Few people in Japan own personal digital assistants, and Web-based distance learning has only caught on after the relatively recent introduction of broadband Internet. But the ubiquitous cell phone here can help people who want to study on the move. "The only device that's really handy enough to let you study where, and when, you want is the cellular phone," says Junko Ogawa, mobile-Internet content producer for Tokyo language-textbook publishing company, ALC Press (Japanese). Streamlined study, testing and reference sites are used by everyone, from the salaryman hoping to cram in a little English vocabulary during his morning commute, to the high school student with five minutes to spare for brushing up on a few Chinese kanji characters. Studious subscribers can access distance-learning sites for Sino-Japanese character study, professional qualifications or English language study. Other distance or e-learning content is linked to Japanese or English dictionary sites. At the same time, not all e-learning content is serious study. One can find abundant "edutainment," such as quizzes attached to entertainment, or practical information. NTT DoCoMo's i-mode mobile Internet service has more than 40 million subscribers and lists study and reference sites on its main menu. Last month, No. 4 on DoCoMo's "dictionary list" was Pocket Eijiro (Japanese), an English-language learning site provided by ALC. The Pocket Eijiro site started in December 2002 with an English-Japanese, Japanese-English dictionary. Now the site gets more than 100,000 hits per day (data on individual visits were not available), and its subscribers number in the hundred thousands. The service costs $1.53 per month, plus tax and packet charges. "We guess that our customers tend to be young," says Ogawa, the dictionary's chief content creator. Ogawa says that there are as many male as female subscribers, although women tend to use the service more frequently. ALC has little detailed data about who accesses the site, but its producers can make a few guesses by looking at how the dictionary is used. No. 1 on a top 10 list of dictionary searches last month is "maybe" with 2,909 requests. ("Maybe" is the enigmatic catchphrase of Takuya Kimura, a popular actor and singer, in his latest television drama.) Other popular searches are "eternity," "precious" and "love" -- ALC suspects users are looking up romantic English words for amorous text messages. In addition to the dictionary, the site also includes simple multiple-choice quizzes to test users' English. Students are given a "corporate" rank -- from probation to CEO -- that can gradually improve if they study often and answer correctly. Too many mistakes or too little study and they are headed for demotion. "The most important thing was to design it so that one session finishes in around five minutes," says Masayasu Morita (Japanese), Pocket Eijiro designer and researcher at the Kyoto College of Graduate Studies for Informatics (Japanese). "I don't think a user would use this for hours -- they would probably get tired because of the hardware." On the other hand, he believes that this kind of bite-sized study might attract students too busy to stick to an organized school or Web-based learning course. "The reason that people quit Internet-based learning is that their motivation gets very low. They work all day, come home and they don't want to study. With mobile phones, you can study when your motivation is high." Mobile Internet technology on cell phones lends itself well to fact-based learning, such as language vocabulary. Many of the most popular services are for learning English, a huge part-time study industry in Japan. A 2001 government survey found that about 10 million Japanese over the age of 10 were learning English in their spare time. Only the study of computer subjects was more popular. Some Japanese businessmen in major firms have found that English competency has increasingly become a condition for promotion. Despite the popularity of language study in Japan, education sites don't make much money at the moment, says Morita. And they only account for 1 or 2 percent of mobile Internet content. English isn't the only study possible on cell phones. Another popular learning service is kanji study and testing. Kanji are the over 2,000 Chinese pictogram characters used in written Japanese, in addition to two Japanese alphabets and the Roman alphabet -- enough to keep even adults studying. This makes Japanese-to-Japanese dictionaries popular, and the fact-based study services on the mobile Internet allow users to test their knowledge for professional examinations. What all the learning content has in common is that it is fact-based and easy to test on a cell phone, says Morita. "If you have a multiple choice question, that's much easier. If you have to fill in a blank or write an essay, I don't think you can do it on a mobile phone." Tokyo-based start-up Cerego Japan believes a potential exists for smarter learning software. "The phone is a ubiquitous platform; it's very tempting to go out there and do a word-a-day vitamin," says founder Andrew Smith Lewis. "What people haven't done is take a