Mobile Learning: A Topography

Abstract

This chapter provides a brief overview of the ‘history’ as well as the most pertinent current issues in mobile learning (research and practice). The research underpinning this chapter necessarily involved attendance at, and the organisation of specialist conferences and engagement with relevant blogs and other social networking tools. The chapter provides an overview of the field, in terms of practical examples as well as key conceptual issues, in an attempt to sketch a broad context for the remainder of our discussion in this book. It attempts to summarise, present and comment on the main developments in mobile learning in order to provide a baseline for our own theoretical stance. We start our topography with a diachronic overview of three phases of mobile learning that we characterise respectively by: a focus on devices, a focus on learning outside the classroom, and a focus on the mobility of the learner. Our topography continues with an examination of conferences, events, organizations and journals in the field. In the third part of our topography, we turn to the key issues emerging from the literature in the field. We come to the conclusion that mobile learning can be seen as central to educational landscape of the twenty-first century.

So here is the paradox: the lived always seeks to be represented in some way and thus sacrifices the sense of life for the sense of words and meanings in order to relive. The journey is thus a double structure: one is the life of bodily engagement with the world; the other track is the life of reflection in order to represent textually, through images, through signs of all kinds, the experience of the journey. The double-tracked journey demands commitment, is often uncomfortable, takes too long and yet opens up new vistas, gives glimpses into different lives and can offer new possibilities for changes in direction, self-growth. (Schostak 2002, p. 2)