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Giunti Labs’ CEO outlines innovative scenarios for mobile learning at the Seriously Mobile Workshop

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.”

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 offices in Milton Keynes (UK), Frankfurt (Germany) 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 eLearning 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 an e-learning 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.

learn eXact now ships new modules named eXact Mobile and eXact VR for mobile learning and virtual learning worlds.