The Pedagogy of Mobility

Direct student experience of the real, live organism, object, place or environment is recognised by teachers and other educators as having powerful potential for high quality learning. Rendering this rich experience into explicit learning contexts for students remains an on-going pedagogical challenge. The use of mobile technologies as a way for students to capture their experience as it happens in the real world holds great promise as a vehicle to support authentic learning. This chapter presents a series of cases where different school groups were challenged with different mobile learning activities. The first two cases are derived from research studies in the local environment. In these two cases students were involved in inquiry-based learning where they used data collected in the field with handheld computer and digital cameras to assess the health of their local environment. The second two cases are derived from complementary geography tasks in the field. In one case students worked in pairs to navigate a given route, and in the fourth engaged in a debate about an issue pertaining to urban planning using text- and picture- messaging technologies. The results of the cases are analysed with a view to generating some general principles around the technologies, the activities and the tools that comprise the pedagogies embodied in these cases. It is hoped that they will inform more effective professional practice, specifically when teaching spatially dependent tasks and, more generally, in mobile collaborative learning environments.

Educational Podcasts at University Campus Suffolk

This chapter will explore the introduction and development of podcasts at University Campus Suffolk (UCS). The podcasts discussed in this chapter have all been developed in relation to pre-registration health and social care courses within the Faculty of Health at UCS. UCS is a relatively new university, and has a wide range of professional courses including nursing, midwifery, radiography, operating department practice and social work. The chapter will begin with a discussion of where podcasts sit in the paradigm of mobile learning and then a brief history of podcasting. The introduction of podcasts at UCS has been ad-hoc and mostly in response to ideas for developing the wider student learning experience. This ad-hoc approach has led to the development of a model for their educational use. Three case studies will be outlined, followed by presentation of the model. These case studies will show how podcasts came to be utilised, and the progression of our thoughts and experiences which have informed their current and future development at UCS. Small scale evaluations throughout the developmental period, and informal student feedback have helped inform the progression of podcasting at UCS. These evaluations have driven the increased use of podcasts at UCS, with students enjoying the experience of using podcasts, and also the ability to digest the podcasts at a time of their choosing. However, it should be noted that because of the nature of the developmental process, full scale evaluative research is only now being undertaken.

The Digital Revolution in Education

This chapter aims to provide an outline of the digital revolution and the way that mobile devices facilitate participation in the Information age. It provides readers with a broad understanding of the key developments that have emerged over the past two decades as well as the current developments in this area. New and emerging practices relating to the use of mobile technologies for learning and their underlying drivers will be explored. The interconnectivity of applications and devices that is closely linked to concepts of multiple literacies and digital citizenship will be discussed. This brief review of the emerging technology landscape allows for greater appreciation and fuller exploitation of the potential that mobile technologies hold and provides a portrayal of its topography to enable conceptualization at a macro-level.

Using Mobile Phones for Teaching, Learning and Assessing Irish in Ireland

This chapter outlines the processes, benefits and challenges of two pilot projects which investigated the integration of mobile phones into the teaching, learning and assessment of Irish in post-primary schools in Ireland. Existing literature examining the status of Irish in Ireland and previous research into the use of mobile phones for teaching and learning languages are described. Findings from the two pilot projects indicate that mobile phones can help to promote the increased use of oral language skills, can increase student motivation and enjoyment for the task at hand and increase students’ competency in the language being taught. Mobile phones also proved successful in providing opportunities for students’ oral language practice and self-assessment and teachers’ formative and summative assessment of students’ language skills.

Implementation of Mobile Learning at the Open University Malaysia

As part of its ongoing effort to offer an effective blend of learning modes, the Open University Malaysia (OUM) recently incorporated mobile learning into its blended learning model. Having enrolled more than 86,000 learners over the last eight years, OUM strives to continually improve its delivery mode for the benefit of its learners. Mobile learning is seen to be the next wave of learning given the fact that almost all OUM learners have mobile phones. A study conducted in late 2008 to determine the readiness of its learners for mobile learning indicates that about 99% of OUM respondents have a mobile phone. The readiness survey also found that majority of respondents would be ready for mobile learning within six months of the study. The chapter will highlight, among others, the introduction of mobile learning at OUM, the initial finding with the pilot implementation and recommendations for the way forward.

