Avallain Lab; UNESCO Chair: Innovative Informal Digital Learning in Disadvantaged and Development Contexts; Commonwealth Chair Innovations in Higher Education Address: Ceredigion, Cymru
Supporting Departments and Ministries of Education in Southern Africa with the remote delivery of English language teaching and learning during Covid-19: An evaluation of the impact of the ‘Learn on WhatsApp and ‘Learn on DBE TV’ projects., 2022
Funded by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), the British Council and Depart... more Funded by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), the British Council and Department of Basic Education’s (DBE) Learn English on WhatsApp programme aims to contribute to a reduction in the negative impact on educational outcomes during the Covid-19 crisis, especially English language and literacy, in five Southern African countries: Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe. Quality learning materials are offered on WhatsApp, and have also been repurposed into multimedia for TV shows (for South Africa), aimed at EFAL learners through Grades R to 4. This report covers the evaluation of the programme up to 31 December 2020. The programme is continuing in 2021; the findings reported on here therefore correspond to a mid-line evaluation.
International Journal of Mobile and Blended Learning, 2009
The launch of the International Journal of Mobile and Blended Learning is one of several indicato... more The launch of the International Journal of Mobile and Blended Learning is one of several indicators that mobile learning globally is reaching a critical and sustainable momentum and identity. The past six or seven years have seen a host of pilots and initiatives across sectors and across countries and these have established firstly that mobile learning takes learning to individuals, communities and countries where access to learning was challenging or problematic and secondly that mobile learning enhances, enriches and extends how learning is understood. Environmental factors have meant that this development has been haphazard. The mobile learning community is now faced with broader challenges of scale, durability, equity, embedding and blending in addition to the earlier and more specific challenges of pedagogy and technology, but these developments take place in the context of societies where mobile devices, systems and technologies have a far wider impact than just mobile learning as it is currently conceived. This paper looks at the definition and evolution of mobile learning as the starting point for a discussion of this wider impact.
JUCS - Journal of Universal Computer Science, 2021
An extensive literature exists on how to help students learn languages. The learning process is p... more An extensive literature exists on how to help students learn languages. The learning process is particularly challenging since it combines different types of knowledge and skills into a dual process of comprehension and production, using both oral and written modalities. Networked technology has led to the emergence of different types of learning that can be applied to languages. In this article three of these types are highlighted as being particularly useful for language learning, as can be seen by their impact in the literature, namely mobile, open and social learning. After an analysis of each one, a proposal is made to combine them into a single framework called Mobile Open Social Learning for Languages (or MOSL4L). It is subsequently characterized using Activity Theory and some suggestions are made for establishing a rubric that could enable language learning scenarios to be analyzed in terms of the constituent parts that define their nature and enable the causal relations wit...
This essay uses the popular and perennial topic of definition as a way to explore differing persp... more This essay uses the popular and perennial topic of definition as a way to explore differing perspectives and expectations amongst the various communities whose interests and activities overlap in what has come to be called mobile learning, and to discuss the role and choice of theory in mobile learning. The purpose of the paper is to add to the academic foundations of mobile learning. These communities continue to make progress and continue also to make mistakes; the researchers continue to provide ideas and examples for practitioners, policy-makers, activists and developers, but often on assumptions, logic and inferences that are not transparent or robust. This is the problem being addressed. Here we seek to add greater critical rigour to the language and expectations being deployed. The essay is by nature not definitive, but seeks merely to expose some of the lack of clarity when mobile learning is discussed and promoted.
The notion of digital literacy is rapidly gaining coherence and visibility as a major focus in UK... more The notion of digital literacy is rapidly gaining coherence and visibility as a major focus in UK universities and more widely in Europe for a cluster of non-subject-specific attitudes, skills and competences appropriate to digital societies. This paper argues that there is an obvious mobile component or addition to these and that this would a tactical improvement to the digital literacy agenda. A world characterised by near universal connection and movement does however pose a more serious and profound opportunity ...
ALT-C 2006 Research Proceedings 143 Part 3 Paper 766: The evaluation of next generation learning ... more ALT-C 2006 Research Proceedings 143 Part 3 Paper 766: The evaluation of next generation learning technologies: the case of mobile learning PAPER 766 The evaluation of next generation learning technologies: the case of mobile learning Authors John Traxler Agnes Kukulska-...
Our project aims were to take a birds-eye view of developments and practice in the UK and interna... more Our project aims were to take a birds-eye view of developments and practice in the UK and internationally, and to communicate our findings to a broad and varied audience. 'Wireless and mobile learning' is characterised by technical terminology and for those who are new to it, ...
Mobile learning has moved in the last decade from being a small, scattered research interest to b... more Mobile learning has moved in the last decade from being a small, scattered research interest to being viewed by many international agencies as a way of delivering their humanitarian missions to the developing contexts of the global South. This paper explores and documents fundamental concepts and concerns that characterize or perhaps jeopardise the relationships between the ‘old’ research communities and ‘new’ policy maker communities working to improve the nature and scope of learning in the developing contexts of the global South using personal mobile digital technologies. As becomes apparent, these concepts and concerns are relevant and interesting across a broader range of domains, touching perhaps under-privilege and access to education and technology in both the global North and the global South, the uses of technology to extend, enhance and transform learning and the various pressures and determinants of policy-making and of the public funding of research.
The previous chapters explored design in different disciplinary contexts. This chapter looks at h... more The previous chapters explored design in different disciplinary contexts. This chapter looks at how new technical opportunities can change what is considered effective in pedagogic design. There is much interest in the possibility that mobile and wireless technologies can support greater choice in how learners engage with learning activities, and, from the educator's point of view, that this might enable more flexible approaches to learning design. Developments in mobile learning could therefore have a significant impact on learning ...
There is now a unique interdisciplinary opportunity to work across the various digital technology... more There is now a unique interdisciplinary opportunity to work across the various digital technology development communities, for example ICT4D and m4d, albeit with their conservative conceptions of learning, and the innovative digital learning communities breaking away from institutional e-learning formats, for example the open learning movement, at a time when many indigenous communities in the global South have considerable experience, access, ownership and familiarity with personal and social digital systems and when the decolonising movement provide the impetus and processes to develop new tools and techniques to work together for an accurate and authentic understanding of learning needs and the methods to address them. This is timely and urgent since digital technologies, produced by Anglophone global corporations and promoting the global knowledge economy, threaten fragile cultures and languages and promote the Fourth Industrial Revolution whilst in fact delivering the next wave...
The established mobile learning paradigm is now two decades old; it grew out of the visions and r... more The established mobile learning paradigm is now two decades old; it grew out of the visions and resources of e-learning research communities in universities in the world’s more economically developed regions. Whilst it has clearly been able to demonstrate many practical, pedagogic and conceptual achievements, it is now running out of steam. It has failed to adapt to a world where mobile technologies are pervasive, ubiquitous and intrusive and where people and communities can now own their own learning. This paper looks at the evolution of the established mobile learning paradigm and explores the current global, demographic, social and technical environment in order to develop a new paradigm more suited to the changed and changing realities and priorities. This is mobile learning2.0. The paper looks at the axioms and values of this paradigm and its possible tools and techniques. The treatment is discursive and critical. The paper reimagines the concepts and practices of learning with...
Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching, 2019
The promise of autonomous online language learning undertaken in a non-formal educational context... more The promise of autonomous online language learning undertaken in a non-formal educational context as a general solution for all student needs is greatly exaggerated. In this chapter, the authors argue that its adoption and application varies from region to region, culture to culture, and language to language. This is particularly true of the Middle East and the refugee communities coming from there. The problem is arguably more sociocultural than technological; a broader definition of the digital literacy needed to learn online would need to be both culturally and contextually specific. The chapter explores the nature of such literacy for this social group and how it needs to be defined to potentiate their online language learning. A key element in this process is argued to be community LMOOCs that exploit and combine appropriate open-source software with a set of design principles and processes that ensure the necessary empowerment and ownership needed for meaningful language learning.
This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Teaching & Learning at ODU Digital... more This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Teaching & Learning at ODU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Teaching & Learning Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of ODU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact digitalcommons@odu.edu. Repository Citation Traxler, John and Crompton, Helen, "Mobile Learning in the UK today: Successes, Failures, Future" (2015). Teaching & Learning Faculty Publications. 30. http://digitalcommons.odu.edu/teachinglearning_fac_pubs/30
The concept of paradigms gives us the capacity to look analytically at historical scientific and ... more The concept of paradigms gives us the capacity to look analytically at historical scientific and intellectual episodes in a broader framework. It does however potentially also give us the capacity to look more analytically at contemporary scientific and intellectual activity and make conjectures and predictions. This paper looks at various contemporary pedagogic paradigms, including language learning and mobile learning, and suggests both their failings and then their replacement by an over-arching pedagogic paradigm more suited to societies permeated by personal digital technologies. This might be called the mobility, learning and language paradigm. The paper uses these examples as a way of exploiting paradigmatic thinking in order to catalyse intellectual progress.
Supporting Departments and Ministries of Education in Southern Africa with the remote delivery of English language teaching and learning during Covid-19: An evaluation of the impact of the ‘Learn on WhatsApp and ‘Learn on DBE TV’ projects., 2022
Funded by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), the British Council and Depart... more Funded by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), the British Council and Department of Basic Education’s (DBE) Learn English on WhatsApp programme aims to contribute to a reduction in the negative impact on educational outcomes during the Covid-19 crisis, especially English language and literacy, in five Southern African countries: Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe. Quality learning materials are offered on WhatsApp, and have also been repurposed into multimedia for TV shows (for South Africa), aimed at EFAL learners through Grades R to 4. This report covers the evaluation of the programme up to 31 December 2020. The programme is continuing in 2021; the findings reported on here therefore correspond to a mid-line evaluation.
International Journal of Mobile and Blended Learning, 2009
The launch of the International Journal of Mobile and Blended Learning is one of several indicato... more The launch of the International Journal of Mobile and Blended Learning is one of several indicators that mobile learning globally is reaching a critical and sustainable momentum and identity. The past six or seven years have seen a host of pilots and initiatives across sectors and across countries and these have established firstly that mobile learning takes learning to individuals, communities and countries where access to learning was challenging or problematic and secondly that mobile learning enhances, enriches and extends how learning is understood. Environmental factors have meant that this development has been haphazard. The mobile learning community is now faced with broader challenges of scale, durability, equity, embedding and blending in addition to the earlier and more specific challenges of pedagogy and technology, but these developments take place in the context of societies where mobile devices, systems and technologies have a far wider impact than just mobile learning as it is currently conceived. This paper looks at the definition and evolution of mobile learning as the starting point for a discussion of this wider impact.
JUCS - Journal of Universal Computer Science, 2021
An extensive literature exists on how to help students learn languages. The learning process is p... more An extensive literature exists on how to help students learn languages. The learning process is particularly challenging since it combines different types of knowledge and skills into a dual process of comprehension and production, using both oral and written modalities. Networked technology has led to the emergence of different types of learning that can be applied to languages. In this article three of these types are highlighted as being particularly useful for language learning, as can be seen by their impact in the literature, namely mobile, open and social learning. After an analysis of each one, a proposal is made to combine them into a single framework called Mobile Open Social Learning for Languages (or MOSL4L). It is subsequently characterized using Activity Theory and some suggestions are made for establishing a rubric that could enable language learning scenarios to be analyzed in terms of the constituent parts that define their nature and enable the causal relations wit...
This essay uses the popular and perennial topic of definition as a way to explore differing persp... more This essay uses the popular and perennial topic of definition as a way to explore differing perspectives and expectations amongst the various communities whose interests and activities overlap in what has come to be called mobile learning, and to discuss the role and choice of theory in mobile learning. The purpose of the paper is to add to the academic foundations of mobile learning. These communities continue to make progress and continue also to make mistakes; the researchers continue to provide ideas and examples for practitioners, policy-makers, activists and developers, but often on assumptions, logic and inferences that are not transparent or robust. This is the problem being addressed. Here we seek to add greater critical rigour to the language and expectations being deployed. The essay is by nature not definitive, but seeks merely to expose some of the lack of clarity when mobile learning is discussed and promoted.
The notion of digital literacy is rapidly gaining coherence and visibility as a major focus in UK... more The notion of digital literacy is rapidly gaining coherence and visibility as a major focus in UK universities and more widely in Europe for a cluster of non-subject-specific attitudes, skills and competences appropriate to digital societies. This paper argues that there is an obvious mobile component or addition to these and that this would a tactical improvement to the digital literacy agenda. A world characterised by near universal connection and movement does however pose a more serious and profound opportunity ...
ALT-C 2006 Research Proceedings 143 Part 3 Paper 766: The evaluation of next generation learning ... more ALT-C 2006 Research Proceedings 143 Part 3 Paper 766: The evaluation of next generation learning technologies: the case of mobile learning PAPER 766 The evaluation of next generation learning technologies: the case of mobile learning Authors John Traxler Agnes Kukulska-...
Our project aims were to take a birds-eye view of developments and practice in the UK and interna... more Our project aims were to take a birds-eye view of developments and practice in the UK and internationally, and to communicate our findings to a broad and varied audience. 'Wireless and mobile learning' is characterised by technical terminology and for those who are new to it, ...
Mobile learning has moved in the last decade from being a small, scattered research interest to b... more Mobile learning has moved in the last decade from being a small, scattered research interest to being viewed by many international agencies as a way of delivering their humanitarian missions to the developing contexts of the global South. This paper explores and documents fundamental concepts and concerns that characterize or perhaps jeopardise the relationships between the ‘old’ research communities and ‘new’ policy maker communities working to improve the nature and scope of learning in the developing contexts of the global South using personal mobile digital technologies. As becomes apparent, these concepts and concerns are relevant and interesting across a broader range of domains, touching perhaps under-privilege and access to education and technology in both the global North and the global South, the uses of technology to extend, enhance and transform learning and the various pressures and determinants of policy-making and of the public funding of research.
The previous chapters explored design in different disciplinary contexts. This chapter looks at h... more The previous chapters explored design in different disciplinary contexts. This chapter looks at how new technical opportunities can change what is considered effective in pedagogic design. There is much interest in the possibility that mobile and wireless technologies can support greater choice in how learners engage with learning activities, and, from the educator's point of view, that this might enable more flexible approaches to learning design. Developments in mobile learning could therefore have a significant impact on learning ...
There is now a unique interdisciplinary opportunity to work across the various digital technology... more There is now a unique interdisciplinary opportunity to work across the various digital technology development communities, for example ICT4D and m4d, albeit with their conservative conceptions of learning, and the innovative digital learning communities breaking away from institutional e-learning formats, for example the open learning movement, at a time when many indigenous communities in the global South have considerable experience, access, ownership and familiarity with personal and social digital systems and when the decolonising movement provide the impetus and processes to develop new tools and techniques to work together for an accurate and authentic understanding of learning needs and the methods to address them. This is timely and urgent since digital technologies, produced by Anglophone global corporations and promoting the global knowledge economy, threaten fragile cultures and languages and promote the Fourth Industrial Revolution whilst in fact delivering the next wave...
