Mobile Learning

Perspectives on Practice and Policy

Edited by

Danielle Herro
Clemson University

Sousan Arafeh
Southern Connecticut State University

Richard Ling
Nanyang Technological University

Chris Holden
University of New Mexico

Information Age Publishing, Inc.

Charlotte, North Carolina

www.infoagepub.com

Digital Media and Learning

Danielle Herro and Remi Kalir, Series Editor

Mobile Learning: Perspectives on Practice and Policy (2018)

Edited by Danielle Herro, Sousan Arafeh, Richard Ling, and Chris Holden

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

CIP data for this book can be found on the Library of Congress website:
http://www.loc.gov/index.html

Paperback: 978-1-64113-122-3

Hardcover: 978-1-64113-123-0

E-Book: 978-1-64113-124-7

Names: Herro, Danielle, editor. | Arafeh, Sousan, editor.

Title: Mobile learning: perspectives on practice and policy / edited by

      Danielle Herro and Sousan Arafeh.

Other titles: Mobile learning (Information Age Publishing)

Description: Charlotte, North Carolina: Information Age Publishing, Inc.,

      2018. | Series: Digital media and learning | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017050342 (print) | LCCN 2018003494 (ebook) | ISBN

   9781641131247 (EBook) | ISBN 9781641131223 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781641131230

  (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Mobile communication systems in education—United States. |

      Internet in education—United States.

Classification: LCC LB1044.84 (ebook) | LCC LB1044.84 .M614 2018 (print) |

      DDC 371.33—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017050342

Copyright © 2018 IAP–Information Age Publishing, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or by photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise without written permission from the publisher.

Printed in the United States of America.

CONTENTS

Foreword

Preface

PART I:
POLICY CONTEXTS FOR MOBILE LEARNING

1. Tensions Between the Local in the Global: A Cosmopolitan View of Mobile Learning Initiatives

Judith Dunkerly-Bean, Helen Crompton, and Char Moffit

2. The Role of Leadership and Professional Development to Overcoming Barriers to Mobile Learning in Formal Schooling

Liz Kolb

3. Mobile Learning Curricula: Policy and Potential

David Parsons and Kathryn MacCallum

4. U.S. Tweens Talk About Mobile Phones: Dominant Discourses, Danger, and the Importance of Information Seeking

Sousan Arafeh, Michael Kuszpa, Meghan Weller, and Thomas Mitchell

PART II:
CONNECTING HISTORY AND COMMUNITY: LOCATION-BASED MOBILE LEARNING

5. STEMlandia: Using Mobile Technology to Get ’Em Outside

James L. Larsen, Jodi Asbell-Clarke, Barbara MacEachern, and Elizabeth Rowe

6. Community Inquiry With Mobile Asset Mapping

Ryan M. Rish, Aijuan Cun, Abigail Gloss, and Merve Pamuk

7. We Got This: Toward a Facilitator-Youth “Apprenticeship” Approach to Supporting Collaboration and Design Challenges in Youth-Designed Mobile Location-Based Games

Sara Vogel and Judith Perry

8. Augmenting National Historical Parks: A Pilot Study for Harpers Ferry

Laura A. Gillespie

PART III:
MOBILE LEARNING IN PRE-K–12 EDUCATIONAL SETTINGS

9. Piecing the Puzzle Together: Building a Dialogue for Engaging Multiple Disciplines in Inquiry-Based Mobile Learning Through Professional Development

Cynthia C. Minchew Deaton, Sandra M. Linder, and Benjamin E. Deaton

10. Digital Leadership in Rural Middle School: Preparing Effective 21st Century Digital Citizens Via a Mobile Learning Curriculum

Jennifer L. Motter

11. BYOD in the Art Classroom: A Framework for Studio Learning

Aysenur Ozyer, Kyle Roberts, and Brent G. Wilson

12. Your iPhone Cannot Escape History, and Neither Can You: Self-Reflexive Design for a Mobile History Learning Game

Owen Gottlieb

About the Contributors

Foreword

Context and Questions

John Traxler

Professor of Digital Learning,
Institute of Education, University of Wolverhampton

Mobile learning, whatever it may be exactly, is spreading fast and changing fast, and certainly moving away from its roots.

