Giunti Labs' CEO outlines innovative scenarios for mobile learning
at the Seriously Mobile Workshop at Reuters
Reuters' headquarters in Canary Wharf, London, at the end of April, was
the setting for this year's 'Seriously Mobile Summit', Europe's premier
mobile learning event. Its theme was 'the mobile internet - working in
real time and supporting mobile workforce capability'.
Among the keynote speakers at the summit was Fabrizio Cardinali, the
newly elected co-chair of the European Learning Industry Group (ELIG)
and CEO of Giunti Labs, Europe's leading vendor of e-learning and
mobile learning content management solutions (LCMS).
Cardinali discussed new formats developed by his company, Europe's
leading innovator in LCMS technologies, such as 'geolearning',
narrowcasting, personal ambient learning media and virtual learning
worlds - and outlined some of the recent mobile learning projects
involving Giunti Labs.
Having revealed that Giunti Labs is working closely with key players
such as Cisco Systems, Ericsson and Microsoft, to shape the business
availability of innovative mobile and virtual solutions for learning
online while also improving the media based personalisation of learning
materials, he continued: "We are producing training and testing
'nuggets', known as 'LearnPills', for many new personal devices
including Blackberry mailers, Windows Mobile PCs, Symbian smartphones
and Xybernaut wearable computers. Location based delivery is also added
to increase the context awareness of streamed learning experiences.
"For leading publishers and service providers, we are developing
scenarios where learners log on to a web portal empowered by Giunti
Labs' learn eXact Lobster Digital Repository (DR) automatically
versioning the more appropriate content and 'pull' these nuggets to
them. Alternatively, they can receive an email or SMS based
notification to download the materials (a 'push' approach).
"We call these nuggets 'LearnPills'. They are used by ODAs (On Deck
Applications) which we call 'eXact Gloves' (or General Learning Objects
Viewing Environments). These are able to perform SCORM sequencing and
tracking - thus taking care of all the LMS/VLE intercommunication,
sending data from the eXact Lobster DR to any third party LMS or VLE."
Giunti Labs is also working with Microsoft Mappoint technology on 'GeoPills',
adding location based information to this content management
technology, to provide just-in-time, just-when-you-need-it,
location-based learning - perhaps to teach someone what to do to cope
with an emergency in an industrial or risk management situation.
"We're also starting to blend GeoPills with virtual reality to offer
remote coaching," revealed Cardinali. "The learner is at a location,
equipped with GPS. The coach is remote but can interact with the
learner via a virtual world which faithfully reproduces the actual
location.
"This technology already exists. What is beginning to develop is the
vision to apply virtual reality (VR) technology to mobile learning," he
concluded.
Summit delegate Paul Coyne, R&D Manager for Emerald Group Publishing,
commented: "The summit has attracted a high quality line-up of
speakers, each of whom is hugely experienced and knowledgeable. I've
been following developments in mobile learning for some time but I
learnt a lot from today's event - especially from Fabrizio Cardinali's
presentation.
"Giunti Labs really are at the leading edge of mobile learning
technologies and their practical application."
In addition to Cardinali, summit speakers included Tom Glocer, CEO of
Reuters, the world's largest multimedia news agency; the
California-based world-renowned e-learning guru, Jay Cross, Charles
Jennings, of Reuters; serious play specialist Kristina Nyzell; Stephen
Clee, of the streaming media specialists, Datmedia; Claus Nehmzow, of
PA Consulting; Professor Lizbeth Goodman of the University of East
London's SMARTlab Digital Media Institute, and Paul Landers, of
Ericsson's Learning Consultancy Services, based in Stockholm, who said:
"There are 3bn reasons for mobile learning - since that is the
estimated number of subscribers to mobile phone technology in the world
in 2007/08. There are over 400m mobile phone users in China alone and
the number of mobile phone users in India increases by 6m each month."
End
Notes for Editors
About Giunti Labs
Giunti is unique in the international publishing industry.
In 1497, Giunti publishers and typographers in Florence, together with
others in Venice, began modern book manufacturing. Over the years
Giunti has built a 'historical catalogue' of huge dimensions, through a
gradual process of 'fusion' of different publishers, but also through
the creation of new brands, including Giunti Labs. Giunti Editore now
includes 20 companies in the publishing sector.
Giunti Labs, which has its EMEA headquarters in Italy and an offices in
Milton Keynes (UK) and in Boston (US), provides a wide range of
services, in response to any content, learning and knowledge management
need, covering:
Content
production
Research
and development
Technological solutions for content, learning & knowledge management
Architectural and technological solutions for mobile & wireless
Training
and consulting
Giunti
Labs provides the learn eXact suite, Europe's leading e-learning and
mobile learning content management technology. This suite is
interoperable with all major vendor-driven and open source LMS and VLE
solutions in the market including Plateau, Oracle, SumTotal, Saba,
WebCT, Blackboard, Sakai, LRN and Moodle.
Moreover, Giunti Labs does not just adhere to the international
standards relating to the LMS/LCMS world, it is one of the
organisations that helps to determine and drive these standards:
co-writing and developing them. Giunti Labs plays a key role in most of
the international institutions for the definition of e-learning
specifications (IEEE LTSC, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC36, CEN/ISSS WSLT, AICC, IMS,
ADL-SCORM and OKI).
About Giunti Labs' learn eXact suite
Giunti Labs' learn eXact is a eLearning and Mobile Learning content
management system (LCMS) that enables users to create, manage and
deliver content based on learning objects, XML, standards and
international specifications. It delivers learning content to
location-based mobile devices, interactive TV and wearable computer
devices.
