The use of mobile devices for education has been an interest of mine since 2011. But a lot has changed since the days of the iPhone 4 and the Nexus S: smartphones, which used to be the cutting edge of consumer technology are now ubiquitous to the point of being taken for granted. And technology vendors, who used to think of mobile as an afterthought, are developing apps and services with mobile compatibility as the first priority.
And I’ve seen attitudes shift among faculty too. As recently as 2015, many faculty I interacted with saw using smartphones for learning as so radical as to be frightening. In the last year, many faculty seem to view the notion as so obvious as to be boring.
Given these shifts in technology and attitudes towards the technology, this is a good time to check in on the current state of mobile learning, and it’s trajectory going forward.
No matter what you may have planned, or how cool or timely it may be, or how exactly it may fit into the material you had planned to cover that day, you’re going to run into a situation where something goes awry. Perhaps it’s a technology issue at work, and that great piece of software you were going to demo just isn’t going to work on the classroom computer. Could be that for some reason, half the class just didn’t participate in the online exercise you had so meticulously planned. What if you have been assuming that an exercise was going to go one way, only to find that it has gone in a completely unanticipated direction?