Its history to date has been a patchwork of achievements, mistakes, insights, platitudes, and epiphanies as the ground has moved under us. It has moved from a predictable landscape where mobile learning researchers were the innovators and early adopters in their institutes and universities, working with novel, expensive, difficult, fragile, and scarce technologies fueled by curiosity on a trajectory defined by the aspirations of tethered e-learning. It has moved to a much less predictable environment where the technologies had become cheap, easy, robust, and universal, indeed intrusive, and understood, appropriated and exploited by everyone.

Early research, with findings predicated on consistent, stable technological platforms, looked irrelevant as it became more apparent that the short term teaches us little about the long term, the small scale teaches us little about the large scale, and the pedagogic and technological answers do not help with the organizational and cultural questions. So, dear reader, history will not be teaching us much and when it comes to mobile learning, we are on our own, scrutinizing the current texts as carefully as possible and trying to discern the message and its meaning. We need these new texts to capture the present before it becomes the irrelevant past. The readers of mobile learning are perpetually challenged to look at the dots, that is, all the accounts of individual researchers, projects, pilots, programs, and interventions, and join them up, into some bigger, broader, more abstract, generalized, conceptualized picture—sadly there are never enough dots, they fade before our eyes as they recede into history and we never get to the big picture of mobile learning. So instead we must scrutinize the dots, the individual accounts in the current book, and hope for whatever insights resonate with our own contingent problems and perspectives.

While this may be a slightly apocalyptic portrayal we must also recognize that mobile learning is a recognized and established phenomenon within the various sectors and countries of formal education. We must not only interrogate these texts to understand the role of mobile learning in the context of mobile and connected societies but also within the ecology of education technology. This wider education technology environment has moved on and mobile learning has to compete, complement, contribute to, or coalesce with, for example, ideas about the flipped class-room, massive open online courses, learner analytics, bring-your-own-device (BYOD), lecture capture, digital literacy, heutagogy, and content curation, with plagiarism detection, online submission, and each new generation of virtual learning environment as neighbors in the educational technology ecosystem. To some extent, the longer term viability of mobile learning, and the projects and pilots described here, depends on how it is perceived as a component or a competitor or a complement to any of these other trends, vying for resources, capacity and change. Some are conceptual and theoretical, for example heutagogy and the connectivism that underpinned the early massive open online courses, some are operational and pragmatic, for example lecture capture and plagiarism detection, and that makes a difference. Features and attributes that might appeal to innovators and early adopters might not be what appeals to regulators, managers, and rank-and-file faculty; the latter sometimes preferring whatever seems to offer a pragmatic, a more efficient version of the status quo while the former seek novelty and surprise, and conceptual transformation. This one of the challenges for innovation in mobile learning.

The flipped classroom was originally an American conception and was a response to various practical and pedagogic problems and challenges (principally those of encouraging autonomous active learning, discussions about BYOD, and increasing pressure on contact time) and a response to a specific infrastructure and technical environment—namely the widespread availability of cheap connectivity and personal, social, and domestic digital technologies. While an underpinning theory of the flipped classroom may have emerged, the idea was nevertheless originally nationally specific and culturally specific, and so the documented experiences come originally from a very specific setting, namely schools in America. The flipped classroom concept should not be interpreted merely as using technology, for example mobile technology, to displace the consumption of content out of the classroom. In fact, the principles of the flipped classroom can be expressed as the following quite profound questions or challenges, in particular, How can we optimize the face-to-face learning experience? What is it that students can only get from face-to-face interaction with lecturers? How can we optimize the ways in which students can learn from each other face-to-face? What is it that students can only get face-to-face with each other? How can we optimize the campus experience? What is it that students can only get by coming on campus? And, how can digital technology, including obviously mobile digital technology, support addressing these challenges? And what does digital technology, including mobile do most effectively or uniquely?

