In an effort to change how American schools think about teaching, Jenkins’ team developed a strategy called PLAY (Participatory Learning and You) to explain the exploratory and experimental approach to teaching they think students would benefit from. The team worked with teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District, and recently released a series of studies that describe what they found. “PLAY describes a mode of experimentation, of testing materials, trying out new solutions, exploring new horizons,” Jenkins said. It’s how kids interact with games – throwing themselves in without reading the rules, testing the limits and feeling free to try and fail. But this learning style is hard to achieve in a system ruled by high-stakes testing where there is no room for students to fail. Everything they do goes on their academic record and they have become unaccustomed to experimenting.

Todd Richmond, director of advanced prototype development and transition at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies, said his gut feeling is that what a user gets out of mobile learning depends on the user. “If you have a user that is comfortable with a tablet or a smartphone, they will be more willing to put up with issues and engage with the content,” he said

Jan Cannon-Bowers, research director of University of South Florida’s Center for Advanced Medical Learning and Simulation, said the convenience of mobile learning makes it useful for refresher training in rare procedures. For example, she’s working with the military on an app for refresher training for corpsmen.

“We do this all the time. It was the same thing with PC-based training and distance learning,” she said. “It was dominated by very, very smart people who are engineers and software designers. They see possibilities — and there are possibilities — but we don’t apply them smartly