In just under two weeks our workshop on mobile learning will be held at the ICDE in Maastricht. Currently I prepare the different concepts I want to present and discuss in the workshop. The main focus will be how mobile learning will shape distance education in the future or as the abstract for the workshop states:

"Mobile technologies plau an important role in contemporary communication. Starting from mobile telephony, mobile devices are increasingly becoming ubiquitous devices for personal information management and communication through different channels. These new devices shape our perception of information, communication, participation, and learning. Moreover, new and "smart" mobile technology challenges the current views on education and learning more radically then the worldwide web, because different types of techniques and technologies convert in the present mobile devices. This leads to new understandings of connectedness, interaction, participation, and context. This workshop explores different approaches of using mobile technologies in education and to support learning. It focuses on these four concepts of mobile learning and how they can be approached by using "smart" mobile devices. The workshop analyses the concepts of 'connectedness', 'interaction', 'participation', and 'contextualisation' through mobile applications for the Apple iPhone and Android smartphones. The participants will work and discuss the conversion of web2.0 and online participation of increasingly mobile learners based on mobile courseware (mobiMoodle) and mobile social software (team.sPod), as well as educational applications as field trips and context aware spaces."

As the abstract already states the workshop will focus on four topic lines

• connectedness
• interaction
• participation
• contextualisation

These topics are presented in through the following example applications that have been developed in our lab during our first year of work.

• team.sPod
• mobiMoodle
• context aware spaces
• context blogger

I will use these applications to demonstrate some of our ideas and discuss them with the audience. My objective for this workshop is to push some of our stuff to the public and see how the participants link what they will see into a coherent picture of our work.

The challenging thing of this workshop is to make it interactive and squeeze a lot of information into three hour session. Everyday for the rest of this week I will focus on each topic and a selected application.