These kinds of questions are being discussed though perhaps not very rigorously. They are linked indirectly to earlier discussions about personal response systems, namely discussions about promoting more active and engaged learning in formal education. While its first incarnation of personal response systems was delivered on dedicated devices, the so-called clickers or zappers—and thus an unsustainable expense—later incarnations use software or apps, such as Socrative, that run on learners’ own devices and thus align with emergent BYOD policies. Lecture capture, another current trend, is a technical fix to the problem of student attendance, English language proficiency and enhanced revision, but is often implemented on systems, such as Panopto, that encourage playback on mobiles, and thus also aligned BYOD policies.

These policies are increasingly visible and the relationship with mobile learning is fairly clear. Furthermore, they seem to dig mobile learning out of the hole of its own making. That is the hole of unsustainability. At a more operational level, however, BYOD policies present several local or tactical problems. First, the technical and infrastructural challenges, secondly the operational aspects and thirdly, the ethical and political issues. Mobile technologies are obviously the devices in question, albeit rather vaguely defined, but mobile learning has largely developed independently of the BYOD debate and discussion.

Content curation, sometimes called orchestration, is the concept of supporting learning with resources from wherever they were best, not defaulting automatically to the treadmill of in-house content creation. If content, and its intellectual property, represent a perceived business asset within their respective universities then curation is the basis for a very different business model. It is kindred to the open learning movement, driven by motivation that is part pedagogic, part ideological, part practical. To work effectively curation requires teachers (or librarians or the designers of learning experiences) to develop skills around the selection and organization of resources. Given that the mobile is increasingly a portal to the resources of the web for an almost universal demographic beyond the classes and institutions that access networked computers, there is a clear and powerful connection between mobile learning and content curation but higher education is still largely committed to in-house resources. Skills and attitudes are the likely barrier to change, though it is perfectly reasonable to argue that in a few cases in a few institutions in-house content encapsulates unique new knowledge, unavailable anywhere external.

The movement to exploit external content, that is the curation of content, is aligned to the movement to exploit user-generated or learner-generated content. This is not necessarily a mobile phenomenon but the mobile empowers a more broadly-based demographic of creators and richer and diverse content, derived from the environment and the context, wherever people could take their mobiles. It implicitly happens every time someone shares their ideas and images on social media (and similarly, curation happens every time someone uses social book-marking) but is only a fringe activity in higher education.

Heutagogy, or self-directed learning, is an emerging pedagogic paradigm, in some ways a rejuvenation of informal lifelong learning and a recognition that in an era where everything changes, everyone needs to continually learn, to continually learn digitally. At the moment however, the connection between mobile learning in higher education and heutagogy during and after higher education is tenuous and receiving little attention.

Digital literacy is the pervasive and comprehensive underpinning of all these various trends and formulations. In its broadest interpretation, digital literacy describes those skills, attitudes, access and competences necessary for individuals, and perhaps communities, to flourish in an increasingly digital world. The genesis of digital literacy was higher education in western Europe with a clearly defined pressure to focus on e-learning, information technology skills, and employability, and a less coherent lobby for the social, culture, expressive, and creative aspects of being digital. A specifically mobile element of digital literacy has yet to be developed in spite of the observation about how pervasive and ubiquitous mobiles are in our societies, and this may illustrate the tension between the educational technologies of the institutions as opposed to the universal technologies of their societies.

