Pedagogical issues and mobile learning Norbert Pachler Institute of Education, University of London

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Pedagogical issues andmobile learningNorbert
PachlerInstitute of Education, University of
Londonwww.londonmobilelearning.net

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Outline

• Some preliminaries
• Growing significance of mobile devices
• What is (new about) mobile learning
• Liquid modernity
• Practices around personally owned technology
• New habitus of learning
• Learner-generated contexts and augmented reality
• Framing for meaning-making
• Context as embodied interaction
• Affective and motivational factors appropriation
• Contingency as a conceptual lens for what
  counts
• Questions for discussion

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Growing significance of mobile devices

• mobile devices have become increasingly embedded
  in the life worlds of (young) people
• we foreground the life worlds of users (cf.
  Alfred Schütz), i.e. the world as experienced in
  the perceptual subjectivity of everyday life
• we see a danger in
• the failure of the education system to keep pace
  with the developments in the life worlds of young
  people and society more widely
• the potential disconnection between the way
  (young) people operate in their daily lives and
  the way educational institutions interact with
  them
• we live in a 'mobile society in flux', in
  quantitative and qualitative terms
  (see e.g. Traxler 2007)

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• our focus is on how learners are making
  technology their own for and through
• identity formation
• social interaction
• meaning-making
• entertainment

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What is (new about) mobile learning

• we view learning with mobile devices as a process
  of meaning-making through communication across
  multiple contexts among people within a triangle
  of social structures, cultural practices and
  agency
• communication (rather than conversation) for us
  captures the fact that meaning-making is bound up
  in economic, socio-cultural, technological and/or
  infrastructural systems including the mass media
  and technological networks/infrastructure
• mobile learning as we understand it is not
  about technology or delivering content to mobile
  devices but, instead, about the processes of
  'coming to know' and 'being able to operate
  successfully in and across' new and ever changing
  context and learning spaces
• mobile learning as understanding and knowing how
  to utilise our everyday life
  worlds as learning spaces

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• we consider emerging socio-cultural practices
  around the use of new technologies in learners
  everyday life worlds to be important sites and
  acts of learning
• we view agency inter alia as manifesting itself
  as the learners social and semiotic capacity
• what is new is
• the capability and the functionality of the
  technology, in particular the convergence of
  services and functions into a single device, its
  ubiquity and abundance, portability
  and multi-functionality
• the boundary and context crossing mobile
  technologies enable in the context of learning
• personal ownership of high-specification
  multi-functional computing
  technology

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Liquid modernity (Stone, 2008)

• increasing freedom to choose our way in the
  world For in liquid modernity
• our lives are fragmented into a succession
  of ill-connected episodes, the
• narrative for which is no longer some
  notion of Cartesian transcendence nor
• the negotiation of conformity within the
  structured identities of modernity, but a
• desire and a need to communicate with some
  sense of who we are at each
• juncture.

• questions arise around the extent to which
  the act of recording and
• documenting experiences digitally actually
  interferes with the
• nature of these experiences for participants
• questions also arise around what constitutes
  individual identity a work
• in progress which reflects the dialectic
  relationship between self-
• reflexive understandings and externally
  enforced subjectivities,
• multiple, fluid and contingent, but not
  underpinned by a true self
• that finds multifaceted articulation
  according to different contexts

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Practices around personally owned technology

• recent research (JISC, 2007 Conole et al, 2008)
  suggests that students place greater value on
  technologies they have discovered themselves and
  delineates eight factors influencing changing
  student practice
• pervasive (technologies are used to support all
  aspects of study)
• personalised (technologies are appropriated to
  suit personal need)
• niche/adaptive (particular tools are used for
  specific purposes)
• organised (technologies are used in a
  sophisticated manner to find and manage
  information)
• transferable (skills gained through non-education
  use of technologies are applied to learning
  contexts)
• time/space boundaries (changes to where and how
  students are working)
• working patterns (new working practices attendant
  to new tools) and
• integrated (suiting individual need).

