FLEXible

Beside relevant conferences on mobile learning, the topic is increasingly discussed in a much wider community on internationally occurring BarCamps. These participant-driven ‘unconferences’ are usually centered around a specific topic and try to avoid some negative aspects of traditional conferences (Wikipedia, 2010). So far there has not been a BarCamp focusing solely on mobile learning, but there are EduCamps dealing with education and MobileCamps dealing with mobile technologies.

The events in the immediate vicinity are the EduCamps in France and Germany/Austria (http://educamp.mixxt.de/) as well as the MobileCamps in Brussels and Dresden (http://barcampdresden.mixxt.de/). Although mobile learning is not in the main focus, both events offer at least the opportunity to discuss the topic in self organized sessions mainly with non-expert participants. Last year I attended the MobileCamp trying to track the trends within the community towards mobile learning. As anticipated most sessions either focused on mobile technology or on its commercial exploitation. Although this might change when the technical premises are mature and the focus shifts towards the application area, for the moment it seems to make more sense to incorporate the topic from an educational perspective. Therefore our group plans to participate at the upcoming EduCamp hold 5th – 7th November at the RWTH in Aachen.

The official entry point (including a list of past and upcoming events) to the international network of BarCamp events is http://barcamp.org/. If you plan to attend one of these events, get used to the unofficial rules listed under http://barcamp.org/TheRulesOfBarCamp. Also bear in mind that the majority of events are targeted at an national audience and therefore the sessions most probably will be held in the respective national language. To overcome these barriers and put on an international event addressing specifically mobile learning could be a nice opportunity to meet and involve a larger majority of the community landscape.

Working on an article for Campus Wide Information Systems (CWIS) journal, I came accross an interesting article by John Traxler from the University of Wolverhampton talking about definitions and perspectives of learning in a mobile age.

So far there have been lots of attempts to define mobile learning, such as “learning that happens when the learner takes advantage of learning opportunities offered by mobile technologies” (O’Malley et al., 2003) or “any educational provision where the sole or dominant technologies are handheld or palmtop devices” (Traxler, 2005). The perspectives taken are either technocentric (like in the given examples), consider the mobility of the learners, or rest upon the anytime/anywhere paradigm of existing content (Winters, 2006; Taylor, 2006). Each of these different perspectives is extensively discussed in the literature (Sharples, 2006; Traxler, 2009), but by now there is no generally accepted definition, nor an agreement on which perspective to consider finding one. Especially the technocentric perspective is highly controversial as the underlying development of mobile technologies is continuously progressing, making the attempted definitions highly unstable (Traxler, 2009).

A more promising way towards a theory of mobile learning (Sharples et al., 2005) seems to be the focus on the clarification of significant issues (Sharples, 2006), research challenges (Arnedillo-Sánchez et al., 2007), case studies (Kukulska-Hulme & Traxler, 2007), or motivational or affective aspects (Jones et al., 2006). All these attempts contribute to a definition of key characteristics for mobile learning and sharpen the picture of what constitutes mobile learning rather then finding a precise definition. In his article looking at the definition and evolution of mobile learning Traxler (2009) even suggests replacing the question ‘what is mobile learning?’ by the questions ‘what is learning in a mobile age?’ or ‘what is mobile learning?’ focusing more on the educational part of the domain.

Going in this direction, following this suggestion we decided already a while ago to conduct an explorative case study within the mobile learning domain that is not taking one of the perspectives mentioned earlier. Instead, the focus was set on the educational problems that underpin the expectations on mobile learning, while at the same time trying to find an adequate conceptualization of these problems. For the study the following research questions have been defined:

1. What are the educational problems that mobile learning is trying to solve?
2. Which problem clusters can be identified and how are they emphasized?
3. How are the different problem areas related within the overall research domain of mobile learning?

In a previous blog post “What is mobile learning?” Christian already introduced the resulting expert study. Though the question he asked remained the same, the results enable to see mobile learning from a different perspective. There’s more to come on this, as we proceed with the analysis and evaluation of the results …

References:

Arnedillo-Sánchez, I., Sharples, M. & Vavoula, G. (Eds.) (2007), Beyond Mobile Learning Workshop, Trinity College Dublin Press, Dublin.

Jones, A., Issroff., K, Scanlon, E, Clough, G and McAndrew, P. (2006), “Using mobile devices for learning in Informal Settings: Is it Motivating?”, in Proceedings of IADIS International conference Mobile Learning Dublin, IADIS Press, Barcelona.

Kukulska-Hulme, A. & Traxler, J. (2007), “Design for Mobile and Wireless Technologies”, in Beetham, H. & Sharpe, R. (Eds.), Rethinking Pedagogy for the Digital Age, Routledge, London.

O’Malley, C., Vavoula, G., Glew, J., Taylor, J., Sharples, M. & Lefrere, P. (2003), “Guidelines for learning/teaching/tutoring in a mobile environment”, available at: http://www.mobilearn.org/download/results/guidelines.pdf

Sharples, M., Taylor, J., & Vavoula, G. (2005), “Towards a theory of mobile learning”, in Proceedings of mLearn2005 – 4th World Conference on mLearning, 25-28 October 2005, Cape Town, South Africa, available at: http://www.mlearn.org.za/CD/papers/Sharples- Theory of Mobile.pdf

Sharples, M. (2006), Big Issues in Mobile Learning, Kaleidoskop Network of Excellence, Mobile Learning Initiative, Nottingham.

Taylor, J. (2006), “What are appropriate methods for evaluating learning in mobile environments? Evaluating Mobile Learning”, in Sharples, M. (Ed.), Big Issues in Mobile Learning, Kaleidoskop Network of Excellence, Mobile Learning Initiative, Nottingham.

Traxler, J. (2005), “Mobile Learning- it’s here but what is it?”, Interactions 9, 1, University of Warwick, Warwick.

Traxler, J. (2009), “Learning in a Mobile Age”, International Journal of Mobile and Blended Learning, 1(1).

Winters, N. (2006), “What is Mobile Learning?”, in Sharples, M. (Ed.), Big Issues in Mobile Learning, Kaleidoskop Network of Excellence, Mobile Learning Initiative, Nottingham.