The established mobile learning paradigm is now two decades old; it grew out of the visions and r... more The established mobile learning paradigm is now two decades old; it grew out of the visions and resources of e-learning research communities in universities in the world’s more economically developed regions. Whilst it has clearly been able to demonstrate many practical, pedagogic and conceptual achievements, it is now running out of steam. It has failed to adapt to a world where mobile technologies are pervasive, ubiquitous and intrusive and where people and communities can now own their own learning. This paper looks at the evolution of the established mobile learning paradigm and explores the current global, demographic, social and technical environment in order to develop a new paradigm more suited to the changed and changing realities and priorities. This is mobile learning2.0. The paper looks at the axioms and values of this paradigm and its possible tools and techniques. The treatment is discursive and critical. The paper reimagines the concepts and practices of learning with...
Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching, 2019
The promise of autonomous online language learning undertaken in a non-formal educational context... more The promise of autonomous online language learning undertaken in a non-formal educational context as a general solution for all student needs is greatly exaggerated. In this chapter, the authors argue that its adoption and application varies from region to region, culture to culture, and language to language. This is particularly true of the Middle East and the refugee communities coming from there. The problem is arguably more sociocultural than technological; a broader definition of the digital literacy needed to learn online would need to be both culturally and contextually specific. The chapter explores the nature of such literacy for this social group and how it needs to be defined to potentiate their online language learning. A key element in this process is argued to be community LMOOCs that exploit and combine appropriate open-source software with a set of design principles and processes that ensure the necessary empowerment and ownership needed for meaningful language learning.
This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Teaching & Learning at ODU Digital... more This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Teaching & Learning at ODU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Teaching & Learning Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of ODU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact digitalcommons@odu.edu. Repository Citation Traxler, John and Crompton, Helen, "Mobile Learning in the UK today: Successes, Failures, Future" (2015). Teaching & Learning Faculty Publications. 30. http://digitalcommons.odu.edu/teachinglearning_fac_pubs/30
The concept of paradigms gives us the capacity to look analytically at historical scientific and ... more The concept of paradigms gives us the capacity to look analytically at historical scientific and intellectual episodes in a broader framework. It does however potentially also give us the capacity to look more analytically at contemporary scientific and intellectual activity and make conjectures and predictions. This paper looks at various contemporary pedagogic paradigms, including language learning and mobile learning, and suggests both their failings and then their replacement by an over-arching pedagogic paradigm more suited to societies permeated by personal digital technologies. This might be called the mobility, learning and language paradigm. The paper uses these examples as a way of exploiting paradigmatic thinking in order to catalyse intellectual progress.
Mobile digital literacy skills development as part of digital inclusion is compellingly relevant ... more Mobile digital literacy skills development as part of digital inclusion is compellingly relevant but exactly what the curriculum should contain is less evident. In this paper, we report on the development of a mobile digital literacy skills development curriculum for teachers using a Design Science Research (DSR) methodology. The use of design science research for curriculum development is not common but appropriate where the relevance cycle ensured engagement with the needs of the community while the rigor cycle guided the evaluations by other stakeholders. The main contribution of this paper is the mobile digital literacy skills development curriculum as artifact. Furthermore, the paper provides insights gained on using the DSR methodology for community informatics research
Background: Dengue was reintroduced in Brazil in the 80’s. Since 2010, it is estimated that there... more Background: Dengue was reintroduced in Brazil in the 80’s. Since 2010, it is estimated that there have been over a million cases of dengue per year, leading to hundreds of deaths. Community health education is one of the main objectives of vector control policies.Objective: Here we compare perceptions and behaviours before and after an educational intervention based on behavioural change theories (BCT) of a group of Endemic Disease Control Agents (ACEs) with a group of college students of Campina Grande city, Paraiba state, Brazil.Methods: Using a distance-learning platform adapted for mobile devices, the intervention consisted of tasks or missions that were presented through short videos with people performing the desired target behaviour. To demonstrate the accomplishment of the tasks, participants produced videos and shared on social networks. A questionnaire was completed before and after the intervention by 58 participants, 31 students and 27 ACEs. Results: Most of the particip...
This talk will look at location from two persectives, firstly from the perspective of technology-... more This talk will look at location from two persectives, firstly from the perspective of technology-enhanced learning, specifically location-aware mobile learning, and secondly from the perspective of societies where mobility and connectedness transform the meaning of location, and of space, place and community. Both perspectives impact on the role of educational institutions and their software systems.
There is much activity, much discussion and much interest in the capacity of mobile devices to de... more There is much activity, much discussion and much interest in the capacity of mobile devices to deliver, support and enhance learning for the disenfranchised, the disadvantaged and the developing communities and regions of the world especially in Africa. I argue that much of this discussion, interest and activity is however uncritical, simplistic and poorly synthesised.
In general the argument for using mobile phones or other mobile devices to address educational disadvantage is plausible, self-evident and straightforward: their ownership and acceptance are near-universal and cut across most notions of ‘digital divides’; their use is based around robust sustainable business models; they are, unlike other ICTs, found at the BOP amongst the next billion subscribers; they deliver information, ideas and, increasingly, images. And there are no other options!
There is furthermore a rapidly increasing ownership of more powerful handsets in the developing world, decreasing real costs of this hardware and connectivity, increasing coverage of higher specification networks in these regions and renewed activity of donors and of corporates representing publishing, handsets, services and infrastructure looking for sustainable business models based on the educational use of mobile devices in developing regions.
These various communities, necessary actors in facilitating successful learning using mobile devices and technologies, each come with considerable potential but often inappropriate contributions, partial understandings and flawed assumptions. This seminar will explore the extent to which their optimism is misplaced.
Information is the basis of our society, of our businesses and of our organisations.
Once, in... more Information is the basis of our society, of our businesses and of our organisations.
Once, information was marginal to organisations and then gradually information became central. Consequently, information systems development methodology, “..recommended collection of philosophies, phases, procedures, rules, techniques, tools, documentation, management, and training for developers of Information Systems”, also became central. (Avison and Fitzgerald, 1988).
Over the last decade, the mobility and connectedness afforded by universal personal mobile technologies have meant that the production, transformation, transmission, consumption, ownership, control, nature and significance of information have changed rapidly. The consequences for information systems, for the development of information systems, and for the organisations that use them are still unfolding.
This talk outlines the impact of mobility and connectedness and asks about the effects on information systems and their development.
It is important and urgent to debate and discuss the issue of ‘development’ and the issue of 'app... more It is important and urgent to debate and discuss the issue of ‘development’ and the issue of 'appropriate' technology, in relation to e-learning, and especially to debate and discuss these issues in relation to each other. The key questions are, “Are they antithetical? Is one at the expense of the other? Can they be reconciled?”
One concrete and specific reason for this debate and discussion is the need for much greater clarity about the perceived tension between those e-learning strategies based on near-universal ownership of mobile devices amongst potential learners on the one hand and those e-learning strategies based expensive large-scale installations of static institutional networked desktop computers on the other. This discussion is also important because it is also a discussion about the balance between the individual and the institution, the community and the corporate, the bottom-up and the top-down and it is vitally important to the issue of sustainability.
There are of course many competing and confused ideas about what could constitute 'appropriate' learning technologies and systems for Africa, and also about what would be the ‘appropriate’ forms of e-learning in Africa.
There are also many competing and confused ideas about ‘development’ and much emotive rhetoric about ‘catching up’ and ‘leap-frogging’. This contribution attempts to discuss these but, of course, any discussion of education, and any discussion of education in Africa is always in danger of simplifying Africa or simplifying education or simplifying both.
