Mobile Learning Communities

Creating New Educational Futures

Patrick Alan Danaher, Beverley Moriarty, Geoff Danaher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415991599
• eBook ISBN: 9781135852405
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Mobile Learning Communities explores the diverse ways in which traveling groups experience learning 'on the run'. This book provides empirical evidence that draws on the authors' 17 years of continuing research with international occupational Travelers. It engages with themes such as workplace learning, globalization, multiliteracies, and emerging technologies which impinge on the ways mobile groups make sense of themselves as learning communities. International in focus, this book deals with an issue of increasing global significance and shows the complexities of the lives and learning experiences of such mobile cultures and their strategies for earning, learning, and living, thus challenging simplistic and stereotypical images of traveling groups still found in mainstream media and popular culture.

Mobile Learning Communities brings together for the first time mobilities and learning communities into a single and comprehensive focus. It provides a detailed analysis of how mobile groups position themselves and how they are positioned by others. This text will appeal to scholars in the field of distance education and educational technology and to researchers in education, cultural studies, and sociology. It will also be of interest to educational instructors, policy-makers, and administrators, as well as teacher educators and pre-service teachers. It paints a vivid picture of the experience of mobility through the words of the mobile learners themselves, but also critiques existing notions of learning and suggests ways of creating new educational futures for all learners and educators.

1
Networks and Partnerships

To be e

ctive and sustainable, mobile communities must develop and extend mutually respectful and beneficial networks and partnerships within and outside those communities. This chapter identifies a diversity of strategies by which mobile community members assess and engage in potential opportunities for establishing such networks and partnerships. The chapter also interrogates the crucial impact of those internal and external relationships on community members’ access to e

cient and equitable pathways into formal, non-formal, and informal learning.

Introduction

Why devote the first chapter in a book about mobile learning communities to discussing networks and partnerships? The answer is twofold. First, the basis of a community is social and emotional connectedness. This connectedness highlights that communities are more than loose collections of individuals, and that their members’ aspirations and interests are inextricably intertwined and interdependent. Networks and partnerships act as mechanisms for making those relationships explicit and for helping to strengthen them against potentially competing pressures and priorities.

Second, and building on a point made in the introduction, mobile communities are in many respects marginalized by and from their sedentary counterparts. As this chapter demonstrates, the networks and partnerships that mobile communities create are crucial to reducing the impact of that marginalization and maximizing their e

ectiveness. From this perspective, expressions such as “safety in numbers,” “critical mass,” and “from the margins to the center” evoke the range of functions served by networks and partnerships in relation to mobile communities—including their learning dimension.

While networks and partnerships are interlinked conceptually and practically, it is important to di

erentiate their meanings. Networks are commonly connected with communication and computing systems, and imply generally informal and o

en extensive relationships among large numbers of participants. By contrast, partnerships signify a formalized and sometimes legalized association among participants, usually with an explicit statement of each partner’s intended roles and responsibilities and anticipated benefits arising from the partnership. In combination, networks and partnerships enhance the strength and resilience of individuals as well as of the communities to which they belong, and in the educational arena they maximize opportunities for learning.

From this perspective, networks are not always aligned with partnerships, particularly when participants feel that formalizing their relationships might inhibit their interactions or restrict the benefits of their association. For example, networks understood as waves of resonance and the principle of morphogenic fields (Danaher et al., 2006a) highlight self-organizing systems and cooperative action to which partnerships might be unsuited. On the other hand, partnerships imply some kind of informal network leading to, and providing a framework for, the partnership’s existence. Certainly e

ective partnerships depend on strong and dynamic networks to sustain them in times of tension and con

ict.

Specifically in relation to mobile learning communities, this chapter outlines how functioning examples of those communities exhibit complex sets of both networks and partnerships, centered on the intersection between members’ mobility and their learning opportunities and outcomes. These networks and partnerships are simultaneously internal and external to the communities, and they are enacted through relationships that are informal and intangible as well as formal and tangible. For the sake of simplicity, they can be visualized as collections of overlapping circles, as in Figure 1.1.

