eLearning vs. mLearning: Why I've been hanging in the eLearning Camp

I thought I understood mLearning. Or at least I thought I did--because categorizing mLearning is like me trying to call myself spiritual. I might know what it means, but everyone around me has a different definition. For a long time, I'd been thinking about mLearning as "learning for a mobile device." And I waved mLearning aside as being "too cool." I have spent my time working for organizations that are at the trailing edge of the technology curve, so why would I worry about mLearning? eLearning has meant deployment of training on specific company pcs, not an ipad or a cell phone. Plus, I have had a lot of assumptions about mLearning--for example, designing learning for a cell phone is much different than designing learning for a tablet, so how could they be lumped together?

Yet if I had followed the experts in this, I would have come to the realization sooner that mLearning is not about deployment on a phone--it's about flexible and responsive design.  

I've read two post's lately that have really affected my thinking on the issue: RJ Jacquez' recent post, Here's how Adobe Captivate 6 could have been a Game Changer for mLearning and Claire's Dashe & Thomson article suggesting: Mobile Learning: CHANGE YOUR WAYS OR YOU ARE DOOOOOMED! (Via Connie Malamed, the eLearning Coach). Both articles really got me thinking about the true meaning of mLearning.

Perhaps I'm over simplifying things, but the difference between eLearning and mlearning seems to be in the approach, not the design:

        My over-simplified comparison of elearning & mlearning

With this approach of "acknowledge learning will be deployed on multiple devices" mLearning is not about cell phones or tablets, instead, it's about letting go. Maybe we should have called it dLearning (for device-based) versus fLearning (for flexible)!