Mobile expert Enrique Ortiz at About Mobility Weblog describes the power that ease of discovery has for delivering content. He writes in the context of mobile, and the huge success of the new Apple App Store, which I have been extolling for its new way of making content available. The new mechanisms of the App Store are illustrating, as Enrique says, “that people WILL” use what they can discover.
“Discovering” begins by finding something you want online. Educators can increase the use of open educational resources by making them findable. To join in a major way in the cascade from the App Store (and its inevitable clones), education assets will need to be not only findable in these environments, but downloadable and useful, as Enrique says:
Awesome, 10 million downloads, in just 3 days.
I (and others) knew it all along, and proves the point I we have been making again and again and arguing for a long time: that people WILL download applications, if the problem w/ downloading (i.e. discovery) is solved. (Of course, the app must be useful to begin with) — see
>iPhone SDK, the App Store, the iPhone on the Enterprise . . . .
Apple solved it, and everyone is happy… Andriod MUST solve it, if they want to be successful w.r.t. local apps. Java ME doesn’t have a solution to this, and that is a problem. And Mobile Widgets also need a discovery solution. Ease of discovery must always be part of the mobile solution: being it a search box, an icon on the home page of the handset, a mobile widget, or side-loading…
One way edu could make open educational resources discoverable is by pointing to them with learn nodes that are easily findable blog-like little webpages for micro topics that are within the resources. (Resources have to be open for this to work. The App Store makes both open (free) and for sale apps available, which is literally a mixed bag.)
