Mobile Learning

The Next Generation

John Traxler, Agnes Kukulska-Hulme, John Traxler, Agnes Kukulska-Hulme

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415658362
• eBook ISBN: 9781135123659
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Mobile Learning: The Next Generation documents the most innovative projects in context-aware mobile learning in order to develop a richer theoretical understanding of learning in modern mobile-connected societies. Context-aware mobile learning takes advantage of cell phone, mobile, and pervasive personal technologies to design learning experiences that exploit the richness of both indoor and outdoor environments. These technologies detect a learner's presence in a particular place, the learner's history in that place or in relation to other people and objects nearby, and adapt learning experiences accordingly, enabling and encouraging learners to use personal and social technologies to capture aspects of the environment as learning resources, and to share their reactions to them.

1 Introduction to the Next Generation of Mobile Learning

John Traxler and Agnes Kukulska-Hulme

DOI: 10.4324/9780203076095-1

Introduction

Over the past two decades, mobile learning has evolved and matured to the extent that arguably we can now think of it as “just learning” (Kukulska-Hulme, 2010). In many places, use of mobile technology is increasingly taken for granted and may appear to be fading into the background, with teachers and learners adopting mobile phones and tablets as just another tool. Yet our aim in this book is to show that specific recent technological developments, as well as ways in which education is being reconceived, are still remarkable and that many new challenges need to be discussed and explored. We believe it is particularly important to pay attention to the fact that the next generation of mobile learning is becoming ‘context-aware’. Context-aware mobile learning takes advantage of mobile phones, and other mobile, connected and pervasive personal technologies, in the design of learning experiences that exploit the richness and uniqueness of the learner’s indoor or outdoor environment. These technologies detect a learner’s presence in a particular place, their history in that place and perhaps their presence in relation to other people and objects nearby, and adapt the learning experiences accordingly. They also enable and encourage learners to capture aspects of the environment, approaching the environment as a learning resource, and to capture and share their reactions to it.

We have put this book together to document the most innovative projects in context-aware mobile learning and use these to develop a broader and richer theoretical understanding of learning in modern mobile connected societies. We are also keen to contribute to a critical engagement with the growing popular, non-educational, non-formal, uses of context-aware technologies and devices at the moment when the availability, diversity and capability of retail context-aware apps is reaching saturation. In addition, the book has contributions that place context-aware mobile learning in the wider context and history of mobile learning and, as appropriate, educational technology and e-learning. Issues of scale, ethics, evaluation and sustainability are also addressed within the wider social context. The book consolidates progress in the field, and so it will be a valuable reference for teachers and students using educational technology in schools, colleges and universities in the developed world, as well as for researchers, developers and directors working in education and in the heritage, museum, culture, tourism, environment and landscape sectors. A brief review of books that typically populate the mobile learning space illustrates the continued production of general texts, some of undoubted quality, alongside slowly increasing numbers of more specialist texts that show the gradual maturity of the market. National programs in various countries and sectors continue to publish substantial booklets and books in order to highlight their own funded projects and programs. This book marks an era of more depth and specialisation. The realisation that context-awareness in mobile learning was to be significant for many of us dates back to mLearn 2008, the annual research conference of the International Association for Mobile Learning. That year’s conference was entitled ‘The Bridge from Text to Context’, punning on its Ironbridge venue in the UK. A considerable proportion of contributions showed contextual mobile learning reaching a critical mass. The history of contextual mobile learning has, however, been by no means straightforward, and our contributors tackle the preliminary definitions and early developments from a variety of different perspectives.

The Activities and Achievements of Mobile Learning

The diverse mobile learning community of researchers, developers, promoters, practitioners and policy makers has persuasively demonstrated that mobile devices can deliver learning to people, communities and countries where other educational interventions have been too expensive, difficult, dangerous or demanding. The community has demonstrated that mobile devices can extend, enhance, enrich, challenge and disrupt existing ideas and assumptions about learning. The community has also challenged and changed existing conceptualisations and theories of learning and has shown that mobiles can raise motivation for learning, most especially amongst disenfranchised and disengaged learners.

