The past six months has seen the publication of three new books on mobile learning. First, there was Mobile Learning: structures, agency, practices by Norbert Pachler, Ben Bachmair, John Cook, and Gunther Kress (Eds.) (Springer, 2010). This was followed by my book, The Mobile Learning Edge (McGraw-Hill, 2010), and, most recently, Clark Quinn’s new book on this topic, Designing mLearning: tapping into the mobile revolution for organizational performance (Pfeiffer, 2011). For the most part, these three books do not overlap very much because they each were designed for different audiences and markets, resulting in each book having a different style or voice.
The volume edited by Norbert Pachler and his colleagues is a very academic book and is mostly about the use of mobile devices within the school system. The writing is dense, highly conceptual, and not very accessible to the average reader. It will appeal only to other academics.
My book was aimed at decision-makers and buyers in business and governmental organizations. It makes the case of why the introduction of mobile learning makes good business sense. It has been reviewed extensively elsewhere, so I will not speak further of it in this post.
Clark Quinn’s book is the most accessible of the three. His audience is instructional designers and instructors in K-12, higher education and corporate training departments, and his style is chatty, personal, and anecdotal. It is an enjoyable book to read.
Clark starts off with some of the misconceptions about mobile learning and then makes the business case for why it has become important. He argues that mlearning is not about formal learning in classrooms. “Mobile learning is, at core, about augmentation,” he states, adding, “mLearning is really about assisting our ability to do.” This is why there’s so much talk of performance in this book; mobile learning, if properly implemented, helps people to do their jobs, as well as to learn whatever they want when they want to learn it.
Clark provides a brief history of mobile devices in order to make the point that there “an emergent model” of how all the various mobile devices are converging. But this book is not mostly about technical matters, and quickly gets back to concrete examples. There are case studies of applications of mobile learning within a variety of settings, and interviews with some of mobile learning’s thought leaders such as Judy Brown, Robert Gadd, and David Metcalf. For managers in corporate training, these examples may be the most valuable parts of the book in that it gives them something to use in arguing for mobile learning within their organization.
The book ends with several chapters on mobile design and future trends. My only disappointment is that the book is short, and therefore there is not a lot of detail for any given topic. However, it is a great starting point for anyone who is tasked with implementing mobile learning in their organization. On the topic of mobile learning, this is the right book for its intended audience.
Clark Quinn’s book has a support website at http://www.designingmlearning.com, where you can download the first chapter and front matter.
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