One of the big questions around institutions throwing themselves into the mobile learning world is how do you cater for such a huge variety of handsets and operating systems? Tom Hume, Managing Director of Future Platforms (http://www.futureplatforms.com/) recently presented at the excellent Eduserv Symposium: The Mobile University. Tom pointed out that to reach 70% of UK mobile owners, you need to be available on 375 different devices, 70 different families from 8 manufacturers.

But anyway, go and check out Tom’s talk, along with all the others from that day, on the Eduserv website: http://www.eduserv.org.uk/events/esym10/presentations

The following resource is related to this and exists in a debate that is building in some quarters: If different providers are channeling development of different application platforms, and you look at it and think, “Argh! how do we manage to cover THAT lot??”…do we get the question – Apps v. Web?

Sencha Touch: Mobile-Web Framework

Up step a number of JavaScript frameworks and support for cutting-edge web features afforded by HTML5 and CSS3, while also enabling developers to take advantage of device capabilities such as geolocation (rather an important aspect given we’re talking mobile, eh!). So this way we mix the 2, being able to develop we-apps that can run across a variety of devices while being able to have that very nice look we see in native apps.

So…here’s the more in-depth link on the Webmonkey site that covers a few of these frameworks. Check it out..it’s very interesting

http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/06/new-frameworks-give-mobile-web-apps-a-boost/

This is, of course, closely related to CETIS’s work in the widgets space and the Distributed Learning Environment.