Abilene Christian University has sent out an official news release announcing recent mLearning research and development. Here is the release from Lynne Bruton, director of ACU’s public relations:

As part of its campus-wide evaluation and discussion, ACU recently premiered “Connected,” a short film that shows a compelling and futuristic vision of how mobile learning (mLearning) could transform higher education.

This visionary film follows a freshman through her first two days on a college campus where converged mobile devices, such as the iPhone, are leveraged to build student community, augment educational rigor and innovation and simplify day-to-day tasks, a dream ACU is already working to fulfill.

The film, written and produced entirely by ACU faculty, staff and students, and featuring ACU students and faculty as actors, imagines a number of novel and prospective uses for the new generation of highly mobile, converged computing devices that have recently become popular. Although many of the applications portrayed in the film are fictional, they are based on ideas being developed by ACU’s nine faculty and staff research teams on the use of converged media devices to enrich higher education. Many of the web applications have already been developed by ACU researchers, including the myACU Mobile portal and early forms of the classroom-management and assignment-distribution applications.

“The intent of ACU’s research into mLearning is focused on evaluating whether using converged media devices in the classroom is ultimately beneficial to students and faculty,” said Kevin Roberts, ACU’s Chief Information Officer. “Our goal is to support student learning and faculty teaching in ways that help students learn more effectively and become more successful. We think our movie, ‘Connected,’ is an important visualization of where we’re heading. Adding a student research team to the more than 50 faculty and staff already engaged in these explorations is the next step in this ongoing work.”

The ACU iPhone Executive Research Team has also recently announced a new website, www.acu.edu/connected, which features the film “Connected” and the vision ACU is developing for the future of higher education, as well as additional information about mLearning and the steps ACU is taking toward becoming a technological leader in higher education.