From E-Learning Contents to M-Learning contents

M-learning or Mobile learning represents the last frontier of e-learning, a natural development of the “anytime, anywhere, anyhow” slogan, and identifies every possible learning experience in which the learner uses mobile technologies – PDAs, mobile phones – and/or s/he is not in a specific, predetermined place. In order to provide each user with a really effective learning experience, several users’ characteristics should be taken into account, the so-called context, thus the interaction and the contents to deliver should be adapted according to these characteristics. Unfortunately, nowadays the adaptation of content to mobile devices becomes often synonymous with simple content reduction and loss of information. Moreover, the device scenario is too heterogeneous and depending on its own limits and the contents not so standardized to think it is possible to keep the original educational load unchanged with an automatic adaptation. The present work describes a sailing course for PDA, already existing in PC version, and the approach we used to adapt PC version contents to mobile device, trying to avoid loss of information during the adapting process. The adaptive approach we propose represents a response to the current needs, a first step towards a new direction of information and educational knowledge reuse, which can get new benefit from mobile devices. This approach has been defined “mediated” because it tries to mediate between the result obtained by an automatic adaptive mechanism, namely the possibility of reusing the same mechanism with different contents, and the necessity of keeping the educational load high, also varying the device or the whole access mechanism.