I spent a day at the Learning Technologies show exhibition in London this week. There is a lot of talk of mobile, social, and informal learning at the vendor stalls this year. The most confused, if not misused, term seems to be mobile learning. One large learning systems provider says mobile learning is what’s done on your laptop. The mobile part is that the solution lets you complete your courses even when you are not connected to the Internet. To be fair it does help your mobile workforce learn through your LMS. MORE >>

Mobile learning (mLearning) is all the rage at the moment, but how do you get started and how do you maximize the mLearning plans you have? Simple, follow this free online course facilitated by 7 mobile experts and turn your mLearning knowledge into a practical project. Grab your mobile and optimize its use The MobiMOOC course will run for 6 weeks (2 April – 14 May). If you have a mobile phone or device, than grab it or go and buy one, it will make your learning much more authentic. As the course is focusing on mobile learning, it is called Mobi MOOC. MORE >>

This takes on a post I wrote several weeks ago, that spoke about four themes that will (and not five) predominate learning in the future. As we prepare to iterate development of Upside2Go, we will need to start figuring out what sort of features our users (learners, managers, administrators) would really like from a mobile LMS. Learning is about content and bums-in-seats? Knowing what we know now – that learning is intensely social, we must provide even better tools to facilitate the communication and interaction around topics of interest in the workplace. MORE >>

I recently came across a report on the Deloitte website , which estimates that global Smartphone market sales will touch 375 million by the end of 2011. This means that there are going to be millions of Smartphone users out there, who can access mobile learning anywhere, at any time. Mobile hardware has its own limitations and hence we need to adhere to some critical design conventions in order to make our mobile applications a success. Any mobile learning solution that we design needs to be easy to use even when our target audience is on the move. MORE >>

These are my live blogged notes from a webinar today with Float Learning: Instructional Design for Mobile #id4mlearning. Analyst at Float @gwoodill Jeff Tillet mLearning Strategist and Evangelist at Float (formerly ID at T-mobile) @mojotillett Chad Udell at Float @visualrinse www.floatlearning.com 18 month old company with focus on mobile. Resources: Gary Woodill’s The Mobile Learning Edge Clark Quinn, Designing mLearning Barbara Ballard, Designing the Mobile User Experience (We can tell a field is about to take off because there’s a big rash of books!) MORE >>