Charting the Conceptual Space

Abstract

‘Mobile learning’ is an emerging, and rapidly expanding field of educational research and practice. However, there exist as yet no comprehensive theoretical and conceptual frameworks to explain the complex interrelationship between the characteristics of rapid and sometimes groundbreaking technological developments, their potential for education and learning as well as their embeddedness in the everyday lives of users. In this book, in the form of a socio-cultural ecology, we offer just such a framework and in this chapter we provide an overview of its key components. We provide a brief overview of important social developments around the normalisation of functionally convergent mobile devices, their impact on the cultural practices and life-worlds of young people and we argue the need for a purposeful engagement with mobile learning in all sectors of education, among other things in order to avoid a potential disconnection between the ways young people operate in their daily lives and the ways educational institutions interact with them. We also address the lack of clarity about what best be understood by mobile learning by offering definitional clarity and we briefly examine some important characteristics of mobile devices, which make them attractive to us from an educational perspective given their affordances for meaning-making, for engagement with and for mediating the world around us as well as for communicating with it