m-Learning Device is Coming: Apple iPhone

Apple's new iPhone is really quite amazing. I'm not usually a gadget guy, but you ought to check this out. It really has some great potential as an m-learning device. It will have some of the same limitations of any m-learning device, but it does give us a good glimpse of the future. Check out Steve Job's introduction of the iPhone by clicking here. Job's keynote is not only interesting for the content. It's great theater as well. I clicked on it to find a quote, but I ended up watching almost the whole damn keynote. I found it inspiring. And I don't think it was inspiring because I was once the proud owner of the first line of the Apple Macintosh's---the one's with the 128K disk drives. SMILE.

Of course, there is always a downside isn't there. Check out this article from the NY Times on how Apple is restricting iPod and iTunes users in using music files. Is Apple in danger of losing it's Teflon-coated image as the good-tech angel?

You can hear an analysis of the iPhone and Apple's stock option troubles on the radio show OnPoint.

Lev Grossman wrote the following in Time Magazine.

"Everybody hates their phone," Jobs says, "and that's not a good thing. And there's an opportunity there." To Jobs's perfectionist eyes, phones are broken. Jobs likes things that are broken. It means he can make something that isn't and sell it to you for a premium price.

This brilliant business analysis ought to relate to our industry as well. What's out there in the training-and-development, e-learning, learning-and-performance field that is broken? What can we fix? What can we get people to actually pay for?

Stay tuned for my answers to these questions over the next couple years. And leave your comments about what is broken and what can be fixed.

Comments

[DonaldHTaylor]

Will - Even as someone deeply involved in learning technologies, for me one thing is broken: we're not getting the basics right.

While everyone swoons over YouTube and the new generation of digital natives, too many people (of all ages) still can't use technology adequately - because they haven't learned properly. Whether it's how to set up a flat table of information so that you can pull out what you want (normally in an Excel spreadsheet) or how to produce a table in Word, it's very easy to hire new graduates who can't do this stuff.

I don't have a glib solution to this, but I will say that whatever we do in technology-enhanced learning, learning must always take precedence over technology.

[Lee Kraus]

Will, I think that we in the educational technology world haven't been able to make some of the challenging decisions that Apple is willing to make about design. Such as simple is better. Remove destractions whenever possible. You probably think the iPhone has the potential to be an m-learning phone because it is, relitive to other technologies, a simple device. I think it might serve those of us in the education realm to work harder at getting to simplicity and clearity and making some of the trade-offs necessary to accomplish this. And, I'm not throwing stones, this should start with me.