Mobile Phones, Developing Countries and Learning

The Internet and computers are accessible to only half of the population in the world. For the other half, computers and the Internet are almost alien concepts. This half has no medium for gathering information, and they are computer illiterate. In addition, it is well-known, that the use of computers and the Internet, directly and indirectly, enhance the learning process. Therefore, students from under privileged areas of developing regions of the world are, clearly, at a disadvantage compared to their peers in developed countries. However, mobile phones could change this situation. In developing countries, mobile phones are far more accessible than computers or Internet access. This high accessibility together with the multiple functionalities of mobile phones, allow for the potential to build feasible educational applications that enhance the learning experiences of students in developing countries. Such opportunities enable the students’ experiences to be made proportionate to the other half of the world, with a real mechanism for gathering information.

Historic Monument Education

The aim of this research was to design an inquiry-based mobile learning strategy that integrated the physical environment and digital resources to enhance elementary students’ learning of historic monuments. The students were situated in both the real world and the virtual world to extend their learning experiences. Based on collaborative learning principles, students used the handheld device, PDA, to do their investigations. This research utilized the Peace Temple in Taiwan as the teaching and learning site and invited 32 fifth graders to participate in the learning activities. Through pre- and post-class questionnaires, as well as observations and focus group interviews, both qualitative and quantitative data about students’ social relationships were collected and analyzed. The results showed that students’ social relationships varied at different stages with different tasks. Inquiry-based mobile learning is shown to have positive effect on students’ learning performances and learning satisfactions.

Insights into Students’ Thinking with Handheld Computers

The handheld computer as a pedagogical tool has the capacity to enable students to demonstrate understanding through different modes of representations, for example, verbal, text, tables and graph, drawings, writing or written formulas, concept mapping and animations through Flash or Pocket Slides PowerPoint. Its impact as a motivational learning tool has been described in numerous articles. The purpose of this chapter is to describe its use as a research tool for capturing students’ thinking processes as they construct representations in science and mathematics, or solve problems in these learning areas on the handheld. By using an avi-screen capture software operating in the background to do this, the research is a non-intrusive method of capturing the verbal and screen-based (visual) elements of students’ thinking as they use the handhelds to complete individual or collaborative tasks.

Activity in a Mobile Learning Environment

The practical contribution of the chapter is the understanding of activity in mobile learning environments and how learners use awareness to model their actions for the provision of personalized learning support. The chapter is about the advancement of the human-centric approach to personalized learning through enhanced learner-to-learner interaction – where context and social presence awareness is of vital significance to how learners decide and act on a learning task. It is an expedition towards understanding the phenomenon of mobile learning, where personalized learning and support is a result of social awareness activities of learners as they traverse varied learning contexts. Mobile learning, in this chapter, is signified by mobility of learners regardless of mobile technologies. Activity Theory, which draws attention to mediated activity within a social context, is used to explore how mobile learners use context and social presence awareness to facilitate their ubiquitous social interactions.

Beyond Mobile Learning

Contemporary research on mobile learning focuses mainly on issues such as the acquisition of knowledge, the development of cognitive skills and the efficiency of these tools with respect to the achievement of specific educational goals. Nonetheless, the consequences of the adoption of a technology within a learning context for educational purposes should not be reduced solely to the cognitive dimension implied in its use, nor should it be measured only in terms of goal achievement. Even if intended as purely educational tools, technologies are complex social objects that redefine the sense of the context, the activity and even the identity of the actors engaged in their use. When educational institutions adopt mobile information technologies they propose more than a supposedly efficient educational instrument or technology-formatted contents. They introduce a form of life. By form of life, we mean a repertoire of possible uses, actions, meanings and even intended actors that the users may adopt. A technology is then a condensed social context within which learning takes place. We might then ask, what kinds of learning are at stake? To grasp the richness and the complexity of the learning involved in using mobile information devices, we need a larger and holistic definition of learning that goes beyond simply acquiring knowledge on particular topics, or processing information for some formal educational purpose. Learning through mobile devices is a larger and complex process that involves different aspects of an individual’s psychological, cultural and social development. How does the use of an iPod affect the students’ identity? How does it contribute to the development of social skills and social awareness? Drawing on research involving 123 Canadian university students recruited from different disciplines (on the basis of data coming from diaries and focus groups), this chapter focuses on the multiple consequences of the introduction of this technology as an educational tool in students’ academic life.