Since I took up this work in 2003, I’ve met some great, great people. One of them is Liz Kocevar-Weidinger, Instruction and Reference Services Librarian at Longwood University. Liz is a very creative and imaginative person who understands the power of metaphor and has an uncommonly interesting strategic sense of how libraries can become vital partners with faculty and students. She’s a visionary.

Liz was kind enough to invite me to speak at the 2007 Virginia Library Association Conference. My topic was mobility and mobile learning. I had delivered an earlier version of this talk at the 2006 EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative Focus Session on Mobile Learning. Unfortunately, the audio recording didn’t work out for that talk. Thankfully, the recording worked this time, and in the intervening year I’d had a chance to revise, polish, and extend the original argument. For the VLA conference, I pushed into some new areas, trying to work in some of my recent thoughts having to do with intimacy, imagination, and emergence. I’m still working on those concepts, testing them as heuristics in several contexts. My thanks to Liz for the invitation and the opportunity.

I also need to footnote and thank Bryan Alexander for the idea that mobile devices can be compellingly intimate. In fact, Bryan’s talk at NLII 2004 was the first talk I ever heard on mobile computing, and for that matter the first time I had seen a Bryan Alexander presentation. A most memorable and fateful evening, one for which I remain very grateful.

As I tried to think my way through this topic during my prep for the VLA conference, I was struck by how much had changed from 2004-2006, and how much (perhaps even more) had changed from 2006-2007 when it came to mobile computing and mobile learning. In an era of continuing miniaturization and increasing sophistication in human-computer interfaces, it may very well be that “mobile learning” will soon be superseded by the simple term “learning.”