Firstly, the idea of a technology system, especially a socio-technical system such as an e-learning technology system, is complex and many definitions of systems and technologies emphasise their human and social components, alongside the technical and tangible components, and also emphasise how understanding or designing a technological system crucially depends on identifying its intended purpose (and perhaps its actual use) and the nature of its interactions with its environment. With anything other than the simplest system, these are all complicated, unclear and often contested.
Secondly, Africa is composed of widely different countries and cultures; many of the institutions and structures of formal education in many Africa countries are still strongly influenced by the legacy of contact, most likely colonisation, with different European countries each with its own educational traditions. This is apparent in ideas about instruction, curricula, assessment, organisation and management and may cut across national boundaries. These institutions and structures may however now be influenced by the growing globalisation of educational thinking and by the pressure from global educational technology developers and vendors.
Furthermore, as in countries in other continents, the formal institutions and structures of education may not be sympathetic to the practices of the communities and to the ideas of informal learning in the different local cultures, or even conducted in the same languages. There can sometimes also be vagueness in defining in practical terms the ‘African-ness’ that ‘development’ or ‘appropriate’ technologies and systems are supposed to be addressing: is it sparsity, rurality and distance? Is it poverty and deprivation? Is it infrastructure, capacity and organisation? Is it national, cultural and linguistic diversity? Or is it something else? There is always a risk of making superficial generalisations or untrustworthy inferences but there is always a practical need to learn what can be transferred or replicated too, and a need to formulate policy.
Thirdly, education systems and institutions have seldom developed their own sustainable, scalable technologies anywhere in the world. It is unlikely that any parts of Africa will be any different. Instead, education systems and institutions have appropriated or co-opt technologies, that is, they have used technologies for purposes for which those technologies were not intended or designed or sold. There are a variety of reasons for this but one reason must be perceptions amongst vendors and developers that education is only a small market compared to commercial, corporate and industrial markets. Nevertheless some technologies have been developed for purely educational markets – interactive whiteboards, VLEs and e-portfolios are the obvious ones currently.
Education systems in most parts of the world have appropriated the desktop computers and the software systems designed for the American and European corporate markets. Financial constraints make this practice virtually essential but this has clearly been problematic for the development of ‘appropriate’ educational technologies anywhere in the world. This is perhaps more problematic for education systems in the 'developing' regions of the world since they are doubly distant from the original intended designs. Dedicated educational hardware is practically non-existent and dedicated educational software is miniscule compared to the volume of commercial and industrial software; furthermore the vast majority of this dedicated educational software originates outside the world’s developing regions so its ‘appropriate-ness’ is suspect too.
Fourthly, looking at ‘appropriate’ technologies from outside Africa raises the issues of designing for ‘appropriate-ness’ rather than procuring it. Participative design and user-centred design both seem at first sight to be the tools for developing ‘appropriate’ local or indigenous technologies. However community preferences may differ from the preferences of trained or professional educators and they may also differ from the ideas of ‘progressive’ developers and theorists from the ‘developed’ regions. Furthermore, raising the issue of design implicitly raises the issue of evaluation, or perhaps M&E in an African or ‘development’ context.
Evaluation methods must be aligned to design practices in order to feedback meaningfully into iterative design. And if we are concerned about sustainability, then the outputs of evaluation must be appropriate to the developer community and perhaps also to the policy and business communities in order to generate the type of evidence that will either change policy and thus secure public funding or establish a business case and thus encourage commercial activity.
Seeing sustainability at a national level in these terms is by no means easy because it probably implies the kind of 'big government' that would characterise the UK or Sweden but not the US or South Africa, the kind of 'big government' prepared to commission and then evaluate evidence and then change policy and allocate resources. In countries with 'small government', sustainable educational technology is in the hands of businesses or social enterprises, and the mechanisms to support and sustain initiatives are different and less obvious.
Fifthly, sustainability is also an organisational and a cultural issue. It is easy to see any discussion of educational technology in Africa in terms of physical challenges and physical deficits, to see the problem (or rather to define the problem) in terms of infrastructure, in terms for example of reliable mains electricity, broadband connectivity, secure clean buildings, modern computer hardware, up-to-date licenses and software installations. And this simple analysis suggests that once a range of these physical pre-conditions have been met, that successful e-learning will take place. We must however recognise that no technology is culturally neutral, either as it is originally designed or deployed or as it is subsequently appropriated. Every technology embodies an ideology. In the case of educational technology and of e-learning, the ideology is in part the implied pedagogy. So when institutions or countries procure and install a particular educational technology, they also install the ideology including the pedagogy that comes with it. Of course the technology and its ideology may not be aligned to their new learners or their institutions and culture. The misalignment could be at a number of levels. The educational technology may not be aligned its host institution and its ideas about teaching and learning, it may not be aligned to popular, informal or cultural expectations about learning (of course, the educational institutions may not be aligned to popular or informal expectations about what constitutes learning and how to learn either).
Another dimension to the discussion of sustainability and ‘appropriateness’ is the lifecycle of projects and innovations in e-learning in both the ‘developing’ and the ‘developed’ regions of the world. In most cases and in most places, these are small-scale and fixed-term; they are usually funded, staffed, implemented and evaluated in ways that keep them isolated from their host communities and host organisations and almost inevitably they fail to embed and endure; they are evidently ‘inappropriate’.
And lastly, to return to the issue of appropriation, of course people generally appropriate technologies anyway; the 'missed call' or the 'please call me' is the obvious example - the network operators and the handset vendors clearly did not set out to provide the world with free messaging. However there is a tension between those technologies appropriated by educational institutions, such as PCs, and those appropriated by the community, for example for informal mobile learning. Implicitly the idea of appropriation is linked to the idea of sustainability; those technologies appropriated by the community must evidently have some attributes of sustainability; those technologies appropriated by the educational institutions may not be sustainable.
Any attempt to analyse educational technologies in Africa may be simplistic. Our concern is to question whether the rhetoric of ‘catching up’ or ‘leap-frogging’ in e-learning is not taking place at the expense of a discussion about what is ‘appropriate’.
Educators are using popular digital technologies, including mobile devices notably phones and med... more Educators are using popular digital technologies, including mobile devices notably phones and media players; social networking sites such as Bebo, LinkedIn and Facebook; blogging sites such as Twitter and Jaiku, immersive virtual environments, mainly Habbo Hotel and Second Life, and gaming platforms such as Grand Theft Auto, World of Warcraft and DoomEd.
These are important developments and entirely different from the use of technologies that are purely educational or institutional such as e‐portfolios or VLEs, where educators and their institutions control the technology and lay down the rules. With popular digital technologies, those beyond the walled garden of the institution, other rules have already developed and other regulators operate.
These technologies are creating more and more places and modes that people, learners, perhaps learners off-duty, can inhabit, where communities can form, where ideas, images and information can be produced, stored, shared, transmitted and consumed and thus these technologies, each in their different ways, transform rather than merely reproduce the nature of learning. Each of these technologies may also have its own rules, for example concerning privacy, expressed in the appropriate terms and conditions to which users sign up. These may be at odds with their own communities’ customs and practices and also with educators’ own expectations. Educators are also taking learners into these places, virtual field trips in effect, and this raises ethical issues, and possibly legal questions, in terms of a duty of care.
Ethics are important to educators because of the possible need to align their methods to the ethical expectations of the communities with whom they work; these expectations are however volatile, tacit, transient, chaotic and local to each community. And of course, the learner's experiences and expectations, their ethical expectations, of these educational experiences are obviously informed by the experiences and expectations they bring within from the 'outside' world where they already use many of these technologies. We are perhaps entering an era of ‘user‐generated ethics’.
