John Traxler

Learning in a Mobile Age

The launch of the International Journal of Mobile and Blended Learning is one of several indicators that mobile learning globally is reaching a critical and sustainable momentum and identity. The past six or seven years have seen a host of pilots and initiatives across sectors and across countries and these have established firstly that mobile learning takes learning to individuals, communities and countries where access to learning was challenging or problematic and secondly that mobile learning enhances, enriches and extends how learning is understood. Environmental factors have meant that this development has been haphazard. The mobile learning community is now faced with broader challenges of scale, durability, equity, embedding and blending in addition to the earlier and more specific challenges of pedagogy and technology, but these developments take place in the context of societies where mobile devices, systems and technologies have a far wider impact than just mobile learning as it is currently conceived. This paper looks at the definition and evolution of mobile learning as the starting point for a discussion of this wider impact.

Students and mobile devices

unaffected by how it is stored, transmitted or consumed. In its earliest forms, knowledge and learning came from lectures, a linear format from an authoritative ‘sage-on-the-stage’ with no pause, fast forward or rewind, and from books, substantial and linear but segmented and randomly accessed. The delivery of knowledge and learning by networked computers meant a break from linearity with the ALT-J, Research in Learning Technology 155 introduction of hyperlinks and new heuristics of usability that prescribed how knowledge and learning should be chunked and presented. With mobile technologies, using a small screen and a limited input medium, the usable chunks become much smaller but the navigational overheads become much larger. In essence, small pieces of knowledge and learning can be easily presented but their relationship to any others may be difficult to understand, thereby fragmenting and perhaps trivialising what students learn. The patterns of use – that is, the various ways in which people interact with technologies – also differ dramatically if we compare sedentary desktop technologies with mobile personal technologies. The use of desktop computers, documented in the research literature of human–computer interaction, is well understood, well established and much more tractable than is the use of mobile devices (see Jones and Marsden 2006). Our understanding of how people engage with information as they walk down the street and perhaps share devices with friends is still relatively limited. Words such as “lightweight”, “opportunistic”, “informal”, “spontaneous”, “episodic”, “private” and “personalised” are found in the literature but this is often impressionistic. Nevertheless, creators, publishers and providers of content (and navigation and organisation) must adapt to these findings as they emerge if the student experience is to be optimal. Mobile technologies have converged with the wider user-generated content movement associated with Web 2.0 rhetoric and technologies, promoting the Web as a medium for writing and participation not just for reading and passivity. It uses technologies such as wikis, mashups, blogs, newsfeeds and podcasts to move the web from a centralised broadcast medium to one where everyone has a voice. Mobile devices extend and enhance this voice because they allow users to capture content – for example, images, sounds, data and voices themselves – from the real world, from events as they happen, specific to when and where they happen. The rise of citizen journalism (for an account and analysis, see Ananny and Strohecker 2002) is a very specific example of the power of mobile phones and user-generated content. Meanwhile, previously unknown musicians and disenfranchised political groups use the same technologies to propagate their material and their views. In doing so they create a more fragmented and complex world where the received wisdom and the accepted tastes no longer have the hegemony or the authority that they had in more static, stable times. Mobile students are now able to create, access and publish not only facts about the outside world but the inside world too, information about themselves, their friends and affiliations, their feelings, their days and their doings. Every mobile phone has personal information management software – that is, calendars, tasks, notes, contacts, and so forth – that can be made visible to the chosen few or the unchosen many. Now social network software on mobile phones can capture and distribute content that is less purely functional and much more intimate. The wider visibility of this personal information is part of the transformation of identity and students’ sense of themselves and their communities, no longer based in the purely physical and the face to face. Dramatically increased levels of individual choice, control and convenience sound benign; however, there are drawbacks. These developments reinforce a tendency to view knowledge and other forms of content merely as commodities or assets; furthermore, this choice and control are exercised at a purely personal level, allowing individuals to each pursue their own curiosity, constructing their own private libraries and inhabiting their own worlds of knowledge. This erodes the idea of a commonly

Distance education and mobile learning: Catching up, taking stock

This special edition of Distance Education is dedicated to mobile learning. As such it seeks to connect two rather different communities and specifically to introduce and explain the work of the small but growing mobile learning research community to the more established and mature distance education community. In introducing this edition it is perhaps necessary to provide some context and orientation for readers, all the more so since the mobile learning community is only some ten years old and is unevenly spread around the globe. In exploring the literature of mobile learning, it is easier to get a sense of the breadth of mobile learning than it is to get a stable definition. Early approaches to definition focused on technology, for example, saying it was “any educational provision where the sole or dominant technologies are handheld or palmtop devices” (Traxler, 2005), or on the mobility of the technology, describing mobile learning as “e-learning through mobile computational devices: Palms, Windows CE machines, even your digital cell phone” (Quinn, 2000). Another view of mobile learning says it involves: “Any sort of learning that happens when the learner is not at a fixed, predetermined location, or learning that happens when the learner takes advantage of learning opportunities offered by mobile technologies” (O’Malley et al., 2003, p. 6), while Keegan took a similar position in 2005, saying

