What is “mobile learning?”

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Mobile learning is a special domain of e-learning made possible by mobile technologies: portable phones, PDAs, smartphones, and in general what is called ‘handheld devices’.

But theories of mobility go beyond the technological aspect, and also beyond the mobile device.

Mobility is rather a set of practices that start to expand in our lives: practices that make us access content and knowledge from different devices at different places and times, to pass with fluidity from a formal way of learning to informal ones, differently distributed in the city or perfectly portable through handheld devices.

Hence a new place becomes available through the web site which is consulted before, through the GPS which locates us on place, through information gathered via internet phone while on staying, or through variously uploaded programs that are accessible via phone; through messaging with experts or friends; through contents accessed at various fixed points of the new location; these contents stay available on the way back, and they are enriched by notes taken on place.

Mobility concerns

“patterns of social interaction [that] are dynamically reshaped and renegotiated through our everyday activities significantly freed from spatial, temporal and contextual constraints” (Kakihara and Sørensen, 2002, p. 1760).

Mobility is hence synonymous of fluidity of practices. At the level of education and learning it is this fluidity, rather than technology itself that should be addressed, and this with the aim of exploiting practices made possible by technology and technology only at its best:

“research attention should be directed at identifying those simple things that technology does extremely and uniquely well, and to understanding the social practices by which those new affordances become powerful educational interventions.” (Roschelle, 2003, p.268)

“Research into mobile learning then becomes the study of how the mobility of learners, augmented by personal and public technology, can contribute to the process of gaining new knowledge, skills and experience. The challenge here is to define the role of pedagogy and theory in this process.” (Kukulska-Hulme, A., Sharples, M., Milrad, M., Arnedillo-Sánchez, I. & Vavoula, G., 2009, p. 22)

According to Kukulska-Hulme and Traxler (2007), mobile technologies are not bound to one specific method and educational approach (say constructivist or situated), but rather fits with all those educational practices that require a personalized, situated, authentic and informal form of learning.

Mobile phones, mobile minds