Mobile learning - will the medium destroy the message?

This article was written for IT Training magazine.

Word count: 720 words

While I'm not quite at the 'stop the world I want to get off' stage, I do feel unnerved that technology now changes faster than our ability to adapt to it.

We take for granted that, during the time it takes to unwrap a new wonder gadget, the same manufacturer has released an updated version - rendering our purchase obsolete.

More worryingly, changes in technology are happening so quickly that they are undermining good communications. To see what I mean, compare one of your granddad's letters home from the trenches to one of your children's text messages.

It was only in 1992 that the first text message was sent (by a Vodaphone engineer called Neil Papworth, who sent the text “MERRY CHRISTMAS” to colleagues, in case you're interested). Text messaging has certainly been a success - last Valentine's Day, we sent 57.5 million text messages. But the 130 character limit, combined with a hopelessly inadequate input device, has resulted in a whole string of new (and nearly incomprehensible) TXT words.

Fair enough. Times change, and letter-writing isn't the formal thing that it was. But these low standards of communications now pervade our everyday lives - and most people either don't notice or don't care. Much of this comes from those writers who are responsible for the majority of written words which we see: advertisers.

I know that it's not only myself who is annoyed when I see e-mail spelt email (so how do you spell t-bone steak or x-ray then?) or Web site spelt website (so how do you spell building site?) - and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Posters surround us selling CD's instead of CDs. Hollywood even released a blockbuster Hugh Grant film with the title Two Weeks Notice - missing the single apostrophe which would give sense to the name.

I'm not a grumpy old man. I actually think that, in this fast-moving process of communications change, the world has gained more than it has lost. Desktop publishing, Web sites, e-mail and text messages have brought instant and borderless communication.

But there's a difference in the cultural impact of Jones the Butcher selling steak's instead of steaks and a multi-million dollar advertising budget promoting Two Weeks Notice instead of Two Weeks' Notice. The latter has so much clout that it can truly change the way society uses words, without a better excuse than ignorance.

And so we come to my main concerns with mobile learning. Being more mobile and having access to 'always connected' technology doesn't, in itself, make mobile learning a good (or bad) thing.

It's potentially good, because we can get connected to learning when or where we need to. It's potentially bad because, unlike a text message (where poor communications isn't a massive issue) this form of learning depends absolutely on good communications. Perhaps (and I throw this open for debate) it requires better communications than the available media can actually deliver.

Will mobile learning become the fast food of learning - small chunks of mediocre product thrown together by the unskilled, based on standards determined thousands of miles away? Will the medium become the message, as Marshall Macluan predicted?

Further, will it engender learning development to be undertaken by people who have but a slim understanding of learning or communications? If you don't think this is a risk, spend a little time browsing through some learning books, or have a look through the courseware of many official IT training courses, where the skills of the educationalist are deferred to those of the subject-matter expert - to the detriment of the learning material. Much of this mainstream 'learning' is educationally unsound garbage.

One notion I've always resisted is that of 'dot-com time' - where in the e-world, things need to be completed inexplicably faster, or you die. Not so: if something needs results that stick, it needs to be done well. Generally, the faster you do something, the less good the results will be.

And just how good for us spiritually is rushed learning? Sound bites forced into us on the tube, in the car or in hotels? As William Henry Davies said: “What is this life if full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?”

Mobile learning could be great - but let's get it right, and not get seduced by the speed and availability of mobile media.