The Future of Mobile Learning

This paper is part of the UNESCO Working Paper Series on Mobile Learning. The Series seeks to better understand how mobile technologies can be used to improve educational access, equity and quality around the world. It comprises fourteen individual papers published in 2012 and 2013. The Series is divided into two broad subsets: six papers examine mobile learning initiatives and their policy implications, and six papers examine how mobile technologies can support teachers and improve their practice. Within the two subsets there are five geographical divisions: Africa and the Middle East, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and North America. Each subset also contains a ‘Global Themes’ paper that synthesizes central findings from the five regional papers. Two additional ‘Issues’ papers round out the Series. One paper highlights characteristics shared by successful mobile learning initiatives and identifies supportive policies. A separate paper discusses how mobile technologies are likely to impact education in the future. As a whole, the Series provides a current snapshot of mobile learning efforts around the world. Collectively and individually, the papers consolidate lessons learned in different regions to provide policy-makers, educators and other stakeholders with a valuable tool for leveraging mobile technology to enhance learning, both now and in the future.

Read

Mobile phones as a social means of education

Mobile phones can be used in education just as computers can. They can for instance serve as social tools that pupils use to develop one another’s projects. Mobile phone games can also enhance learning. Finnish schools have started using mobile phones as a proper learning tool. Professor Jari Multisilta from Pori University Consortium has been studying the potential educational uses of mobile phones since the late 1990s. This was when the first WAP phones and communicators were introduced, which allowed for the production of simple contents on mobile phones. According to the professor, a major future application for mobile social media will be in the area of on-the-job learning and group work.

Read

L’Apprentissage Mobile et les Politiques – UNESCO

L’apprentissage mobile n’est pas une nouveauté mais ce n’est que ces dernières années qu’il a suscité un intérêt soutenu chez les éducateurs, les gouvernements et les entités commerciales. Des milliards de gens utilisent les appareils mobiles pour communiquer ou à d’autres fins, mais une minorité seulement les utilise régulièrement à des fins éducatives. Aujourd’hui, les options récréatives disponibles sur les appareils mobiles dépassent de loin les options éducatives, et en conséquence les responsables de l’élaboration des politiques ont tendance à considérer les technologies mobiles comme étrangères ou même contraires à l’éducation. Comme le présent document et l’ensemble des documents de travail de la série de l’UNESCO sur l’apprentissage mobile le montrent clairement, une telle façon de voir les choses limite les possibilités éducatives en négligeant une foule de programmes qui s’appuient sur les technologies mobiles pour améliorer l’enseignement et l’apprentissage. Des initiatives qui permettent aux apprenants de contrôler davantage leur propre éducation à celles qui facilitent le perfectionnement professionnel des enseignants, les appareils mobiles aident les apprenants et les enseignants travaillant dans divers contextes autour du monde.

Lire

Mobile learning – Delivering Web to Mobile

This report is intended to help staff of UK education institutions, involved in the development of content, gain an understanding of the emerging approaches to delivering services and content for mobile devices using the Web. The use of mobile devices for the consumption and use of Web content and services has grown steadily over the last few years and continues to do so, with analysts predicting that mobile will soon exceed the traditional desktop PC as the most common means users interact with the Web and other Internet services. This report looks at the growth of mobile, the state of the Web and gives an overview of approaches to delivering content and services optimised for the mobile context.  This includes approaches to Web design for responsive sites, leveraging access to device functions and capabilities and the use of Web technologies to build mobile applications.

Read

The Future of Mobile Learning

This bulletin provides an overview of the current state of mobile learning in higher education, speculates on future directions, and suggests questions that educators might ask of themselves and their institutions in preparation for the onset of mobile education. Ignoring mobile learning is not an option when it has already begun to show a strong potential to disrupt existing pedagogical infrastructure, including that of online education. It is up to those in higher education to adapt this freewheeling trend to best serve the core mission of educating students.

Read

Using mLearning and MOOCs to understand chaos, emergence, and complexity in education

In this paper, we look at how the massive open online course (MOOC) format developed by connectivist researchers and enthusiasts can help analyze the complexity, emergence, and chaos at work in the field of education today. We do this through the prism of a MobiMOOC, a six-week course focusing on mLearning that ran from April to May 2011. MobiMOOC embraced the core MOOC components of self-organization, connectedness, openness, complexity, and the resulting chaos, and, as such, serves as an interesting paradigm for new educational orders that are currently emerging in the field. We discuss the nature of participation in MobiMOOC, the use of mobile technology and social media, and how these factors contributed to a chaotic learning environment with emerging phenomena. These emerging phenomena resulted in a transformative educational paradigm.

Read

Hyperconnected Education – the human network

When people connect, they begin to share. This happens automatically, an expression of the instinctive human desire to communicate matters of importance. Sharing, driven by need, amplified by technology, reaches every one of us, through our network of connections. We both give and receive: from each according to their knowledge, to each, according to their need. Sharing has amplified the scope of our awareness. We can find and connect to others who share our interests, increasing our awareness of those interests.

We teach children to research, as if this were an activity distinct from the rest of our experience, when, in reality, research is the core activity of the 21st century. We need to think about the era, just a few years hence, when everyone has a very smart and very well connected mobile in hand from birth. We need to think about how that mobile becomes the lever which moves the child into knowledge. We need to think about our practice and how it is both undermined and amplified by the device and the network it represents.

Your students are not alone on their journey into knowledge and mastery. Beside them, educators blaze a new trail into a close connectivity, leveraging a depth of collective experience to accelerate the search for solutions. We must search and research and share and learn and put that learning into practice. We must do this continuously so we can stay in front of this transition, guiding it toward meaningful outcomes for both students and educators. We must reinvent education while hyperconnectivity reinvents us.

Read

Eventually Tablets will Facilitate more Personalized and Interactive Learning

Read

Tablets offer a number of advantages for education in comparison to laptops or netbooks. First, their lighter weight and orientational flexibility makes them far superior for digital reading or accessing of content. Second, their instant-on capability and fast switching among applications allows learning activities to proceed with less delay. Third, their touchscreen interface allows a high degree of user interactivity. Fourth, they are much more mobile than laptops, as students can carry them inside or outside a room without having to close and reopen the screen and can also use them for mobile data collection or notetaking. Fifth, since it is inexpensive to develop apps for mobile platforms, there is a rapidly growing amount of free or low-cost apps for tablets, many of which are suitable for education. And finally, tablets’ long battery life makes them more suitable for a school day.