A discussion of the MOOC should follow on logically from all the previous topics. The idea of the MOOC was born out of experiences with large open on-line courses in higher education that suggested a new pedagogy, where the numbers and connections would create a new learning paradigm. The story of the MOOC is however not straightforward. In its original formulation, it did indeed hark back to many of the issues just discussed. It grew out of ideas and experiences with large numbers of connected learners, termed connectivism. As well as the well-documented Canadian experiments, there were small ones with a specifically free and mobile focus, specifically MobiMOOC. The idea of the MOOC became, however, co-opted by formal institutional perspectives and now has been transformed into a highly interactive rich media experience broadcast by universities on a small number of specialized and dedicated platforms. Some platforms more than others render well on mobile devices—FutureLearn in the United Kingdom is a prime example of a mobile first MOOC philosophy—but the early idealism of the wisdom of the crowd has been replaced by a globally competitive and corporate ethos.

Alongside the issues of the changes, fashions, and trends that constitute the immediate environment of mobile learning we must also recognize elements of stasis and stagnation; whatever the rhetoric, the learning management system or virtual learning environment has become the established repository of institutional content and change is often only represented by periodic replacement of one model or brand by its obvious successor rather than by any more fundamental debate. In this sense virtual learning environment or learning management system have become an established part of the university experience or the university tradition, of which learner analytics, plagiarism detection and online submission are just minor appendages or refinements. Consequently, in this depiction, mobile learning may only mean accessing the virtual learning environment or receiving short message service alerts on a mobile, and innovation is necessarily severely constrained at an institutional level; the enacted version of mobile learning in education may be quite different from the espoused version enunciated by its early fathers. The current contributions break out of this narrow depiction.

Perhaps, as preparation for diving into the contributions, we should all get our bearings and ask ourselves a few questions. Given the novelty, change, potential, interdisciplinarity, diversity, and contexts of mobile learning, it probably requires a much more active and critical readership than some other more established disciplines.

First, given this impressionistic overview of the context of the current book, what does each of us readers think mobile learning is, both in theory and in practice, and as something we espouse and something we enact? This is perhaps the recurrent definitions question; how does each of us define mobile learning in our writing and in our work? Is it a component of e-learning mostly in educational institutions or is it a pervasive feature of our societies?

Where is each of us coming from and how has that shaped our perceptions and preferences? Is it from a technical background or an educational background? Or is it from background in research driven by theorizing, speculating, and curiosity or in research coming from a desire to spread learning further and wider?

Actually, those of us who are innovators or early adopters—sadly the digital learning community is still shackled to the lexicon of the diffusion of innovations—should be asking ourselves about the extent of our understanding of the values, concerns, and constraints of regular teachers and lecturers and their managers. How can we, the current readers and contributors, connect with them all?

So, now primed with the context and the questions, read on.

Preface

When it comes down to it, education has yet to take much notice of “mobile.” For most of the last decade, aside from dealing with new crises like active shooter scenarios or questions of who should use what bathroom, educators have largely continued business-as-usual. They have often ignored the potential of mobile technologies for learning, even when pioneering teachers, researchers, and schools tinker at the edges. Meanwhile, mobile technology has assumed a central position in society.

In this context, education’s intransigence should not be mistaken for mere luddism—though there’s certainly a fair share of that too. Instead, the reluctance reflects how large the challenge of mobile communication is. It takes time and effort to turn a large machine around and schools do not turn on dimes, which can be both good and bad. However, the social changes inspired by mobile technological developments are extensive. Mobile learning moves us beyond simple questions about how instruction is delivered or whether it should be compartmentalized within domains or between pedagogy and policy. Mobile learning has been elusive. In part, because it is still a missed opportunity; however, it is also because so many good ideas about mobile learning have not gained enough traction to thrive. The “no-easy-answers” that live in the wile tempt, but too often disappoint. Through this book we seek to offer touchstones in the continued quest for more extensive awareness and adoption of mobile learning.

There is one seemingly easy answer to the challenges of mobile learning to which we bear witness: its outright ban. Since the introduction of these always on, always-connected devices, disallowing use within and adjacent to schools has been the most popular policy. Thus, for a decade or more we have acted as the proverbial ostrich with its head in the sand. Do we really believe that the technology that has brought nearly infinite learning and knowledge across space and time and into every corner of our lives has no place within the formal organization of learning? We often rue the fact that we perpetuate an educational model birthed in the Enlightenment and only slightly changed by the industrial revolution. Intended to deliver classical knowledge and prepare graduates ready for factory work, this educational model cannot serve the future. And sticking our collective heads in the sand when it comes to mobile learning in and outside of school further perpetuates this obsolete approach to education. Mobile technology is here to stay. We have a wonderfully complex opportunity before us. It is time to get on with it and “make good.”