Yet this representation is idealized and formalized, because all relationships are implicitly equal in terms of power, duration, and impact and all participants are assumed to engage and benefit equally. A more realistic illustration of the networks and partnerships in mobile learning communities is presented in Figure 1.2, which uses the rhizomes conceptualized by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) to convey the multiple, non-hierarchical intersections and dead ends characteristic of human social life. Rhizomes are also e

ective in evoking the highly divergent strengths and longevity of individual relationships and the widely varied degrees of importance that such relationships contribute to the community’s survival and sustainability.

A significant theme in the chapter is the impact of formal schooling systems on the networks and partnerships attending mobile learning communities. Such systems, themselves at the epicenter of di

erent kinds of associations, can potentially challenge and disrupt the mobile communities’ relationships, resulting in educational disjunctures. Yet they can also extend the learning outcomes of those communities, leading to enhanced mutual understandings that can in turn improve the operations of the schooling systems.

Figure 1.1 Networks and partnerships as embedded circles

Figure 1.2 Networks and partnerships as rhizomes

The chapter is divided into six sections:

• Networks and partnerships in the literature about learning communities
• Networks and partnerships in the literature about mobile communities
• Examples of networks in selected mobile learning communities
• Examples of partnerships in selected mobile learning communities
• Implications for the future education of mobile learning communities
• Implications for broader educational practice.

In particular, the chapter focuses on the strategies that mobile community members use to assess and engage in opportunities for participating in networks and partnerships. Attention is paid also to the e

ects of that participation on community members’ access to and experience of formal, non-formal, and informal learning activities.

Networks and Partnerships in Learning Communities

Contemporary theories of learning such as social constructivism (Vygotsky, 1934/1962, 1978) are predicated on the formal and informal relationships that are also characteristic of networks and partnerships. These relationships clearly include those between learners and teachers, but they also encompass associations among learners, between learners and content, between learners and contexts, and between learners and the media or technologies deployed to facilitate learning. These relationships can be seen as both networks and partnerships. For example, while the interactions between student and teacher in a classroom have an overtly formalized and legalized character evocative of a partnership, their e

ectiveness o

en depends on both participants building up the rapport and trust more commonly connected with a network.

The purpose of this chapter is to explore how networks and partnerships are understood and experienced in necessarily selective literature about contemporary learning communities. Two such communities have been chosen: those related to online education and to teacher education professional experience. These are di

erent specific manifestations of a broader phenomenon: the multiple and complex ways in which networks and partnerships intersect to create (and sometimes to constrain) opportunities for learning.

Networks in Online Education

While online education has been critiqued as exemplifying a broader onslaught on university learning and teaching (Brabazon, 2002), and while online learning can be just as disengaging and disempowering as face-to-face encounters, several researchers have pointed to the possibilities of developing lively and enduring communities of learners across boundaries of time and space (Luppicini, 2007). For example, Kehrwald (2007) identified e

ective strategies for maximizing learner support in online environments, and Kanuka (2002) highlighted ways of facilitating online discussion forums that will generate higher levels of learning.

A prominent theme in the online education literature is di

erent forms of presence. This is not surprising. The absence of face-to-face interactions, particularly in asynchronous online environments, throws into stark relief what is assumed (sometimes erroneously) to be present in face-to-face situations: active and mutual interest and engagement on the part of learners and teachers alike. Anderson’s (2004) di

erentiation among cognitive, social, and teacher presence elicits respectively three interaction modes considered essential components of e

ctive education, regardless of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Acronyms
• Introduction: Mobile Learning Communities
• 1: Networks and Partnerships
• 2: Lifelong Learning From the Cradle to the Grave
• 3: Technologies and Their Users
• 4: Globalization and Interactions with the Outside World
• 5: The Knowledge Economy and Workplace Learning
• 6: Multiliteracies and Meaning-Making
• 7: Communities at Risk: Building Capacities for Sustainability
• 8: Marginalization and Transformation
• Conclusion: Creating New Educational Futures
• Glossary of Terms
• References