My Mobile Devices...

I do quite a bit of travel for my job with Blackboard.  I literally could not do my job if I did not have my mobile devices; they are an essential part of my life to keep in contact with colleagues, customers, family and friends.  Mobility and connectivity are a common part of my daily routine; over the past year I have seen the value of cloud computing for work, our coursework and for personal use.  I enjoy using technology and would consider myself an early adopter of new technologies.  I regularly use work and personal laptops, but I have found over the past couple of years that my mobile phone has become the most important device I use on a regular basis.   Cloud computing services makes being mobile so much easier today as services such as Gmail, Google Docs, Mobile Me, Google’s new cloud music service and many other similar services no longer tie me to one device.  If I am home I can use my personal computer to access files, documents and music, and when I travel I have a similar experience accessing the same services either on my work laptop or my mobile phone.  I use my mobile devices regularly throughout the day, my wife probably thinks I am on the computer or mobile phone too much; this is the downside to mobile technologies – they are a tool that can increase contact with others, but when we are together they are distracting and sometimes an annoyance. 

Thinking back to my undergraduate days in the mid-1990s, the discussion around technology and how to use this new service – the Internet, was about convergence.  Convergence was widely discussed about how technology was going to be used in the house as part of an ecosystem tied into appliances, security and climate control systems.  But 15 years later, these forecasts have not come to fruition.  Where convergence seems to be happening at a rapid rate is with mobile technology.  In my undergraduate days it was not conceivable that in your hand you could hold a very powerful computer that would allow you to: browse the web, take pictures, listen to music, watch movies, act as GPS and map, augment reality, send email and text messages, and act as a phone almost anywhere in the world. 

I have work with academic technologies since the late 1990s when I worked in an instructional technology lab at The George Washington University.  At that time many were trying to figure out how to best use the Internet for educational purpose.  With services like GOPHER and MOSAIC, universities understood the value of interconnecting researchers, but using these technologies for teaching and learning was still rather new.  I think we are at a similar stage with mobile technologies.  There are some great ideas for how it can be used in an educational context, but we are still in the early stages of mobile learning’s potential.  Mobile phones and tablets continue to become more powerful and operating systems become easier to use, but I do not think we have begun to tap the potential of mobile learning.

As I finish my first blog posting for EPSY 590, I want to share an interesting article I came across in Campus Technology regarding the use of Web 2.0 technologies for teaching and learning purposes.