Going Mobile: Mobile Media Technologies and their Impact on Academic
Collaboration Beyond the Walls of the Classroom
An Action Research Project - Douglas W. Conrad
Abstract
Personal and always in your pocket, the cell phone is more than just a tool that we use to call each other. Mobile devices are quickly transforming the way we live and learn. In the past few years, these devices have become commonplace in our daily lives, but like the automobile, are now defined more by the value of their features than their innate nature to transport. Businesses have found ways to use the power of the mobile device to unlock the potential for the workspace to expand to wherever the worker goes. The education community has been slower to adopt mobile media technologies, viewing them mostly with skepticism as disruptions rather than effective tools for learning and communication. One area that some educators are looking at to utilize the mobile media device, is to use them to enable and encourage informal learning that happens outside of classroom hours. Mobile media technologies are modern vehicles for communication.
Here are three ways that mobile media devices are affecting our lives.
1. They alter our understanding of the place in which we are grounded. Often, we find ourselves processing more than one stream of information and experience the blurring between the online and offline parts of our lives. This hybridity or multiplicity of place changes our orientation from being only where we are physically located to potentially multiple locations. The mobile phone contributes to this shift more than any other piece of technology. It is this hybridity of place that is fueling a subtle change in the way we communicate.
2. They help personalize learning. The ubiquitous nature of these devices enables a social aspect of learning. Dialog between two or more people anywhere on the planet is freed from the constraints of physical place. When we can connect what we learn to our lives, we personalize the acquisition of knowledge. When the tool for connecting to information sources is always with us - our own personal device - the information gathered itself becomes more personal.
3. They enable individuals to be publishers of information. Cell phones have become high powered computing tools that have the potential to disrupt traditional educational hierarchy. The Internet connected cell phone allows users to be publishers as well as consumers of information. This is a shift from the traditional, top down learning model where the information was held by only a few. Mobile media devices like the cell phone are not transformative in and of themselves, but are changing the way we perceive our communication and learning.
The purpose of this action research project was to discover the effect of mobile media technologies on the learning thought of as "informal” that happens in the spaces and times outside of the classroom. Current research has shown that the use of mobile media tools has begun to change our understanding of place. When we can communicate, collaborate and relate without the boundaries of time or space, our understanding of place or where we are grounded is altered. It is possible that this change can be leveraged by schools to incorporate the academic collaboration and knowledge building that happens beyond the walls of the classroom into the students' "formal" learning environment. The impact that mobile media technologies have in this space was the focus of this action research project.