Mobile technologies referred to here can include laptops, portable media players, cell phones and GPS devices.  This initiative could be seen as expanding upon the iPod and  Second Language Acquisition proposal drafted in 2005 that was the basis for the Language Schools iPod pilot programs in 2005 and 2006.

Clearly more and more content is being created and accessed from mobile devices.  We have strategies in place for getting curricular resources such as media files from websites to mobile devices such as iPods.  Segue supports RSS feeds with enclosures so that media files included as file-for-download content blocks in Segue can be accessed via the page’s RSS feed and downloaded all-at-once and automatically updated when added to RSS readers.

The iPhone and iPod Touch support wireless connectivity and include a web browser that displays web pages in nearly the same way as the web browser available for the Mac OS and Windows platforms.  Soon mobile versions of these operating systems will have many of the same features as their laptop/desktop ancestors.  That said, many web applications have developed versions of their sites optimized for mobile devices.

A mobile technologies initiative could seek to diseminate methods for developing content for multiple platforms and modalities.  This might involve audio versions of text or transcripts of audio or developing multiple versions of a given resource optimized for multiple platforms or modalities. 

A mobile technologies initiative could also seek to identity key mobile technologies and make some of these available to selected faculty, staff and students as part of pilot studies.