These informal ethics, that is, the standards and expectations, of people in online or connected communities continue to grow, multiply and evolve; law and regulation are misunderstood and perhaps inappropriate.
Ethics could be characterised as fundamentally about trying to do good, and trying to avoid doing harm; harm may be defined in terms of physical or objective harm but also in terms of distress, upset, embarrassment and shame. Ethical behaviour may have been straightforward in a modernist age where society was assumed to be united by a set of grand narratives including some about the nature of good and bad. The informal and fragmented ethics that we are describing may be symptomatic of a transition to a postmodern society - or they may be simply symptomatic of a transition to an acceptance of more relativist or subjective ethical stances - but they raise questions about the legitimacy of one community deciding what constitutes harm for another community.
Speculation amongst educators about these issues can only proceed a limited distance before it becomes apparent that the educators need to engage with learners, and the other inhabitants of all these other informal places and spaces. This however is clearly not straightforward. What are the ethics of such engagement? Does it itself risk intrusion, embarrassment, oppression or something else that might be construed as 'harm'. Are there ways, research methods, of engaging with learners that will enable accurate, authentic and harmless discussion to take place, or are research methods and research ethics at odds in this area of enquiry?
We live in a society increasingly characterised by mobility and connectedness; our educational in... more We live in a society increasingly characterised by mobility and connectedness; our educational institutions are however still largely characterised by fixity and isolation, and perhaps by the risk of irrelevance.
Recent years have seen a growth and interest in mobile learning, in many countries of the world and in all sectors, universities included. At the same time, the acceptance and ownership of increasingly powerful mobile personal technologies has become widespread, nearly universal , in our societies. These two trends might seem supportive of each other and in some respects they are. In other respects, however, their relationship is more problematic.
This talk explores the impact of mobile technology on society and the phenomenon of mobile learning within our institutions, and the likely strategic implications and issues for UK universities.
Mobile learning is perhaps nine or ten years old. This talk looks back at those years to ask if w... more Mobile learning is perhaps nine or ten years old. This talk looks back at those years to ask if we started in the right place and went in the right direction. And have we gone as far as we can?
The achievements of the mobile learning community in this time are relatively easy to identify. The community globally has demonstrated, though probably not proved, that we can take learning to individuals, communities and countries that were previously too remote, socially, economically, infrastructurally or geographically, for other educational initiatives. We have also shown that we can enhance and enrich the concept and activity of learning, beyond earlier conceptions, with learning experiences that are more personalised, authentic, situated and context-aware than ever before. We have shown also that we can challenge and extend existing theories of learning.
There are now several substantial national programmes and initiatives, and last but not least, the community now supports an international professional association, several peer-reviewed academic journals and a range of national and international conferences, ranging from those for practitioners and policy-makers to those for researchers.
Each of these apparent achievements is however more complex than it at first seems and the mobile learning community still has major challenges to address. Some of these are internal or local to the mobile learning community itself but other more significant challenges are located in the wider external environment.
The development of mobile learning has often been driven by pedagogic necessity, technological innovation, funding opportunity; it has come out of particular regions, institutions and disciplines, and sometimes out of the perceived inadequacies of conventional e-learning. These historical factors have shaped mobile learning but they have limited it and now challenge it too.
There are still the significant challenges growing out of this history, those of scale, sustainability, inclusion and equity in all their different forms in the future, and of context and personalisation in all their possibilities, of blending with other established and emerging educational technologies, and of tracking the changes in technology.
There continues to be challenges in developing the substantial and credible evidence-base that will justify further research and development.
These challenges are however local to the immediate educational context of mobile learning. There are however wider contextual challenges, those of recognising the profound societal and philosophical changes catalysed by mobile devices, and of recognising their local echoes and implications within mobile learning.
Mobile learning can be characterised as a specific enterprise within education systems. Mobile devices are near-universal and their impact brings near-universal connectedness to people, data, content and media. There are subtle but pervasive transformations of jobs, work and the economy, of our sense of time, space and place, of ethics and politics, of knowing and learning, and of community and identity. Finally, the talk explores how these transformations challenge education systems and hence challenge mobile learning.
This talk draws on a review of the literature of mobilities and looks at its significance for 'le... more This talk draws on a review of the literature of mobilities and looks at its significance for 'learners' and its capacity to help educators understand how mobility and connectedness are changing the expectations of learners.
The 'learner experience' of learning and technology whilst at university, and the learners' reactions to learning and technology, before, during and within their time at university, are, in part, a product of learners' changing experiences of learning and technology outside university and before university. We cannot just ask about the 'learner experience' without asking how the world outside is shaping learners.
These experiences are now changing dramatically as more and more of these learners have personal mobile devices. These devices include smart-phones, satnav, games consoles, digital cameras, media players, netbooks and handheld computers. Almost every learner owns one and uses one, often more than one. Not only do they own them and use them but they also invest considerable time, effort and money choosing them, buying them, customising them, enhancing them and exploiting them. These devices express part or much of their owners' values, affiliations, identity and individuality through their choice and their use. The devices are curiously both pervasive and ubiquitous, both conspicuous and unobtrusive, both noteworthy and taken-for-granted in the lives of most of the people in this country.
The review and talk are intended to give the 'learner experience' community some insight into the literature that currently describes and analyses the relationships and dynamics between the mobility and the connectedness afforded by personal mobile devices, systems and technologies on the one hand and changes in people, culture and society on the other. Much of this picture is one of fragmentation; attitudes and usage of mobile technologies facilitate the creation of transient or volatile communities and thus fragment more stable, monolithic and traditional communities. One obvious possible difference between these communities is age; the uptake of these technologies is often, rightly or wrongly, characterised as age-dependent, as generational. If this is even partly true, it means that the impact on universities will be different across the sector. Those universities with a student profile that peaks sharply at 18- 19yrs will at some point see sudden changes. Those universities taking students from across the decades will see gradual and apparently haphazard changes perhaps masked by more local factors.
The talk looks at changes to identity as well as community; to jobs, work, economy and employment; to disadvantage and 'digital divides', personal, local and global; to knowing, finding out and learning; to manners, expectations, standards and ethics; time, space and place and how all of these changes and transformations change and shape the expectations that underpin the 'learner experience'.
Finally the talk touches on the possibility or rather certainty that learners may bring not only their attitudes and expectations with them but also the devices themselves and attempts to describe some of the situations that this might engender. There is however a very specific situation on the horizon in which institutions might decide to deliver and support learning using these learners' own devices. This changes the default from a situation where institutions procure and provide learning technologies to one where learners bring their and institutions support this. It shifts the locus of control from institution to learner. This is going to prove challenging.
There is an emergent community of researchers, developers and activists under the banner of ‘mobi... more There is an emergent community of researchers, developers and activists under the banner of ‘mobiles for development’ that believes the widespread ownership, accessibility and use of mobiles in the ‘developing’ world, unlike any other ICT, represents a significant and timely opportunity to address deprivation and poverty. There have already been many initiatives and gatherings but progress has not been straightforward. Much work for mobiles, for example mobile learning, and much work in ‘development’, for example in Africa, has been characterised by failure to scale up and to endure; there has been a confusion about the role and meaning of ‘development’ alongside capacity-building, aid and research, and about the activities of ‘development’ alongside the global activities of corporates, donors, tourists and universities.