The community has, however, worked largely within institutional contexts, often positioned at the vanguard of e-learning, buying into the rhetoric of innovation and working top-down. There have been many small-scale, fixed-term subsidised projects staffed by enthusiasts, growing largely out of the conceptions, foundations, aspirations and limitations of e-learning. These developments took place when technology was scarce, fragile, difficult and expensive; now technology is ubiquitous, easy, cheap and reliable. The context for mobile learning has changed from the legacy of learning with computers to the ubiquity of the social use of mobiles.

If we look back at the last 15 to 20 years, we see several overlapping generations, or paradigms, representing some kind of historical progression. We suggest that these might be:

• Techno-centric learning, where the defining feature was merely that the learning took place on a mobile digital device. Various dedicated graphing calculators fell into this paradigm and perhaps the experiments with the connected classroom, where the mobile technology worked with other components such as an interactive whiteboard to form a managed learning environment. Little contextual mobile learning was represented in this phase or paradigm because of its inherent conservatism, though the scope for personalisation of learning might now be recognised as part of “user-generated contexts” (Cook, Pachler, & Bachmair, 2013).
• Industrialised learning, where technology is used for its capacity to ensure quality whilst producing efficiency gains and increased throughput in large-scale formal education. This is a continuation of learning with computers, perhaps taking it from batch processed production line learning to flexible manufacturing systems learning, from mass production to mass customisation. Little contextual mobile learning has been represented in this paradigm to date, probably because of high editorial investment needed to create usable content and interactions for large-scale systems.
• Enriched learning, still a legacy from learning with computers, where the extra affordances of mobile technology, for example location-awareness, image-capture or augmented reality, combined with existing affordances of computers, enable the curriculum to become more flexible, vivid, personalised, situated and authentic. This was where contextual mobile learning was often to be found in its early days.
• Extended learning, another legacy from learning with computers, this time taking learning to people, communities and regions where traditional educational interventions were too expensive, dangerous or difficult, to dropped-out kids or rural communities for example. Sadly to date few examples of contextual mobile learning are found in this phase or paradigm, probably because the deployment depends on learners’ own mobiles, which must be presumed to have adequate and uniform capability.
• Encouraging learning, yet another legacy of learning with computers, exploiting the apparent capacity of mobile technologies to enthuse and encourage learners, especially disengaged and disenfranchised learners. The relationship between mobiles, encouragement and achievement was, however, always a difficult one for evaluation to capture and quantify.
• User-generated learning, marking a distinct shift away from the existing institutions, curricula and professions of education as understood and expressed in the earlier phases, and instead characterised by contributions from across cyberspace, phonespace and the Twittersphere. This is apparent also in the vast number of apps and podcasts. The financial return on either is so minimal that clearly there are other institutional, corporate or personal motivations involved. The institutional one is usually an educational mission, the corporate one is usually about branding, presence and image, but that still leaves a large number of individuals and groups contributing for diverse and diffuse reasons.
• Learning for mobile and connected societies, where the technologies of mobility have transformed the balance of what can or must be known and learnt because they have or they are transforming the societies themselves. The transformations include the assets, artefacts, transactions, commodities, corporations and resources that constitute the economic life of those societies and how they are organised; a continuation of the epistemological revolution that started with computers, gathered momentum with networks and accelerates with mobiles. These technologies have become pervasive, embodied and prosthetic, around us, on our bodies and maybe soon within us. One of our contributors tackles exactly these issues, but several others allude to the changing nature of learning and knowing.

The reason behind this exploration of the generations, paradigms and implicit definitions of mobile learning is to provide contrasting lenses with which to analyse the contributions in the current volume. It does not necessarily imply that these generations have been mutually exclusive, sequential, global or even well populated with examples. We see the current book as indicative of a transition or generational change in writing about mobile learning, a transition from the generic to the specific, acknowledging the increasing familiarity amongst readers with the general ideas, principles and history of mobile learning and perhaps an increasing familiarity amongst the wider world with the technologies and applications available.

‘Generation’ is also a term used to characterise the wider population, specifically the division or transition from ‘immigrants’ to ‘natives’ (Prensky, 2001), or from ‘visitors’ to ‘residents’ (White & le Cornu, 2011). Whatever the rigour or relevance of these concepts, they can be loosely correlated to earlier remarks about a change in the culture and context of mobile learning, as mobile technologies change from being scarce and difficult (with progress taking place amongst relatively small research communities) to being ubiquitous and pervasive (with progress being driven by commercial and social activities and pressures). In these various senses, we see contextual mobile learning as the next generation.