Starry-eyed fantasy is similarly ineffective, so we need to be careful to avoid an overreliance of our historic, hedonistic sci-fi imaginings about the future of mobile learning. We have moved well beyond the first waves of research and practice to see that mobile learning enables something subtler than “learning anywhere,” or simply translating existing educational models to a new form of content delivery. In fact, we need to be more jaded than those early cheerleaders because there is no silver bullet for the systemic, interconnected problems mobile learning poses. Mobile communication can be a tool, but is no panacea. The answer to the simple question of whether mobile technology is good or bad for learning is simply, “It’s not that simple.”

Part of what characterizes the confusion we face when considering mobiles vis-à-vis education is that even the most basic answers are hard to find. For instance, are we clear about what counts as mobile technology? Is a calculator a “mobile device” in the same way as a smartphone? Do screen size, net access, and primary input method differentiate in a meaningful way? What distinctions or similarities account for the depth of difference in software design? Do the same devices we blame for distraction also facilitate ever-deepening focus and access to time-relevant information? If we cannot agree on the boxes, is there a point to studying a thing called “mobile”? Certainly details matter, but it is far from clear which ones, when, and for whom. If we can collectively claim to have learned one thing so far about mobile learning, it is how tenuous and tentative our path forward must be to take us anywhere worth going.

Yet, educators and other stakeholders are interested in what mobile means for teaching and learning. They are realizing the need to respond to the changes wrought by this technology. Messy and unsure though this ground may be, it is here our authors have sought to find waypoints. Together we have put together a volume that eschews the idealistic gleam or the mostly imaginary worlds so characteristic of earlier work on mobile. Instead, the work in this volume is clothed in realism, zips and buttons of the here-and-now. The authors here engage in the quotidian, hands-on creation of new educational realities and realize that ideals must be tempered by circumstances—including limited time and small, if any, budgets. What we lose in the way of “science fiction,” we gain in usefulness to those in more commonly found educational worlds, their questions, and evolving practices.

What is not true of this bewildering landscape conjured by mobile is that it is wholly new. Technology is not new, even if this technology is. As a result, we have nearly a century of relevant educational thought to guide us. While not a blueprint for the future, this knowledge helps us see, describe, and work toward education that is more relevant, important, and alive. Perhaps much of our work is looking for ways mobile education can help ensure we maintain the best of 20th century education in our 21st century learning environments. There are so many innovative ideas and practices that were worked out, and worked on, long before mobile technology put phones in so many pockets that have not been outpaced by new inventions. They are as relevant as ever. However, they require us to look from another angle starting with a basic reconsideration of what it means to learn in this new mobile-enhanced world where we have these devices and are constantly connected to networks of others. We have a unique opportunity to rework old paradigms and develop new vigor; thus, our inspiration lies in nurturing the important innovations that have been developing over the past years.

Mobile-based teaching might help us to reconsider inquiry-based learning, where the organizing principle is not the lists of facts and principles to be memorized, but rather nurturing the desire to know and grow. How, for instance, might an inquiry-based model come into its own when every pupil can go off on their own to document and inquire with their mobile devices both connecting them to the inquiry and to the progress of their peers. We find mobile technology requires combining knowledge and experience in new ways. The development of augmented reality, for example, alerts us to the hybridization of place and underscores how these devices are capable of creating new potentials for learning. Another development includes using the onboard technologies (compass, Global Positioning System, accelerometer, camera, advanced processor, etc.) to gather and examine materials in situ. And what about the distribution of basic digital learning materials on inexpensive laptops when, for example, the basic materials of knowledge work, such as a cheap Chromebook, make it possible for a typical school to provide 1:1 resources? While not as flashy as some other technology-based innovations, knowing that students have specific common resources at their disposal opens doors previously closed to many. The basic dynamics of learning occur in an age where knowledge and the ability to create are abundant, and need to be understood and shaped. Participation in knowledge building looks quite different when mobile tools and information access are widely available, not reserved for a few.

