Reflections from mLearnCon: geolocation and exploration

Imagine the time when technology effortlessly connects us to conversations, resources, community, when it understands what’s on our minds and facilitates us getting the answers, creating meaning, making sense of the world.

We’re on the edge of the revolution, where geolocated and contextualised connections become the norm: where we more effortlessly connect into relevant conversations and help co-create the narrative that takes place within them.

Learning is about exploration: it’s like when i landed in San Francisco last week, i started with formal tours, which let me construct a mental framework of the geography, then i walked and rode within that matrix and filled in the gaps. In each space i documented my journey by writing, taking photos, painting pictures.

Much of the technology i’ve been looking at this week supports these exploratory activities: games are designed to create rehearsal spaces, safe and permissive environments to fail in, as well as giving us scores when we succeed. Tools allow us to curate content, to find things out and share our knowledge effectively. Our mobile technology lets us build stories as we go.

The technology extends and enhances our native capability: through taking photos, through geolocated sensors, through analytical Apps that identify and quantify things, by overlaying additional contextual data on top of our reality to build an augmented picture.

And the technology facilitates storytelling: it provides a reflective and iterative space to think and share. It allows us to capture tribal knowledge and co-create a story around a place.

As ever, the technology isn’t the end goal: it’s what facilitates the journey. So much of what we achieve is through effective exploration and storytelling. It’s a real luxury to be able to take a week out to share stories and develop ideas with a community like this, to be immersed in the innovative space, but it’s never going to be the whole solution. Until we refine and develop our learning methodologies to be more in line with how we really learn in the social spaces, it’s going to be fighting against the flow.