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On the trip home from mLearnCon last week, the “puddle jumper’ plane I was in passed through an epic thunderstorm. Lightning flashed outside the windows as the plane bounced around like some out of control amusement park ride. Experiences like that make me wonder why I chose to fly through the sky in a tubular tin can but we arrived safely and by the time I pulled in my driveway there was another thunderstorm busting loose. When you live in farm country like I do, storms are welcome and needed. They may make a lot of noise and maybe even cause some damage but the rain brings life to the corn and makes it shoot up like green missiles out of the black earth.

Last week I was able to experience different kinds of storms. They were storms of innovation, ingenuity and inspiration. It was a tremendous experience to spend three and a half days at mLearnCon 2010 in San Diego with colleagues in the mobile learning community. I can’t explain how valuable it is to network with the creative and smart people who are making such an impact in this new field. Ideas and collaboration were popping up like storm cells on a humid July day in the Great Plains. And like summer thunderstorms, the mobile learning storms that sprouted at mLearnCon will help bring forth a bumper crop of mobile learning applications later this year. I’d like to share some of the recurring ideas I heard that are good advice for anyone who is active in or planning on efforts to develop and deliver mobile learning content.

Start with low-hanging fruit. In your existing ILT or eLearning you have successful courses that have withstood the test of time. Your learners like them and you have received successful feedback from management regarding their effectiveness. If you have a course that fits that description, look at it as potential mLearning. You will almost certainly have to redesign it at different levels. The instructional or interactive design or both may not be appropriate for mobile delivery but that doesn’t mean it can’t translate to the new platform. If it’s your first mobile learning, it will be easier to sell to your audience if you are using a course that they already know and like.

Keep it simple, stud. I didn’t want to call you stupid to complete the KISS acronym. But simple is good in mLearning. I went to a presentation of two instructional designer/developers of a major telecommunications company and their first mobile learning effort was the equivalent sending out a jpeg of important content. It was information that was critically important to their audience that had been distributed on a card. Now the information goes out quickly and immediately and is readily available on a device that they carry around with them anyway. It was brilliantly simple. The effort also started to get the audience used to content delivery on their mobile device. The seeds were planted and future rain can cause those seeds to grow.

Short and sweet. More than once I heard that mobile learning experiences should be two to three minutes long. When I hear metrics like that I need some validation from usability or measurement and I never did learn how designers came to this conclusion. But it does make sense. The mobile learning context only allows for learning in short spurts and in deftly designed “chunks.” I would like to see some standards of mobile learning rise up as the field begins to walk instead of crawl. Send me thoughts in the comments about mobile learning standards.

As you know, storms can be calamitous as well. They can just be all sound and fury and not produce anything beneficial. There are some aspects of the mLearning field right now in which there is a lot of talking but still not a lot of discernible activity. In a future post, I am going to share some things I was hoping to find but did not see at mLearnCon.

In my farming community, when its time for harvest, you will often see a bountiful crop that is the result of hard work and at the same time, the many storms that passed across the fields over the growing season. For those of us in the mobile learning community, there will be some bumpy flights ahead for sure. But they can be through storms where we learn a lot and grow in our understanding of what makes effective mLearning. That would be a bountiful harvest indeed.

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