Abstract
Mobile learning is a relatively new phenomenon and the theoretical basis is currently under development. The paper presents a pedagogical perspective of mobile learning which highlights three central features of mobile learning: authenticity, collaboration and personalisation, embedded in the unique timespace contexts of mobile learning. A pedagogical framework was developed and tested through activities in two mobile learning projects located in teacher education communities: Mobagogy, a project in which faculty staff in an Australian university developed understanding of mobile learning; and The Bird in the Hand Project, which explored the use of smartphones by student teachers and their mentors in the United Kingdom. The framework is used to critique the pedagogy in a selection of reported mobile learning scenarios, enabling an assessment of mobile activities and pedagogical approaches, and consideration of their contributions to learning from a socio-cultural perspective.Keywords: mobile learning; pedagogy; socio-cultural theory; framework; pedagogical features(Published: 3 February 2012)Citation: Research in Learning Technology 2012, 20: 14406 - DOI: 10.3402/rlt.v20i0/14406
Highlights
Portable, handheld devices have increasingly powerful multimedia, social networking, communication and geo-location (GPS) capabilities and mobile learning (m-learning) offers numerous opportunities as well as challenges in education
While acknowledging that the features identified in other frameworks are important in characterising technology-mediated learning by mobile users, we propose a succinct framework highlighting a unique combination of distinctive characteristics of current mobile pedagogy to bring socio-cultural insights to the literature on m-learning
Current framework we describe a rationale for including personalisation, authenticity and collaboration as the three distinctive features of m-learning forming the basis of our current framework, working within our previously discussed conception of ‘‘time and space’’
Summary
Handheld devices have increasingly powerful multimedia, social networking, communication and geo-location (GPS) capabilities and mobile learning (m-learning) offers numerous opportunities as well as challenges in education. Sophisticated theoretical models have been developed (Laurillard 2007; Pachler, Bachmair, and Cook 2009; Sharples, Taylor, and Vavoula 2007), locating distinctive features of learning with mobile devices is an evolving process as devices and associated technologies mature. Informed both by current m-learning theory and by socio-cultural theory, this paper identifies three distinctive features of m-learning through our framework. Extensive descriptions of activities within both these projects are available elsewhere (Kearney, Schuck, and Burden 2010)
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