On Mobile Learning

While considering innovate ways that mobile learning could enhance education spaces, I reflected on ways I could incorporate the use of mobile devices into my online classroom to enhance the overall learning experience. I recently added Wimba, a collaborative learning tool, as an audio discussion tool to my course in Angel, and I think it’d be neat for my students to be able to record their audio posts or replies as a voice memo on their mobile devices and be able to upload them up to the thread. Unfortunately, from what I can find that functionality just doesn’t exist yet, so I may have to use a tool like VoiceThread if I decide to do that. On a more general scope, it seems like mobile devices, if independent of other learning tools, could create roadblocks in the learning process. Med Kharbach talks about the pros and cons of mobile learning in his Educational Technology blog, and lists accessibility to mobile phones and expense among two of the possible setbacks of integrating mobile devices into the classroom. When incorporated into the classroom as an optional tool to enhance existent content, though, I think this could be a very effective way for the classroom to spread outside of the defined space that is the classroom, whether that be the traditional face-to-face classroom, or a course housed on a Course Management System.