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mLearnCon 2012: Part 1

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The sessions are intensive. The ground they cover is formidable. The people I have met come from all kinds of backgrounds: from Canadian Military to CIA to publisher reps to LMS vendors.

For the afternoon sessions, I am so tired I go back to my room for a 10 minute power nap during breaks so that I don't fall apart. Of course, to remedy the situation, I eat some seafood, float in the pool, and bake in the sauna. In the end all is well.

At the end of all this hard work, some things about mobile learning and how it would apply to us back at Bow Valley College has become clear. There are so many devices out there that building native apps for each of these devices would be exhaustive, even using cross-platform kits: secy but exhaustive. If we are to build apps, they should be web apps.

These web apps can be created using current web technologies, such as dreamweaver which comes with spry and html 5 extensions. Google has tapped into this idea and has moved all of its mobile apps back to the cloud as web apps. And best of all, these apps would not have to be distributed through the iTunes store or the Android marketplace.

And before we even think about web apps, we need to think about works well for us in the mobile realm. Really, mLearning for us would mean the delivery of content, such as vodcasts, through platforms, like YouTube, readily available on most smartphones.

The accessibility of SMS is formidable. Most of our students might have SMS as their only access. SMS texting and tweets are so comparable. BVC should explore the possibilities of integrating the two for the purposes of communication.

If there is one thing that I have come to realize after attending all these sessions and meeting all these people from various organizations, in the end, no matter how we try to control it, mLearning remains a personal and intimate media and our audiences will control their experiences. At best we can provide opportunities and meet the students where they are. We will have to learn how to incorporate some level of social media (and the mere term sends shivers down my spine) into our practices.

P.S. I thought I was one of the few Canadians down here. Not so. In fact, I even met someone from NorQuest during the last session. So we are not the only ones making a foray into this area.



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