I'll admit it: I'm hooked on m-learning! By m-learning I of course mean mobile learning, or perhaps more precisely, mobile-device-based-learning. I listen to a wide range of content via hand-held devices, sometimes my BlackBerry, but most often my rather simple, older generation iPod.
Although it took some time to get into the habit of carrying content around with me, I’ve since found myself productively using time that would have otherwise been wasted. Some examples of times when I watch, or more often simply listen, to what I would consider "learning content":
- Driving to work.
- Waiting at the airport, or riding on planes.
- Waiting in long lines (e.g., at the post office).
- While exercising.
What I listen to that can broadly be considered "learning content" is also quite varied. My favorite is probably the articles of The Economist magazine. Every article of each issue is available as downloadable MP3 Audio. I wish all the magazines I subscribe to offered this—Wired magazine, are you listening?
There is one other magazine that comes close to what The Economist offers, and it is one from our own Learning and Development industry. ASTD's T+D Magazine offers many of its articles as free audio downloads. You can see which ones are available by looking at the end of each article and checking for the podcast indicator.
Naturally, working for Element K, I have access to a lot of great learning content that we produce and content provided by our partners. Some of this content is available in formats that will work on mobile devices. For instance, we provide some of the content from selected Business Skills courses (around 100 of them by now!) as Audio MP3 files. I've listened to some of this content, in areas such as personal productivity, and found it to be a useful alternative when I don't have time to sit at my computer and take the full e-learning course.
But some of my favorite mobile learning content actually comes from some of our partners. I have three examples here. The first was a short-term situation that arose for me last summer. My wife and I were taking a vacation in France, but I took Spanish in high school and college, not French. So in order to learn some basics, I listened to several Audio MP3 vocabulary builder and dialogue lessons from the beginning-level French content provided by our partner Living Language. That was perfect for me for the week or two before the trip, and even the plane trip over the Atlantic.
I also regularly listen to book summaries as audio files from our partner GetAbstract. I love the concept of book summaries: I don't have time to read all the good business-related books that come out each year, but I do have time to read brief abstracts of them, or even better, listen to those abstracts on my drive into work.
And finally, our content partner 50 Lessons provides some 700 or so short video interviews of CEOs and other experts on a range of business topics. I've gone through the entire collection, created a list for myself of the ones I want to view, and then each month I tackle a dozen or so—sometimes watching them, sometimes just listening to the audio track. Either way, I get the value they provide.
— Thomas Stone (Tom_Stone@elementk.com)
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