Contents, Structure and Overview

This introductory chapter ensures that readers from any part of the mobile learning community and any part of the e-learning community globally have the necessary background to appreciate and understand the subsequent more specialised contributions. Having introduced the activities and achievements of the mobile learning community, we provide an explanation for the distribution and nature of the book’s case studies and explain the structure of the book. The chapters merge case study with reflection, recommendation and discussion. In order to facilitate cross-referencing, comparison and analysis, we encouraged contributors to use a template that highlighted the following elements:

• Background (e.g., heritage, landscape, school, museum, zoo, city)
• Sector (e.g., children, adults, informal learning, work-based learning, community)
• Country or region
• Theoretical/pedagogic perspective
• Technology
• Deployment (e.g. funding, scale, timescale, maturity, evaluation)
• Originality, interest or impact

In subsequently organising the chapters of this book, we have been forced to address the issue of the classification and categorisation of contextual mobile learning in order to provide us with a structure and a sequence. The classification of mobile learning in general and contextual mobile learning in particular is a fascinating and thought-provoking exercise (as can be seen in, for example, Frohberg, Göth and Schwabe, 2009; Sharples, 2006; Winters, 2007; Traxler, 2007; Park, 2011). It is, however, ultimately futile as the technologies, the pedagogies and their appropriation progress rapidly and relentlessly, and case studies never populate the sample space regularly, even if it were possible to actually define the axes of that space. We have therefore opted for a progressive, albeit imperfect, sequence of chapters, moving from accessible ones requiring least prior knowledge to, later, more demanding ones. This is not straightforward since any chapter is a mixture of technology, pedagogy and context. We highlight this developmental progression as we preview the book’s contributions.

Our first contributors, Metcalf and Hamilton, provide a very positive overview of the technologies of contextual mobile learning and their applications from a US perspective, with numerous examples from academia, industry, commerce and the military. These graphically illustrate the power and diversity of the apps and peripherals now routinely available in the commercial market place and the potential for further pedagogic and academic exploitation. Arrigo, Fulantelli, Gentile and Taibi are by contrast firmly rooted in Italian educational contexts and report on the impact of mobile technologies in a range of projects based on a common methodological background and on a common mobile platform. The system is significant for encouraging learners to write onto the context as well as read from it; their mobile devices can tag the physical places that they visit with textual notes, photos, audio recordings and social tagging in authentic environments. The practical focus is on three projects across three different educational sectors or levels, each one showing context crossing between formal and informal settings and across hardware platforms. The technology platform facilitates a close relationship between physical objects and the digital objects created during the learning activity and motivates collaboration amongst learners to build shared knowledge. The theoretical framework is the hypothesis that, in a mobile environment, knowledge building can be analysed on the basis of three spaces: social, information and geographical—the social being the social interactions between students, the information being the cultural artefacts and the public statements produced by students and the geographical being the physical places.

Clough also discusses the synergy between mobile and social technologies in a study showing how the development of context-aware mobile technology alongside Web 2.0 social spaces facilitated location-based informal learning. The study demonstrates how these technologies transform the ways in which learners engage with their physical environments and with each other. Clough’s theoretical framework is a constructivist one, used...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Contributors
• 1 Introduction to the Next Generation of Mobile Learning
• 2 Technologies and Applications for Context-aware Mobile Learning
• 3 Integrating Mobile Technologies in the Italian Educational Context
• 4 Mobile Informal Learning through Geocaching
• 5 Learning-through-Touring: A Methodology for Mobilising Learners
• 6 Technology Integration in Next Generation Mobile Learning
• 7 Exploring the Potentials of Mobile Learning for Stroke Patients: RehabMaster Mobile
• 8 Analysing Context for Mobile Augmented Reality Prototypes in Education
• 9 Making Sense of Context for Mobile Learning
• 10 Beyond Innovation in Mobile Learning: Towards Sustainability in Schools
• 11 Challenges and Barriers for Mobile Learning in Security and Defense Organisations
• 12 Context Reconsidered
• Conclusion: Contextual Challenges for the Next Generation
• Index