There are also philosophical problems relating research activities to the processes of evidence-based policy formulation, sometimes in the tensions between ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’, sometimes in contexts of ‘small’ government or just bad government, and the predispositions of different cultures to ideas of participation, risk, control and innovation, and to understanding the trustworthiness of our notions of generalisability, transferability and abstraction. The expectations of the ‘grand narratives’ of ‘development’ have seldom been fulfilled and the mechanics of making stuff happen largely stays a mystery. There are several other challenges!
The work presented here describes the concept of ubiquitous interactive classrooms by demonstrati... more The work presented here describes the concept of ubiquitous interactive classrooms by demonstrating emerging, low-cost presentation technologies including the Nintendo Wii and palm-sized projectors. The authors also discuss how they can be used to promote better learning through ad-hoc digital interaction in traditional classrooms and the field.
Index Terms — active white boards, mobile learning, whole class teaching
Ethics embraces everything from the legally allowable as set out in laws, statutes and regulation... more Ethics embraces everything from the legally allowable as set out in laws, statutes and regulations through the institutionally and professionally advisable or preferable as set out in regulations, codes, frameworks and procedures all the way to the socially or culturally expected or acceptable as manifest in such concepts as fashion, taste, behaviour, etiquette and language. All aspects of ethics, especially the last, are important to individuals as expressions of identity, affinity and community.
They are important to researchers because research must be seen as proper and moral, that is within laws and regulations and within the consensus of research community but also as moral and acceptable within the communities within which researchers work. It must also I suspect be aligned to the ethical expectations of communities if it is be methodologically sound.
In looking at the ethics of conducting design research, every researcher is facing in two directions, has two different sets of discourses and responsibilities.
Firstly, each researcher works with and within the ethical expectations and formulations of their profession, their institute and their funder. Secondly, each works with individuals and communities using novel, complex and powerful technologies, individuals and communities that comprise a society increasingly transformed by these technologies, particularly mobile ones and web-based ones.
The first discourse is easy to understand: technological change is rapid and widespread, and drives social changes - sorry, not meant to sound like technological determinism, whilst ICTD research is often multidisciplinary and multi-partner. Institutional ethics procedures are relatively static and perhaps falling behind this change and complexity but this first discourse is compounded by the second.
The literature of development describes how societies are changing as increasingly powerful technology systems become widespread and integrated into everyday life; inter-related notions of identity and community, conversation and discourse, space and time, knowledge and ideas are evolving; local physical and virtual worlds are intermingling; virtual groups are forming and dissolving; knowledge, ideas, images and issues are being generated and valorised by these fragmented and transient groups. For the design researcher seeking to work ethically and rigorously in developing regions this implies an increasing awareness of transient and fragmented specifics around, for example, preferences, punctuality, taste, slang, privacy, place and status.
Mobile technologies are not only widespread but, unlike other ICTS, they are concentrated at the ‘bottom-of-the-pyramid’. This raises two specific ethical issues for the design researcher: firstly, there is considerable corporate multinational interest in what is perceived to be an enormous potential market for content and services delivered by mobile technologies and hence pilots and projects taking place perhaps below the scrutiny of conventional ethical supervision; secondly, working with communities in developing regions entails attempting to work ethically across multiple differentials of power, status, lifestyle. The mechanics but also the ethics of participative design are challenging and novel in these contexts.
Design researchers in developing regions must recognise wider social contexts in order to be aligned to the ethics of their academic responsibilities whilst being aligned to the ethics of the fragmented, multiple and transient communities and individuals with whom they research. This will ensure that their work is not only moral in the eyes of these communities and individuals but that this work is methodologically authentic and credible.
The proposed contribution will look at these issues from the perspective of someone who has worked across a range of roles and relationships, sometimes as evaluator, sometimes consultant, sometimes as researcher, sometimes as research mentor or supervisor, sometimes as visiting scientist, a mixture perhaps typical of many academics working in developing regions, working within research environments, consortia, not-for-profits, working in both developing and developed countries, however interpreted, attempting to understand and address inclusion, opportunity, diversity and the development agenda
The contribution will use real incidents, suitably anonymised, to address questions drawn from the workshop themes and to illustrate the points made in this outline
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In general the argument for using mobile phones or other mobile devices to address educational disadvantage is plausible, self-evident and straightforward: their ownership and acceptance are near-universal and cut across most notions of ‘digital divides’; their use is based around robust sustainable business models; they are, unlike other ICTs, found at the BOP amongst the next billion subscribers; they deliver information, ideas and, increasingly, images. And there are no other options!
There is furthermore a rapidly increasing ownership of more powerful handsets in the developing world, decreasing real costs of this hardware and connectivity, increasing coverage of higher specification networks in these regions and renewed activity of donors and of corporates representing publishing, handsets, services and infrastructure looking for sustainable business models based on the educational use of mobile devices in developing regions.
These various communities, necessary actors in facilitating successful learning using mobile devices and technologies, each come with considerable potential but often inappropriate contributions, partial understandings and flawed assumptions. This seminar will explore the extent to which their optimism is misplaced.
Once, information was marginal to organisations and then gradually information became central. Consequently, information systems development methodology, “..recommended collection of philosophies, phases, procedures, rules, techniques, tools, documentation, management, and training for developers of Information Systems”, also became central. (Avison and Fitzgerald, 1988).
Over the last decade, the mobility and connectedness afforded by universal personal mobile technologies have meant that the production, transformation, transmission, consumption, ownership, control, nature and significance of information have changed rapidly. The consequences for information systems, for the development of information systems, and for the organisations that use them are still unfolding.
This talk outlines the impact of mobility and connectedness and asks about the effects on information systems and their development.
One concrete and specific reason for this debate and discussion is the need for much greater clarity about the perceived tension between those e-learning strategies based on near-universal ownership of mobile devices amongst potential learners on the one hand and those e-learning strategies based expensive large-scale installations of static institutional networked desktop computers on the other. This discussion is also important because it is also a discussion about the balance between the individual and the institution, the community and the corporate, the bottom-up and the top-down and it is vitally important to the issue of sustainability.
There are of course many competing and confused ideas about what could constitute 'appropriate' learning technologies and systems for Africa, and also about what would be the ‘appropriate’ forms of e-learning in Africa.
There are also many competing and confused ideas about ‘development’ and much emotive rhetoric about ‘catching up’ and ‘leap-frogging’. This contribution attempts to discuss these but, of course, any discussion of education, and any discussion of education in Africa is always in danger of simplifying Africa or simplifying education or simplifying both.
Firstly, the idea of a technology system, especially a socio-technical system such as an e-learning technology system, is complex and many definitions of systems and technologies emphasise their human and social components, alongside the technical and tangible components, and also emphasise how understanding or designing a technological system crucially depends on identifying its intended purpose (and perhaps its actual use) and the nature of its interactions with its environment. With anything other than the simplest system, these are all complicated, unclear and often contested.
Secondly, Africa is composed of widely different countries and cultures; many of the institutions and structures of formal education in many Africa countries are still strongly influenced by the legacy of contact, most likely colonisation, with different European countries each with its own educational traditions. This is apparent in ideas about instruction, curricula, assessment, organisation and management and may cut across national boundaries. These institutions and structures may however now be influenced by the growing globalisation of educational thinking and by the pressure from global educational technology developers and vendors.
Furthermore, as in countries in other continents, the formal institutions and structures of education may not be sympathetic to the practices of the communities and to the ideas of informal learning in the different local cultures, or even conducted in the same languages. There can sometimes also be vagueness in defining in practical terms the ‘African-ness’ that ‘development’ or ‘appropriate’ technologies and systems are supposed to be addressing: is it sparsity, rurality and distance? Is it poverty and deprivation? Is it infrastructure, capacity and organisation? Is it national, cultural and linguistic diversity? Or is it something else? There is always a risk of making superficial generalisations or untrustworthy inferences but there is always a practical need to learn what can be transferred or replicated too, and a need to formulate policy.