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New habitus of learning (Kress and Pachler, 2007)

• we see a very close connection between
  meaning-making and learning, in semiotic terms
  between the making of signs and the making of
  concepts
• learning as purposive work with cultural
  resources
• young people constantly see their life-worlds
  framed both as a challenge and as an environment
  and a potential resource for learning
• their expertise is individually appropriated in
  relation to personal definitions of relevance
• the world has become the curriculum populated by
  mobile device users in a constant state of
  expectancy and contingency

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Learner-generated contexts and augmented reality

• users create their own contexts for learning
  users are constantly negotiating their mutual
  understanding of the situations in which they
  find themselves
• mobile devices increase the students ability to
  bring into fruitful synergy the knowledge
  distributed across communities of use
• spheres of and for mobility (IADIS 2009)
• in physical space,
• of technology,
• in conceptual space
• in social space
• dispersed in time
• one of the defining characteristics is learning
  across contexts

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• spaces of social media (Lock 2007)
• secret spaces (SMS, MMS, IM)
• group spaces (Facebook, Myspace, Bebo)
• publishing spaces (Blogger, Flickr, YouTube)
• performing spaces (Second Life, World of
  Warcraft)
• participation spaces (Meetup, Twitter)
• watching spaces (mobile tv)
• context has both a static and a dynamic
  dimension the static elements (the stuff to be
  learnt), process (ways that stuff can be
  learnt) and place (where stuff can be learnt)
  interact with each other dynamically (linkages)
  (Luckin et al 2005)
• importance of authenticity of and across
  context(s) authenticity of practices

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• importance of meta-level awareness of the learner
  about the learning processes they engage in
  across spaces, time and sites of learning also
  of purposefully designed learning networks and
  paths
• interacting domains
• external representations of knowledge,
• individuals internal conceptualizations of
  knowledge, and
• the social uses made of knowledge and through
  which it is constructed

• design for new geographies of learning, i.e.
  configurations of space,
• place, and network that respect the social
  and collaborative nature of
• learning while still exploiting the
  dynamic potential of networked
• collaboration (Divitini and Morken 2007)
  learning is increasingly
• taking place within and across looser
  communities which
• necessitates a focus on the seamless
  integration of different
• learning experiences conditions for
  spatial contiguity and spatial
• dispersal

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Context as embodied interaction (Dourish, 2004)

• context is seen as an interactional problem
• the context of mobile phone use for learning is
  emergent and not predetermined by events
• centrality is placed on practice, viewed as a
  learners engagement with particular settings
• Context isnt something that describes a
  setting its something that people do. It is an
  achievement, rather than an observation an
  outcome, rather than a premise
• Context cannot be a stable, external description
  of the setting in which activity arises. Instead,
  it arises from and is sustained by the activity
  itself.

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• context as a representational or as an
  interactional problem how and why, in the
  course of their interactions, do people achieve
  and maintain a mutual understanding of the
  context for their actions? (Dourish 2004, p. 6)
• users expend cognitive, social and physical
  resources supported by mobile technologies to
  foster continuity and group identity, to reflect
  on the self and in relation to the group
• meaning as emergent and not predetermined in
  events ubiquitous multimedia can have an
  explicitly participative role enhancing,
  and thus shaping experiences by taking
  part in the emergence of meaning supporting
  shared interpretation, or assisting doing and
  undergoing (Jacucci, Oulasvirta and Salovaara
  2007, p. 5)

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Contingency as a conceptual lens for what
counts

• mobile learning as a set of processes involving
  both technological and socio-cultural resources
  by which individuals (both learners and teachers)
  are enabled to engage agentively with artefacts,
  in order to bring about understanding /
  meaning-making
• such engagement we see as crucial to moments of
  contingency
• moments of contingency contain within them the
  scope for learners understanding to be
  otherwise
• there are limits to the extent to which learning
  can be predetermined

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Issues and implications

• socio-cultural developments will arguably soon
  lead to there no longer being a meaningful
  differentiation between media for learning inside
  and outside formal educational settings
• the ability of technology to transcend the
  unaided, individual human mind, i.e. to augment
  intelligence, is becoming increasingly ubiquitous
  
• the augmentation of intelligence through
  technology can best be understood as the most
  recent stage of externalisation and
  objectification of experiences and insights as
  well as an enhancement of our capacities for
  developing conceptual worlds (Säljö, 2007)
• ubiquitous, and context-aware technologies result
  in a shift from smart planning to smart situated
  actions (Fischer and Konomi, 2007)