Mobile Learning

Mohamed Ally

• Publisher: AU Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781897425442
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

This collection is for anyone interested in the use of mobile technology for various distance learning applications. Readers will discover how to design learning materials for delivery on mobile technology and become familiar with the best practices of other educators, trainers, and researchers in the field, as well as the most recent initiatives in mobile learning research. Businesses and governments can learn how to deliver timely information to staff using mobile devices. Professors can use this book as a textbook for courses on distance education, mobile learning, and educational technology.

PART ONE


Advances in Mobile
Learning

1
Current State of Mobile Learning¹

JOHN TRAXLER
UNIVERSITY OF WOLVERHAMPTON
UNITED KINGDOM

Abstract

Since the start of the current millennium, experience and expertise in the development and delivery of mobile learning have blossomed and a community of practice has evolved that is distinct from the established communities of “tethered” e-learning. This community is currently visible mainly through dedicated international conference series, of which MLEARN is the most prestigious, rather than through any dedicated journals. So far, these forms of development and delivery have focused on short-term small-scale pilots and trials in the developed countries of Europe, North America, and the Pacific Rim, and there is a taxonomy emerging from these pilots and trials that suggests tacit and pragmatic conceptualisations of mobile learning. What has, however, developed less confidently within this community is any theoretical conceptualisation of mobile learning and with it any evaluation methodologies specifically aligned to the unique attributes of mobile learning. Some advocates of mobile learning attempt to define and conceptualize it in terms of devices and technologies; other advocates do so in terms of the mobility of learners and the mobility of learning, and in terms of the learners’ experience of learning with mobile devices.

Introduction

The role of theory is, perhaps, a contested topic in a community that encompasses philosophical affiliations from empiricists to post-structuralists, each with different expectations about the scope and legitimacy of theory in their work. The mobile learning community may nevertheless need the authority and credibility of some conceptual base. Such a base would provide the starting point for evaluation methodologies grounded in the unique attributes of mobile learning. Attempts to develop the conceptualizations and evaluation of mobile learning, however, must recognize that mobile learning is essentially personal, contextual, and situated; this means it is “noisy,” which is problematic both for definition and for evaluation.

Furthermore, defining mobile learning can emphasize those unique attributes that position it within informal learning, rather than formal. These attributes place much mobile learning at odds with formal learning (with its cohorts, courses, semesters, assessments, and campuses) and with its monitoring and evaluation regimes. The difference also raises concerns for the nature of any large-scale and sustained deployment and the extent to which the unique attributes of mobile learning may be lost or compromised. Looking at mobile learning in a wider context, we have to recognize that mobile, personal, and wireless devices are now radically transforming societal notions of discourse and knowledge, and are responsible for new forms of art, employment, language, commerce, deprivation, and crime, as well as learning. With increased popular access to information and knowledge anywhere, anytime, the role of education, perhaps especially formal education, is challenged and the relationships between education, society, and technology are now more dynamic than ever. This chapter explores and articulates these issues and the connections between them specifically in the context of the wider and sustained development of mobile learning.

The use of wireless, mobile, portable, and handheld devices are gradually increasing and diversifying across every sector of education, and across both the developed and developing worlds. It is gradually moving from small-scale, short-term trials to larger more sustained and blended deployment. Recent publications, projects, and trials are drawn upon to explore the possible future and nature of mobile education. This chapter concludes with an examination of the relationship between the challenges of rigorous and appropriate evaluation of mobile education and the challenges of embedding and mainstreaming mobile education within formal institutional education.

Mobile learning has growing visibility and significance in higher education, as evidenced by the following phenomena. First, there is the growing size and frequency of dedicated conferences, seminars, and workshops, both in the United Kingdom and internationally. The first of the series, MLEARN 2002 in Birmingham, was followed by MLEARN 2003 in London (with more than two hundred delegates from thirteen countries), MLEARN 2004 in Rome in July 2004, MLEARN 2005 in Cape Town in October 2005, MLEARN 2006 in Banff, Alberta in November 2006, and MLEARN 2007 in Melbourne, Australia. Another dedicated event, the International Workshop on Mobile and Wireless Technologies in Education (WMTE 2002), sponsored by IEEE, took place in Sweden in August 2002 (http://lttf.ieee.org/wmte2002/). The second WMTE (http://lttf.ieee.org/wmte2003/) was held at National Central University in Taiwan in March 2004, the third in Japan in 2005, and a fourth in Athens in 2006. Both these series report buoyant attendance. There are also a growing number of national and international workshops. The June 2002 national workshop in Telford on mobile learning in the computing discipline attracted sixty delegates from UK higher education (http://www.ics.ltsn.ac.uk/events). The National Workshop and Tutorial on Handheld Computers in Universities and Colleges at Telford (http://www.e-innovationcentre.co.uk/eic_event.htm) on June 11, 2004, and subsequent events on January 12, 2005 and November 4, 2005 (http://www.aidtech.wlv.ac.uk) all attracted over ninety delegates. The International Association for Development of the Information Society (IADIS) (www.IADIS.org) now runs a conference series, the first taking place in Malta in 2005, the second in Dublin in 2006, and the third in Lisbon in 2007. Secondly, there have also been a rising number of references to mobile learning at generalist academic conferences; for example, the Association for Learning Technology conference (ALT-C) every September in the UK (http://www.alt.ac.uk).