Thirdly, education systems and institutions have seldom developed their own sustainable, scalable technologies anywhere in the world. It is unlikely that any parts of Africa will be any different. Instead, education systems and institutions have appropriated or co-opt technologies, that is, they have used technologies for purposes for which those technologies were not intended or designed or sold. There are a variety of reasons for this but one reason must be perceptions amongst vendors and developers that education is only a small market compared to commercial, corporate and industrial markets. Nevertheless some technologies have been developed for purely educational markets – interactive whiteboards, VLEs and e-portfolios are the obvious ones currently.
Education systems in most parts of the world have appropriated the desktop computers and the software systems designed for the American and European corporate markets. Financial constraints make this practice virtually essential but this has clearly been problematic for the development of ‘appropriate’ educational technologies anywhere in the world. This is perhaps more problematic for education systems in the 'developing' regions of the world since they are doubly distant from the original intended designs. Dedicated educational hardware is practically non-existent and dedicated educational software is miniscule compared to the volume of commercial and industrial software; furthermore the vast majority of this dedicated educational software originates outside the world’s developing regions so its ‘appropriate-ness’ is suspect too.
Fourthly, looking at ‘appropriate’ technologies from outside Africa raises the issues of designing for ‘appropriate-ness’ rather than procuring it. Participative design and user-centred design both seem at first sight to be the tools for developing ‘appropriate’ local or indigenous technologies. However community preferences may differ from the preferences of trained or professional educators and they may also differ from the ideas of ‘progressive’ developers and theorists from the ‘developed’ regions. Furthermore, raising the issue of design implicitly raises the issue of evaluation, or perhaps M&E in an African or ‘development’ context.
Evaluation methods must be aligned to design practices in order to feedback meaningfully into iterative design. And if we are concerned about sustainability, then the outputs of evaluation must be appropriate to the developer community and perhaps also to the policy and business communities in order to generate the type of evidence that will either change policy and thus secure public funding or establish a business case and thus encourage commercial activity.
Seeing sustainability at a national level in these terms is by no means easy because it probably implies the kind of 'big government' that would characterise the UK or Sweden but not the US or South Africa, the kind of 'big government' prepared to commission and then evaluate evidence and then change policy and allocate resources. In countries with 'small government', sustainable educational technology is in the hands of businesses or social enterprises, and the mechanisms to support and sustain initiatives are different and less obvious.
Fifthly, sustainability is also an organisational and a cultural issue. It is easy to see any discussion of educational technology in Africa in terms of physical challenges and physical deficits, to see the problem (or rather to define the problem) in terms of infrastructure, in terms for example of reliable mains electricity, broadband connectivity, secure clean buildings, modern computer hardware, up-to-date licenses and software installations. And this simple analysis suggests that once a range of these physical pre-conditions have been met, that successful e-learning will take place. We must however recognise that no technology is culturally neutral, either as it is originally designed or deployed or as it is subsequently appropriated. Every technology embodies an ideology. In the case of educational technology and of e-learning, the ideology is in part the implied pedagogy. So when institutions or countries procure and install a particular educational technology, they also install the ideology including the pedagogy that comes with it. Of course the technology and its ideology may not be aligned to their new learners or their institutions and culture. The misalignment could be at a number of levels. The educational technology may not be aligned its host institution and its ideas about teaching and learning, it may not be aligned to popular, informal or cultural expectations about learning (of course, the educational institutions may not be aligned to popular or informal expectations about what constitutes learning and how to learn either).
Another dimension to the discussion of sustainability and ‘appropriateness’ is the lifecycle of projects and innovations in e-learning in both the ‘developing’ and the ‘developed’ regions of the world. In most cases and in most places, these are small-scale and fixed-term; they are usually funded, staffed, implemented and evaluated in ways that keep them isolated from their host communities and host organisations and almost inevitably they fail to embed and endure; they are evidently ‘inappropriate’.
And lastly, to return to the issue of appropriation, of course people generally appropriate technologies anyway; the 'missed call' or the 'please call me' is the obvious example - the network operators and the handset vendors clearly did not set out to provide the world with free messaging. However there is a tension between those technologies appropriated by educational institutions, such as PCs, and those appropriated by the community, for example for informal mobile learning. Implicitly the idea of appropriation is linked to the idea of sustainability; those technologies appropriated by the community must evidently have some attributes of sustainability; those technologies appropriated by the educational institutions may not be sustainable.
Any attempt to analyse educational technologies in Africa may be simplistic. Our concern is to question whether the rhetoric of ‘catching up’ or ‘leap-frogging’ in e-learning is not taking place at the expense of a discussion about what is ‘appropriate’.
These are important developments and entirely different from the use of technologies that are purely educational or institutional such as e‐portfolios or VLEs, where educators and their institutions control the technology and lay down the rules. With popular digital technologies, those beyond the walled garden of the institution, other rules have already developed and other regulators operate.
These technologies are creating more and more places and modes that people, learners, perhaps learners off-duty, can inhabit, where communities can form, where ideas, images and information can be produced, stored, shared, transmitted and consumed and thus these technologies, each in their different ways, transform rather than merely reproduce the nature of learning. Each of these technologies may also have its own rules, for example concerning privacy, expressed in the appropriate terms and conditions to which users sign up. These may be at odds with their own communities’ customs and practices and also with educators’ own expectations. Educators are also taking learners into these places, virtual field trips in effect, and this raises ethical issues, and possibly legal questions, in terms of a duty of care.
Ethics are important to educators because of the possible need to align their methods to the ethical expectations of the communities with whom they work; these expectations are however volatile, tacit, transient, chaotic and local to each community. And of course, the learner's experiences and expectations, their ethical expectations, of these educational experiences are obviously informed by the experiences and expectations they bring within from the 'outside' world where they already use many of these technologies. We are perhaps entering an era of ‘user‐generated ethics’.
These informal ethics, that is, the standards and expectations, of people in online or connected communities continue to grow, multiply and evolve; law and regulation are misunderstood and perhaps inappropriate.
Ethics could be characterised as fundamentally about trying to do good, and trying to avoid doing harm; harm may be defined in terms of physical or objective harm but also in terms of distress, upset, embarrassment and shame. Ethical behaviour may have been straightforward in a modernist age where society was assumed to be united by a set of grand narratives including some about the nature of good and bad. The informal and fragmented ethics that we are describing may be symptomatic of a transition to a postmodern society - or they may be simply symptomatic of a transition to an acceptance of more relativist or subjective ethical stances - but they raise questions about the legitimacy of one community deciding what constitutes harm for another community.
Speculation amongst educators about these issues can only proceed a limited distance before it becomes apparent that the educators need to engage with learners, and the other inhabitants of all these other informal places and spaces. This however is clearly not straightforward. What are the ethics of such engagement? Does it itself risk intrusion, embarrassment, oppression or something else that might be construed as 'harm'. Are there ways, research methods, of engaging with learners that will enable accurate, authentic and harmless discussion to take place, or are research methods and research ethics at odds in this area of enquiry?
Recent years have seen a growth and interest in mobile learning, in many countries of the world and in all sectors, universities included. At the same time, the acceptance and ownership of increasingly powerful mobile personal technologies has become widespread, nearly universal , in our societies. These two trends might seem supportive of each other and in some respects they are. In other respects, however, their relationship is more problematic.
This talk explores the impact of mobile technology on society and the phenomenon of mobile learning within our institutions, and the likely strategic implications and issues for UK universities.
