I couldn’t understand some parts of this article, but it sounds interesting…

Nothing else if I can help it.

I really don’t think fully interactive mobile has arrived. I avoid using the mobile for any interactive online content unless I’m in a bind. This is in part due to online costs, esp. while travelling abroad, but even when I’m in the U.S. with a 3G connection and unlimited downloads I only use a mobile interface to a web site as an act of desperation - mobile browsers and traditional web/mobile web design approaches just aren’t there, and I’m not sure they ever will be.

Some email solutions set good examples for mobile web apps, I think MS Directpush actually presents a great example of a successful web 2.0 app, albeit one that’s a complete application.

Updating RSS feeds is typically done when the device is tethered to a pc with a real connection, but if I see an article/lesson I really want while on the move I can always download it, but this still isn’t really an interactive process. The great thing about RSS is it’s like email - once I download it the information stays on the device, offline, until I delete it.

Using widgets like the gmail midlet can be good, as the widget skips the requirement of downloading some sort of interface as part of every page request. Many of these still have a click and wait model, and if the data portion isn’t cached most of the benefit is lost.

The powerpoint in Hank’s last post discussed widgets a lot, and I do agree with a lot in that presentation. I think some combination of widgets and mobile oriented RSS are probably the best ways to go. The widget itself might use RSS to present content to the user, and/or download a user’s vocab lists for flashcard review and keep them cached until they request an update. To service the most users and most phones the two leading options are Java midlets or Flash Lite. Java is more ubiquitous, but a lot of the premium content on cpod is already in Flash - porting over to a flash light application might be faster.

The problem with the iphone’s widgets is it sounds like they’ll be semi-proprietary - i.e. only support on the iphone and OS X. The iphone is a bit to pricey and niche to be the killer app for this.

Those examples that you gave bring me to the heart of the problem. Does m-learning mean information on demand or learning on demand? I think both of your examples are of the former.

I’m really hoping to have someone give me an example of m-learning that is more than transitory information uptake (please do not interpret this as being critical of your comments). Believe me, I am not against m-learning for info retrival it is just I am hoping against hope that I can see an example that goes beyond transitory info. uptake.

IMHO earning, in the “ideal” sense, points to information that is taken in, digested, fit together with pieces that are already known and then retained for multiple future use. This kind of learning probably also needs some kind of reinforcement.

While single event, just in time, use and lose learning might be extremely beneficial is it learning in the “traditional” sense and does this matter?

In the pharmacy and can’t remember the Chinese for ‘aspirin’? Just query an online source.

Buying textiles in Mexico and want to get a price check on the price being offered by the market vendor? Ask the community through your phone.

I guess my point is that even though it is hard in advance to envisage exactly how new mediums and technologies will be used, having a resource as powerful as the internet in your pocket is bound to yield tremendous benefits - as long as service providers can figure out what kinds of resource and tool suit this medium. This is what we hope to explore in the coming months and years in the context of language learning.

I find your example to be a great one. Examples like this help us think more concretely.

In the situation that your described above I would never attempt to do any serious research, if I couldn’t have at least three sources open at the same time. The screen size on a m-device makes this impractical for the present. This is not a device that will make it easy to jump between a variety of sources making comparisons.

Moreover the cost (in terms of time spent learning on a small screen) and the cost of m-device air time makes it a very inefficient, cumbersome and ultimately expensive research tool in comparison to laptops.

I don’t see these things being used in this way at all.