#mLearnCon Reflections: mLearning is Growing Up by Kasper Spiro

We welcome Kasper Spiro, CEO of Easy Generator as a Guest Writer to TWIST to share his thoughts on the last week’s mLearn Conference and Expo.

CaptureI loved this mLearncon, I really did. When I had to come up with a title for this recap it didn’t come to mind immediately. At first glance there was no leading trend or great news. I had to reread the posts about the previous mLearn Conferences I attended before it came to me.

The Maturity of mLearning

In years past, there where some early adopters in mLearning, but most of them were just publishing existing courses to tablets. The rest of the attendees were thinking “I need to do something with mobile, but what and why?”. That is the difference with this year’s conference. mLearning has matured.

At first mobile was seen as a replacement for eLearning, and people where bringing their old courses to tablets. This year I saw many examples of mLearning that really take advantage of the unique features of the mobile devices and more and more on phones, not tablets. Smart phones are location and context aware and you have them always with you; this makes it ideal for performance support while you are on the go. Mobile is also ideal for short nuggets of information pushed to mobile, especially short video’s. People are beginning to use the other features of the devices, such as cameras.

Design principles are more clear and more people have a proper strategy in place, ensuring the place of mobile learning in the total learning environment. Another sign of us catching up with the technique is that we are also looking forward. There already is a discussion on wearables (like Google Glass, smart watches and other sensors that we will carry in the near future). A great step forward.

IMG_5093It was a great conference. I attended three keynotes and 10 sessions, almost all of which met the expectations I had, varying from good to excellent. I learned a lot. The highlight of the conference for me was the keynote by Karen McGrane. It was a great presentation and it put a lot of things for me in place. That is my biggest personal take away. I will use many of the tips shared in her session in the product development of the new web edition of easygenerator.

Mobile Blogging at a Mobile Conference

Since mLearncon is about mobile, I decided to write all my post without using my laptop: Tablet and phone only. This worked out really well for me. I used my favorite app (mind node) for creating mind maps, the conference app (which was really great), and the WordPress app (which has room for improvement).

I was able to post the blog most of the times before I left the session room. This worked better for me than writing all the posts on my laptop in the evening. I’m not sure how useful these posts and mind maps are for others; to be frank I do write them for myself. Making the mind maps is my way of organizing and processing all the information, it is my way of learning.  And my blog is developing itself as my extended memory, I check on old posts very often.

Here’s a list of all of the posts I wrote at mLearnCon:

Written by

David Kelly is the CEO of The Learning Guild. Prior to joining The Learning Guild, David spent more than 15 years in senior management learning and performance roles, including serving as SVP at New York Community Bancorp and in VP roles at Carver Federal Savings Bank and ACLD. He is a leading voice exploring how technology can be used to enhance training, education, learning, and organizational performance. David is an active member of the learning community and frequently contributes to the industry by writing and speaking at industry events. He is known for his curation efforts, especially related to conferences and events for learning and performance professionals.

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