Really, a diversity of approaches and perspectives is the only possible strategy when dealing with such wide-ranging and interconnected issues. Like biological evolution, letting a thousand flowers bloom and cross-pollinate looks to be the prudent direction. Just as the centrally planned economies in this world cannot not keep up with the messiness of conditions on the ground, no single group will hit upon a golden mobile learning solution that can be simply scaled. Rather each small success or failure is a contributing insight into what it might mean to succeed or fail in other places and contexts. Sharing, not scaling, is how we reach beyond the here and now. Further, this sharing will not always happen within definitional bounds, such as, among only teachers of seventh-grade math, et cetera. Cross-pollination can come from unexpected corners. An idea needs to find purchase in another plan, and be changed, morphed, and passed on again.

With this book then, we aim to play a constructive role in the evolving ecosystem of knowledge and practices relevant to learning with mobile technology. We have collected the work of educators and researchers in diverse settings who are all concerned, in some way or another, with how we evolve paradigms of teaching and learning in this new age. Readers will see innovative educational approaches that are mediated through the use of new technologies in and outside the classroom. Readers will also hear about efforts to produce policy that is more cognizant of the place these mobile devices can take in learning as well as gain insight into the barriers to spreading the innovative programs to more teachers throughout the world. Of course, professional development’s role in broadening the vision and reality of what can be done with mobile devices is crucial. For readers who have a sense that big changes are afoot but have not really seen beyond their own immediate circumstances, this book offers a sense of the bigger picture and the often-unintended consequences and hidden connections involved in planning for learning in the mobile age. Within the chapters that follow it is clear that mobile learning enables not just a better mousetrap, but also a new depth of responsibility to one another.

We have organized the material on mobile learning into three broad sections.

Policy Contexts for Mobile Learning.       This section examines issues and questions that reach beyond the level of a single classroom or project, the papers in this section focus on issues of policy, scale, and professional development. It addresses how questions about mobile learning address other big topics, such as whose ideas get time and attention.

Connecting History and Community: Location-Based Mobile Learning.      The marriage of mobile technology and game design has resulted in engaging, collaborative learning that can occur both in and outside of schools. The chapters in this section explore place-based games that connect students deeply to their out-of-school communities and histories. This is done by facilitating experiential learning in settings relevant to the content with content relevant to the settings. Whether considered games or just highly interactive educational material, the adult- and student-designed location-based activities showcased here serve as lenses for understanding the educational and technical affordances of mobile technology and how these can be harnessed to scaffold deep, and deeply compelling, learning in and across time and space.

Mobile Learning in PK–12 Educational Settings.      Taking the temporal and spatial fixity of the K–12 classroom as a point of departure, this section examines the disruptions and benefits of mobile learning. The authors describe how mobile learning can transform existing classroom interventions, and how they might find new classroom environments within existing school paradigms.

Together, these chapters represent an optimistic take on how we might move forward in today’s technologically evolving world. The authors included in this volume see new ways of staking out a future that includes mobile learning. They examine ways to empower learners as designers of their own intellectual destinies, knowing that the path forward means considering pedagogy, policy, and training together. We hope this work lets the reader see some of the promise of mobile learning, as well as the “speed bumps” or even cliffs that lie ahead in what is for so many of us unknown territory. We hope to point toward solutions for learning in a mobile age, not easy ones maybe, but real ones that can grow bigger and better. The authors have done their work and told their stories. We, the editors, have pulled their work together and brought it to you. What these stories become in your lives is their true meaning because, although we have offered perspective, you and those around you will make the future of mobile learning.