The mobile learning currently exploits both handheld computers and mobile telephones and other devices that draw on the same set of functionalities. Mobile learning using handheld computers is obviously relatively immature in terms of both its technologies and its pedagogies, but is developing rapidly. It draws on the theory and practice of pedagogies used in technology enhanced learning and others used in the classroom and the community, and takes place as mobile devices are transforming notions of space, community, and discourse (Katz and Aakhus 2002; Brown and Green 2001) along with investigative ethics and tools (Hewson, Yule, Laurent, and Vogel 2003). The term covers the personalized, connected, and interactive use of handheld computers in classrooms (Perry 2003; O’Malley and Stanton 2002), in collaborative learning (Pinkwart, Hoppe, Milrad, and Perez 2003), in fieldwork (Chen, Kao, and Sheu 2003), and in counselling and guidance (Vuorinen and Sampson 2003). Mobile devices are supporting corporate training for mobile workers (Gayeski 2002; Pasanen 2003; Lundin and Magnusson 2003) and are enhancing medical education (Smordal and Gregory 2003), teacher training (Seppala and Alamaki 2003), music composition (Polishook 2005), nurse training (Kneebone 2005), and numerous other disciplines. They are becoming a viable and imaginative component of institutional support and provision (Griswold, Boyer, Brown, et al. 2002; Sariola 2003; Hackemer and Peterson 2005). In October 2005, the first comprehensive handbook of mobile learning was published (Kukulska-Hulme and Traxler 2005), but accounts of mobile distance learning are still infrequent.

There are now a large number of case studies documenting trials and pilots in the public domain (Kukulska-Hulme and Traxler 2005; JISC 2005; Attewell and Savill-Smith 2004). In looking at these, we can see some categories of mobile learning emerging (Kukulska-Hulme and Traxler forthcoming):

• Technology-driven mobile learning – Some specific technological innovation is deployed in an academic setting to demonstrate technical feasibility and pedagogic possibility

• Miniature but portable e-learning – Mobile, wireless, and handheld technologies are used to re-enact approaches and solutions already used in conventional e-learning, perhaps porting some e-learning technology such as a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) to these technologies or perhaps merely using mobile technologies as flexible replacements for static desktop technologies

• Connected classroom learning – The same technologies are used in classroom settings to support collaborative learning, perhaps connected to other classroom technologies such as interactive whiteboards

• Informal, personalized, situated mobile learning – The same technologies are enhanced with additional functionality, for example locationawareness or video-capture, and deployed to deliver educational experiences that would otherwise be difficult or impossible

• Mobile training/performance support – The technologies are used to improve the productivity and efficiency of mobile workers by delivering information and support just-in-time and in context for their immediate priorities (for an early account, see Gayeski 2002)

• Remote/rural/development mobile learning – The technologies are used to address environmental and infrastructural challenges to delivering and supporting education where conventional e-learning technologies would fail, often troubling accepted developmental or evolutionary paradigms

Mobile distance learning could fall into any of these categories (with the exception of the connected classroom learning); how it develops will depend in part on the affordances of any given situation. These affordances might include:

• Infrastructure, meaning power supply, postal services, Internet connectivity, etc.

• Sparsity, giving rise to infrequent face-to-face contact, lack of technical support, etc.

• The wider policy agenda including lifelong learning, inclusion (of rural areas for example), assistivity, participation, and access

• Mobile distance learning within a framework of blended distance learning and the affordances of other delivery and support mechanisms

Defining Mobile Education

In spite of the activity cited above, the concept of mobile education or mobile learning is still emerging and still unclear. How it is eventually conceptualized will determine perceptions and expectations, and will determine its evolution and future. There are different stakeholders and factors at work in this process of conceptualising mobile education and the outcome is uncertain.

There are obviously definitions and conceptualisations of mobile education that define it purely in terms of its technologies and its hardware, namely that it is learning delivered or supported solely or mainly by handheld and mobile technologies such as personal digital assistants (PDAs), smartphones or wireless laptop PCs. These definitions, however, are constraining, technocentric, and tied to current technological instantiations. We, therefore, should seek to explore other definitions that perhaps look at the underlying learner experience and ask how mobile learning differs from other forms of education, especially other forms of e-learning.

If we take as our starting point the characterisations of mobile learning found in the literature (the conference proceedings from MLEARN and WMTE for example), we find words such as “personal, spontaneous, opportunistic, informal, pervasive, situated, private, context-aware, bite-sized, portable.” This is contrasted with words from the literature of conventional “tethered” e-learning such as “structured, media-rich, broadband, interactive, intelligent, usable.” We can use these two lists to make a blurred distinction between mobile learning and e-learning. This distinction, however, is not only blurred – but in part it is also only temporary. Among the virtues of e-learning is the power of its technology (and the investment in it), and soon this virtue will also be accessible to mobile devices as market forces drive improvements in interface design, processor speed, battery life, and connectivity bandwidth. Nevertheless, this approach underpins a conceptualisation of mobile learning in terms of the learners’ experiences and an emphasis on ownership, informality, mobility, and context that will always be inaccessible to conventional tethered e-learning.

Tackling the problem of definition from another direction, we see that mobile devices and technologies are pervasive and ubiquitous in many modern societies, and are increasingly changing the nature of knowledge and discourse in these societies (whilst being themselves the products of various social and economic forces). This, in turn, alters both the nature of learning (both formal and informal) and alters the ways that learning can be delivered. Learning that used to be delivered “just-in-case,” can now be delivered “justin-time, just enough, and just-for-me.” Finding information rather than possessing it or knowing it becomes the defining characteristic of learning generally and of mobile learning especially, and this may take learning back into the community.

Mob...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Forward
• Contributing Authors
• Introduction
• Part One: Advances in Mobile Learning
• Part Two: Research on Mobile Learning
• Part Three: Applications of Mobile Learning
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Index
• Footnotes