Mobillizing the Middle Kingdom: Bringing M-Learning to High Schools

Abstract

Mobilizing the Middle Kingdom presents a model of teacher-directed mobile learning based on the principle that successful pedagogy – tech assisted or otherwise – must be rooted in cultural and pedagogical realities. In China, three such realities are nonnegotiable: a reverence for the gifted teacher that goes back as far as Confucius, a meritocratic ideal in which examinations serve as the gatekeepers to opportunity, and a political system in which social cohesion trumps individual self-expression. At the same time, globalization-fueled educational reform is stimulating interest in the appropriation of Western pedagogies and technologies.

Yet, like species introduced into new environments, only those technologies capable of adaptation will flourish. When tablets computers designed in the United States are transplanted in Chinese soil, two powerful tenets of Western learning must be reexamined:

• 1. Students learn best when they are allowed to make choices about what, how, and when they learn.

• 2. Learning is most effective when teachers play a facilitating rather than a directive role in the classroom.

The chapter describes the problems encountered, solutions developed, and lessons learned by a team of Chinese and American educators charged with designing, piloting, and evaluating an m-learning program for senior secondary 2 (11th grade) English learners. The program was developed around four premises: (1) the future of mobile learning among precollege learners in China lies in formal rather than informal settings; (2) educators, not technologists, university researchers, or policy makers, will determine whether mobile technologies become woven into the fabric of learning or remain a peripheral appendage; (3) broad mobile learning uptake and dissemination will depend on educators’ connection to the “big picture” and professional communities of practice beyond their own students and school settings; and (4) consistent with the technology acceptance model (TAM), mobile learning in China will be adopted strategically and selectively when it provides solutions to problems and opportunities perceived to be both important and inadequately addressed by other means.