Guest Editorial: Special Section on Mobile and Ubiquitous Technologies for Learning

Abstract

MOBILE learning is the study of how to harness personal and portable technologies for effective education. The term also covers research into technology-enabled learning across contexts and learning in an increasingly mobile society. The first phase of mobile learning, originating more than 60 years ago, was to equip classrooms and lecture theatres with handheld response systems to aggregate individual responses from students and to provoke discussion based on differences in answers to open response questions. The more recent technologies of graphing calculators and wireless handheld devices offer new learning opportunities for rapid sharing of data and knowledge, simulation and visualization, and computer-managed groupwork [3]. The second phase was strongly influenced by two major projects funded by the European Commission, MOBIlearn and m-Learning [1], with related efforts occurring across the globe. These projects explored the opportunities for learning with mobile technologies in nonformal settings, including homes, museums, workplaces, and outdoors. The emphasis of these projects was on the mobility of the learner and support for learning across contexts and life transitions. Studies by Livingstone [2] and colleagues have shown that adults, on average, engage in 13-17 hours per week of active learning and this is maintained throughout their lifetimes. Yet, less than 5 percent of this learning is within a school or formal education setting. So, we have a significant opportunity for personal technology to support the other 95 percent of lifelong learning. During the course of this second phase and continuing into the present, a huge wave of mobile technology adoption has swept throughout the world. Now, almost every adult and adolescent child in industrially developed countries owns a multimedia communicator with more computing power than guided the first landings on the moon. For many people in developing countries, the personal mobile phone is their only means of distance communication, automated calculation, precise timekeeping, and, increasingly, image and sound recording. In a seminal 1991 paper, Weiser argued “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it” [4]. In an emerging third phase of mobile learning, learning becomes embedded into everyday life. Children own tools for learning that they can carry with them from home, to school, to college, and into the workplace, constructing a personal and shared history of knowledge enrichment. Buildings, parks, and cities can be augmented to explain their history, ecology, or structure, enriching a tourist visit or field trip. Such pervasive learning technologies pose substantial practical and ethical problems. How can schools manage the disruption of children bringing their powerful personal technologies into the classroom? How far should formal education and training extend into the daily lives of children and employees? What rights do people have over learning-related materials they originate and share? A common theme of this special issue is the lowering of barriers between these three types of mobile learning: in the classroom, outside the classroom, and as part of everyday life. In “A Mobile Live Video Learning System for LargeScale Learning—System Design and Evaluation,“ Carsten Ullrich, Ruimen Shen, Ren Tong, and Xiaohong Tan describe a large-scale learning system that provides university students with access to live streamed lectures after work and on weekends, responding to the quadrupling of students in China enrolled in university education. Efficient compression provides high quality images of the lecture slides on students’ mobile phones, along with audio and video of the lecturer. The students can interact with the lecturer using SMS messaging and can respond to polls and activities initiated by the teacher. Two classes from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, with about 1,000 students in each, successfully used the system to study from lectures at home and on the move. At the other end of the spectrum of technology access, Divya Viswanathan and Jan Blom describe a design workshop in India with children aged 8-11 that proposed concepts for an engaging mobile learning device for children in their paper “New Metaphors from Old Practices—Mobile Learning to Revitalize Education in Developing Regions of the World.” They converge on the simple design metaphor of an electronic “slate” with the properties of touch interaction, small size, support for social use, and audio output. Two general requirements for effective learning are the ability to use the device across multiple contexts, for informal as well as formal learning, and to support both individual and group use. The Indian 4 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES, VOL. 3, NO. 1, JANUARY-MARCH 2010