MIT Center For Mobile Learning Revealed With Google Support

Today we're to understand that MIT has hooked up with Google for a single project, the result of a long-standing relationship based on interests in both technology and education. This project will take the form of a MIT Center for Mobile Learning, a place where education and learning itself will be transformed through innovation in mobile computing. This new center will be working in part through actively studying and engaging with App Inventor for Android, a program recently made open source by Google.

This new project will be house at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, and will indeed by investigating the mobile landscape as a place where people can learn and grow "anywhere, anytime, with anyone." Google University Relations are one of several sources which make this new center possible, while three MIT professors will be running the program. The first professor running this new Center for Mobile Learning is Hal Abelson, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT, the second Professors Eric Klopfer (science education) and Mitchel Resnick (media arts and sciences).

The application App Inventor will play a central role in "an enriched research agenda with increased opportunities to influence the educational community. As it turns out, one of the professors who will run this program, Hal Abelson, was the one who initiated App Inventor at Google by proposing it as a project while he was on sabbatical with the Google in 2008. Meanwhile the core code and inspiration for the App Inventor project came from the other two professors involved in the project now in the form of Klopfer's lab and Resnick's Scratch project.

Professor Abelson notes the following:

"The new center is a perfect example of how industry and academia can collaborate effectively to create change enabled by technology, and we look forward to seeing what we can do next, together."

We wish them good luck!

[via Google Research]