scientific approach to the problem." The company has assembled psychologists, cognitive neuroscientists and information scientists to find ways to enhance learning with technology. One major client is the Princeton Review of Japan, also founded by Smith Lewis in 1989 as an independent franchise of the U.S. Princeton Review. The night school teaches test preparation strategies for English language and SAT-type tests. It uses Cerego development software on PCs, PDAs and cell phones. "We were able to build a product that can present information to the user in such a way that they pay attention to it, and a device that can handle the scheduling and review of that information over time." The company's software monitors students' progress by looking at how much they work, how correctly they answer questions and how quickly they can respond. It alters study plans using Artificial Intelligence technology to match the users' strengths and weaknesses. Sam Joseph, a computational neuroscientist and Cerego scientific adviser, says that AI learning systems ensure that more time is spent actually learning rather than organizing and planning study. "The advantage of an intelligent mobile learning system is to reduce the cognitive burden of study organization on the user, so that they can put more effort directly into studying. A really intelligent system will also compensate for the user's biases about what they think they know, actually producing a schedule that is more efficient than the user could devise for themselves." Smith Lewis says that study in short bursts on mobile devices is effective as well as convenient. "Most people use (our software) for about an hour a day, but on average they use it six or seven times a day. It's more efficient that way if you break it up over time. You are much better off doing it seven times a day for 10 minutes than for 70 minutes straight." For the moment, says Smith Lewis, most cell phones in Japan have too little memory to hold effective learning engines. Princeton Review students do most of their learning on PDAs or on the Internet. The devices are able to exchange data with each other and allow teaching staff to monitor progress. Morita believes that, despite technological limitations, Japanese people may still choose mobile phones over other devices. "The computer is a much better tool for anything, but the question is, people in Japan tend to (use) the mobile phone. They feel more comfortable having things at their fingertips. Even when they take a shower, they put their mobile phone right next to them. When you lose your mobile, you lose part of your brain." Small keypads and displays aren't enough to put people off, he says -- especially the youngest users. "I asked middle-school students in Japan which was easier to use, (a mobile phone keyboard or a computer keyboard) and they said the mobile phone. They told me that there are (too many) buttons on a computer keyboard!" New technology may make more sophisticated study possible in the near future. Some third-generation phones are already capable of playing short audio clips -- say of English pronunciation -- and Morita expects the first voice-recognition applications to be available this year. ALC also hopes to include video clips of native speakers on its English learning site. And more sophisticated content may also allow providers to charge more. "If people want to spend money on a mobile phone site, first they might go to a ring-tone site, then a character site like Pokemon, or a fortune-telling site -- fun content. It's very tough to make a profit from learning content. It's the same priority as their (regular) lifestyle -- first good food, drinking, karaoke; then you might study." Whatever way e-learning is delivered -- by PC, PDA, cell phone or a combination of all three -- it is already clear that the potential market is huge. Education and training is a $2 trillion market worldwide, according to a July 2003 report by eMarketer, an Internet and e-business consultant group. The Japanese government predicts e-learning will balloon from an $800 million market in 2003 to $1.9 billion by 2006. But, Smith Lewis acknowledges, the need for the classroom environment isn't about to disappear. "The big mistake is trying to import the classroom experience to different platforms -- that's not going to work. You have to figure out, what are the tasks that can be accomplished given the parameters of the computer? Mobile learning isn't a substitute for a great teacher or a great class experience." Instead, mobile phones may find a recognized place in the schoolrooms here in Japan -- as well as abroad. "I think in 10 years or so we may see that, rather than cell phones being banned in classrooms, they will be required, as was once the case with slide rules and is now the case for calculators," says Cerego's Joseph. "I expect many teachers to be distributing material over the wire, and polling students in the class to see how they are progressing. "Students themselves will increasingly use their cell phone or other wireless device as a tool that they couldn't go to school without."
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