Small enough to hold in one hand, easily portable - and no risk of ever having a battery run out. Sounds like the ultimate smart phone, doesn't it?
Actually We're talking about a book, that old-school technology that you've always been able to take everywhere.
And here's a review of two books that can actually help you take your organization's mLearning (and this time we mean the electronic type) to the next level: The Mobile Learning Edge by Gary Woddill, Ed.D., and Designing mLearning by Clark N. Quinn.
The two books are great companions, as they each bring great focus to different portions of the mLearning equation.
Woodill's The Mobile Learning Edge is subtitled Tools and Technologies for Developing Your Teams. The book doesn't hone in on just smart phones or tablets, though - it really looks at mobile learning from a pretty broad perspective, suggesting that there are lots of other options that can help your employees learn while in motion.
Woodill points out early that his book is to be a guide for managers and executives who are looking for ways to bring mLearning into their organizational training programs - and to do it in the most effective ways possible.
So in addition to great chapters on effective ways to use mobile learning as a tool, there are also very important chapters on mLearning management and strategy at the organizational level.
Woodill supports the book with a website, www.mobilelearningedge.com. The site's downloads section includes a very practical Mobile Learning Implementation Road Map to help you and your organization get started on mLearning.
Quinn's Designing mLearning starts out early with a great review of just how humans learn - and then uses that as the basis for much of the rest of the book. Quinn's passion for changing the way that corporate learning tends to get created (and, by extension the way that many organizations start out on their earliest mLearning projects) really drives the book forward.
Like its title suggests, Designing mLearning focuses more on the design aspects of making valuable mLearning projects, but Quinn, like Woodill Quiin, recognizes that this design has to be carried out within the context of an organization. So he, too, delves into the area of organizational issues that often need to be addressed when implementing mLearning.
And of course, Quinn also supports the book with a website at www.designingmlearning.com. Quinn has also crafted a parallel book for mLearning in higher education called The Mobile Academy, which is also supported from this same website.
If your organization is just starting to grapple with mLearning, these two books are great places to start. And if your organization has already jumped in, these books are still very valuable as they could save you from a lot of costly mistakes.
Wondering how you're going to solve your content creation problem for mLearning?
Claro might be just what you're looking for. It's a web-based authoring tool that creates HTML5-compliant content as SCORM packages or web-based packages (that don't need an LMS).
Our Claro Overview webinars are a great way to learn more. Here are the dates for April - just use one of the links to sign up for a session:
Title: Claro Overview
Date: Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM EDT
Reserve your Webinar seat:
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/927849584
Title: Claro Overview
Date: Wednesday, April 11, 2012
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM EDT
Reserve your Webinar seat:
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/770031904
Title: Claro Overview
Date: Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM EDT
Reserve your Webinar seat:
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/627706593
Title: Claro Overview
Date: Wednesday, April 25, 2012
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM EDT
Reserve your Webinar seat:
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/885710057
Judy Unrein shares great ideas and resources on her blog OneHundredFortyWords (a nice pun on the 140-character limit of micro-blog tool Twitter).
If you'd like to get a better handle on just what HTML5 is, Marcin Wichary along with members of the Google Chrome team have put together a very helpful overview called HTML5 Rocks.
If you know some HTML code you'll get the most out of this site, but even non-coders will benefit from taking a tour.
