’s because Instagram’s mobile app doesn’t blow. Perhaps it’s Facebook’s mobile strategy in action. That’s my take FWIW.
What does this mean for L&D? We have e-Learning 1.0 and e-Learning 2.0 and now have mobile learning -but are we just taking the 1.0 and 2.0 elements and putting them in mobile form? It seems we have to make sure our mobile learning can stand alone…you know, not totally blow.
