Mobile learning at LearnTrends

Not live blogging today, decided to take a little time to reflect instead.  I found Judy Brown’s session on Mlearning fascinating – she introduced me to so many things that I thought of, but not as deeply as she obviously has.  There was also the fun experience of watching the slides, listening to her talk and following the chat.  So many ideas, suggestions and sources for more ideas and suggestions!  But, all good.  You can read more about “mobile learning” here.

One of the most fascinating aspects was the discussion around codes – like barcodes, only digital – on things that “spoke” to your handheld (blackberry, iphone, new google phone coming out) and directed you to an item of learning or information about it, which would automatically pull up on your handheld.  Sounds sci-fi, but moving into mainstream in Europe and Japan.  Some of you may have heard of a cellphone communicating with a vending machine and our cellphones can talk to parking meters, so why not extend this into learning? Say you work for a financial institution and your employee is making an ATM card and it isn’t working out quite right.  Employee could wave their handheld device (let’s call it an iphone for argument sake) and a short online video appears walking them through the steps to fix.  Hm, it also reminds me of the movie “the Yes Men” and their infamous “Management Leisure Suit”, which you can watch here.

I thought it was ironic that I was participating in this session and jotted down notes on the piece of paper that was closest at hand in my dining-room/office.  I’m sure you can’t read the title, but it’s “Next Generation Talent Management: Insights on how workforce trends are changing the face of talent management”.