The achievements of the mobile learning community in this time are relatively easy to identify. The community globally has demonstrated, though probably not proved, that we can take learning to individuals, communities and countries that were previously too remote, socially, economically, infrastructurally or geographically, for other educational initiatives. We have also shown that we can enhance and enrich the concept and activity of learning, beyond earlier conceptions, with learning experiences that are more personalised, authentic, situated and context-aware than ever before. We have shown also that we can challenge and extend existing theories of learning.
There are now several substantial national programmes and initiatives, and last but not least, the community now supports an international professional association, several peer-reviewed academic journals and a range of national and international conferences, ranging from those for practitioners and policy-makers to those for researchers.
Each of these apparent achievements is however more complex than it at first seems and the mobile learning community still has major challenges to address. Some of these are internal or local to the mobile learning community itself but other more significant challenges are located in the wider external environment.
The development of mobile learning has often been driven by pedagogic necessity, technological innovation, funding opportunity; it has come out of particular regions, institutions and disciplines, and sometimes out of the perceived inadequacies of conventional e-learning. These historical factors have shaped mobile learning but they have limited it and now challenge it too.
There are still the significant challenges growing out of this history, those of scale, sustainability, inclusion and equity in all their different forms in the future, and of context and personalisation in all their possibilities, of blending with other established and emerging educational technologies, and of tracking the changes in technology.
There continues to be challenges in developing the substantial and credible evidence-base that will justify further research and development.
These challenges are however local to the immediate educational context of mobile learning. There are however wider contextual challenges, those of recognising the profound societal and philosophical changes catalysed by mobile devices, and of recognising their local echoes and implications within mobile learning.
Mobile learning can be characterised as a specific enterprise within education systems. Mobile devices are near-universal and their impact brings near-universal connectedness to people, data, content and media. There are subtle but pervasive transformations of jobs, work and the economy, of our sense of time, space and place, of ethics and politics, of knowing and learning, and of community and identity. Finally, the talk explores how these transformations challenge education systems and hence challenge mobile learning.
The 'learner experience' of learning and technology whilst at university, and the learners' reactions to learning and technology, before, during and within their time at university, are, in part, a product of learners' changing experiences of learning and technology outside university and before university. We cannot just ask about the 'learner experience' without asking how the world outside is shaping learners.
These experiences are now changing dramatically as more and more of these learners have personal mobile devices. These devices include smart-phones, satnav, games consoles, digital cameras, media players, netbooks and handheld computers. Almost every learner owns one and uses one, often more than one. Not only do they own them and use them but they also invest considerable time, effort and money choosing them, buying them, customising them, enhancing them and exploiting them. These devices express part or much of their owners' values, affiliations, identity and individuality through their choice and their use. The devices are curiously both pervasive and ubiquitous, both conspicuous and unobtrusive, both noteworthy and taken-for-granted in the lives of most of the people in this country.
The review and talk are intended to give the 'learner experience' community some insight into the literature that currently describes and analyses the relationships and dynamics between the mobility and the connectedness afforded by personal mobile devices, systems and technologies on the one hand and changes in people, culture and society on the other. Much of this picture is one of fragmentation; attitudes and usage of mobile technologies facilitate the creation of transient or volatile communities and thus fragment more stable, monolithic and traditional communities. One obvious possible difference between these communities is age; the uptake of these technologies is often, rightly or wrongly, characterised as age-dependent, as generational. If this is even partly true, it means that the impact on universities will be different across the sector. Those universities with a student profile that peaks sharply at 18- 19yrs will at some point see sudden changes. Those universities taking students from across the decades will see gradual and apparently haphazard changes perhaps masked by more local factors.
The talk looks at changes to identity as well as community; to jobs, work, economy and employment; to disadvantage and 'digital divides', personal, local and global; to knowing, finding out and learning; to manners, expectations, standards and ethics; time, space and place and how all of these changes and transformations change and shape the expectations that underpin the 'learner experience'.
Finally the talk touches on the possibility or rather certainty that learners may bring not only their attitudes and expectations with them but also the devices themselves and attempts to describe some of the situations that this might engender. There is however a very specific situation on the horizon in which institutions might decide to deliver and support learning using these learners' own devices. This changes the default from a situation where institutions procure and provide learning technologies to one where learners bring their and institutions support this. It shifts the locus of control from institution to learner. This is going to prove challenging.
There are also philosophical problems relating research activities to the processes of evidence-based policy formulation, sometimes in the tensions between ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’, sometimes in contexts of ‘small’ government or just bad government, and the predispositions of different cultures to ideas of participation, risk, control and innovation, and to understanding the trustworthiness of our notions of generalisability, transferability and abstraction. The expectations of the ‘grand narratives’ of ‘development’ have seldom been fulfilled and the mechanics of making stuff happen largely stays a mystery. There are several other challenges!
Index Terms — active white boards, mobile learning, whole class teaching
They are important to researchers because research must be seen as proper and moral, that is within laws and regulations and within the consensus of research community but also as moral and acceptable within the communities within which researchers work. It must also I suspect be aligned to the ethical expectations of communities if it is be methodologically sound.
In looking at the ethics of conducting design research, every researcher is facing in two directions, has two different sets of discourses and responsibilities.
Firstly, each researcher works with and within the ethical expectations and formulations of their profession, their institute and their funder. Secondly, each works with individuals and communities using novel, complex and powerful technologies, individuals and communities that comprise a society increasingly transformed by these technologies, particularly mobile ones and web-based ones.
The first discourse is easy to understand: technological change is rapid and widespread, and drives social changes - sorry, not meant to sound like technological determinism, whilst ICTD research is often multidisciplinary and multi-partner. Institutional ethics procedures are relatively static and perhaps falling behind this change and complexity but this first discourse is compounded by the second.
The literature of development describes how societies are changing as increasingly powerful technology systems become widespread and integrated into everyday life; inter-related notions of identity and community, conversation and discourse, space and time, knowledge and ideas are evolving; local physical and virtual worlds are intermingling; virtual groups are forming and dissolving; knowledge, ideas, images and issues are being generated and valorised by these fragmented and transient groups. For the design researcher seeking to work ethically and rigorously in developing regions this implies an increasing awareness of transient and fragmented specifics around, for example, preferences, punctuality, taste, slang, privacy, place and status.
Mobile technologies are not only widespread but, unlike other ICTS, they are concentrated at the ‘bottom-of-the-pyramid’. This raises two specific ethical issues for the design researcher: firstly, there is considerable corporate multinational interest in what is perceived to be an enormous potential market for content and services delivered by mobile technologies and hence pilots and projects taking place perhaps below the scrutiny of conventional ethical supervision; secondly, working with communities in developing regions entails attempting to work ethically across multiple differentials of power, status, lifestyle. The mechanics but also the ethics of participative design are challenging and novel in these contexts.
Design researchers in developing regions must recognise wider social contexts in order to be aligned to the ethics of their academic responsibilities whilst being aligned to the ethics of the fragmented, multiple and transient communities and individuals with whom they research. This will ensure that their work is not only moral in the eyes of these communities and individuals but that this work is methodologically authentic and credible.
The proposed contribution will look at these issues from the perspective of someone who has worked across a range of roles and relationships, sometimes as evaluator, sometimes consultant, sometimes as researcher, sometimes as research mentor or supervisor, sometimes as visiting scientist, a mixture perhaps typical of many academics working in developing regions, working within research environments, consortia, not-for-profits, working in both developing and developed countries, however interpreted, attempting to understand and address inclusion, opportunity, diversity and the development agenda
The contribution will use real incidents, suitably anonymised, to address questions drawn from the workshop themes and to illustrate the points made in this outline