At the Digiday:APPS conference in New York City last August, Teaque Lenahan, an Associate Partner, at Gravitytank presented the results of some of their recent research. He showed a clip of some of the people that they had spoken with, including a principal talking about giving kids iPhones instead of text books. I really liked this idea. While I am leaning more towards other mobile devices as the best development environment, iPhones do have a lot of appeal, and I could imagine some students really enjoying doing their studies on an iPhone instead of from a textbook.

So, it was with great interest that I received a press release last month from Michael Mayrath of GetYaLearnOn. They had just launched a pilot test of an application for learning statistics on the iPhone at Abilene Christian University. I corresponded with Dr. Mayrath to get a better understanding of what they were doing. It seems there is no dearth of educational apps for iPhones. What makes their app stand out?

What makes GetYaLearnOn’s approach exemplary is that Dr. Mayarth has his PhD in Educational Psychology and their director of Research and Development, is finishing up her doctorate in Educational Psychology as well. Dr. Mayarth did post-doc work at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education on Virtual Performance Assessment under Dr. Chris Dede, the Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies. Besides his work on virtual performance assessment, Dr. Dede is working on Developing Multi-User Virtual Environment (MUVE)-based ecosystems science curriculum modules for middle school. I have long been a fan of multiuser virtual environments for education and would love to see such an environment eventually available at the school my daughter goes to.

Dr. Mayarth also suggested checking out The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia as another good starting place for information on instructional design in multimedia learning environments. He also noted that his Masters was an evaluation of a two year pilot program that examined best practices for using Second Life in the classroom.

The focus on assessment of learning tools, I believe to be critical, and I was very interested to hear about their focus on this as part of developing their application.

I must admit that I’m not an iPhone user and have not had a chance to kick around GetYaLearnOn’s Statistics Application for the iPhone. However based on the discussions I’ve had with Dr. Mayarth, it seems like they are approaching using mobile devices in education in ways that the principal in the Gravitytank presentation could only dream of. Hopefully, it will help establish a new standard on how educational applications will be developed.