Tek4L

Being a technology focused company, and also being mostly mac based, we have decided that despite the costs it is worthwhile evaluating the iPhone for wider adoption within our organisation. We are currenly evaluating the devices at two levels:

1. Is there any tangible return on investment to the organisation in terms of employee productivity? Currently our staff mobile phone handsets cost us nothing on a 24 month contract, and we have no data plans. The iPhones will cost us a minimum of $400 per handset on a 24 month contract + a minimum $30 per month for a 200MB data plan. This means that over a two year period each phone costs us $1,120. To roll out iphones to our 50 employees would cost us $28,000 per annum more than we currently pay for moblile phones. We will want to see some significant benefits to justify this level of extra expenditure.
2. Are there any educational  applications of this type of device. How could the iPhone be used to improve teaching and learning? On this side of things it is easier to justify at least a small number of iphones for ‘research’ purposes without the need for any hard and fast ROI data. However there are still some questions to be asked about how much educational potential the iPhone really does have over and above the likes of the iPod Touch, which is a much cheaper option.

I will post more details as our evaluation continues.

Lots of discussion around about the iPhone. There is some talk already on various education blogs/lists on whether this is  the device that will push mobile learning forward. It may help, but I think it would be dangerous to pin any learning delivery to a proprietary device.

Although the iPhone has some great interface innovations there are a few reasons why it may not be the killer device that mobile learning pundits have been waiting for, mainly due to the limitations listed at http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/1/10/6559 and http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2007/01/10/the_five_bigges.html, but apart from these things, I think it would be dangerous for anybody to pin mobile learning delivery on a proprietary device.

None of the key functions of the iPhone are unique to it, voice calls, text, camera, video, email, mp3 player, etc. It may do some of these things in a more useable/stylish manner than other devices, but that would be no reason to limit any possible learning opportunities to it. As I am sure most people would agree, mobile learning, or for that matter web based learning should be as device independent as possible.