Innovative and Sustainable Mobile Learning in Africa

Mobile learning is gaining ground in the developed countries of Europe, North America and the Pacific Rim. In the dramatically different affordances of sub Saharan Africa, mobile learning is developing in a different direction. This paper brings together accounts of two contrasting initiatives, both of which support in-service teacher training and novel but appropriate blended learning formats, in the region in order to illustrate the differences and the difficulties of mobile learning and in order to explore their potential synergy.

Sustaining Mobile Learning and its Institutions

Mobile learning can be characterised as a specific project within the education system. This paper explores the sustainability of mobile learning in the wider context of the sustainability of that system. Mobile devices are near-universal and their impact brings near-universal connectedness to people, data, content, and media. There are consequently subtle but pervasive transformations of jobs, work, and the economy, of sense of time, space and place, knowing and learning, and of community and identity, which call the sustainability of the education system, and consequently of the mobile learning project, into question.

The use of targeted bulk SMS texting to enhance student support, inclusion and retention

The University of Wolverhampton serves a region of considerable social, economic and educational diversity and disadvantage in the UK. The University is aware of the potential of mobile learning, teaching and administration in addressing the needs of its students and it has national Centre of Excellence (CETL) status for using innovative technologies in its work. After several pilot projects with handheld computers and mobile phones (cell phones), it is now moving to a large-scale scheme that will use targeted bulk SMS texting to enhance student support, inclusion and retention. This paper examines the range of technologies and pedagogies that underlie the educational use of texting, the institutional issues that the proposed large-scale texting scheme must address and the interim results and progress of the scheme prior to its launch at the start of the academic year 2005/2006.

Mobile Learning: Shaping the Frontiers of Learning Technologies in Global Context

Learning with mobiles will undoubtedly shape the frontiers of learning technologies in every global context. Looking back over the past 10 years of mobile learning we can see increasing evidence and experience of mobiles driving the agenda for other established learning technologies and either taking learning to people and communities who were previously too distant or expensive to reach or enhancing, enriching and challenging the conceptions of learning itself. This has taken place in an increasingly global context gradually achieving international visibility and recognition but has not been wholly benign as the medium for specific agendas. This chapter reviews this previous decade and then looks forwards to a world where increasingly the notion of learning technology is itself problematic as technology, especially mobile technology, becomes a pervasive, universal, ubiquitous and defining characteristic, taken-for-granted and not-worth-mentioning. The world is no longer a world with technology and mobile technology added in, somehow separate, additional and optional, but is becoming a world unthinkable without technology, particularly mobile technology. This transforms knowledge and knowing and challenges education to stay credible. Learning with mobiles is no longer learning as we knew it somehow delivered or enriched by mobile technology, it becomes learning defined by societies defined by mobile technology. This chapter explores these issues.

Education and the Impact of Mobiles and Mobility

Mobile devices include smart-phones, games consoles, digital cameras, media players, netbooks and handheld computers. Almost everyone owns one and uses one, often more than one. Not only do they own them and use them but they also invest considerable time, effort and resource choosing them, buying them, customising them and exploiting them. These devices express part or much of their owners’ values, affiliations, identity and individuality through their choice and their use. They are both pervasive and ubiquitous, both conspicuous and unobtrusive, both noteworthy and taken-for-granted in the lives of most – but not all – of the people of Europe and the rest of the world.

The crisis and the response: after the dust had settled

ABSTRACT The focus for the group was clear – it was global. Space, time, resources and chance have, however, limited the topics and the treatments they received, and so in this paper we ask: what slipped through the net, what fell between the cracks, and what alternatives were there? We also look at some topics that received only oblique or partial attention, and some that received none at all. These include the separation of online educators’ personal, professional and political ethics; alternative responses from outside the discourses of the North and West; the threat to marginal communities and indigenous cultures from the success of learning with mobiles; the particular role of mobiles within the industrialisation of higher education, and the notion of crisis itself.

Research Essay: Mobile Learning

Mobile learning is perhaps nine or ten years old. This thought piece, based on my keynote at IADIS Mobile Learning 2010 in Oporto, looks back at those years to ask if we started in the right place and went in the right direction, and if we have gone as far as we can go.