Schools Should Make Learning Materials Work on Mobile Phones

­Research institutions needn't expend valuable resources equipping students with mobile devices for learning, they should integrate students' own phones, PDAs, and netbooks. That's according to Euro-American research published next year in the International Journal of Mobile Learning and Organisation.

Many students have their own technology for everyday communication, information management and networking. Johan Lundin of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden and colleagues there and at the University of California, San Diego, USA, suggest that educators should explore this for teaching and learning purposes.

The researchers investigated a project to help students and educators use mobile phones and Wikis (user-contributed and edited web pages) sand in higher education. The success of this project suggests that the same approach could be extended widely to the almost universally available technologies used by today's students.

Mobile information technology has become almost ubiquitous across the globe in the wealthiest and poorest nations. Until now, many educators have seen the likes of text messaging and internet access as tools that allow students to cheat in coursework and tests, plagiarise homework, and even to bully other students.

However, text messaging leads to new ways of writing, challenging established educational norms, Lundin says, continuous internet access in class leads to students engaging in interactive activities during lectures, which teachers usually find unacceptable.

Lundin and colleagues suggest that mobile communications represent an opportunity to learning rather than a barrier or a problem to be addressed. Integrating, rather than attacking, students' own technology is one of the main tasks for research involved in exploring and understanding mobile technology as part of learning, they explain. A new attitude that is not simply focused on the novelty of the devices could make the new mobile technologies a useful and powerful part learning activities, they add.

In order to test their hypothesis with one particular form of technology, the team charged their students with gathering and uploading field data using their mobile phones and then using a browser interface to collate, edit, and annotate that data on a Wiki platform. The use of in-phone cameras and video recorders allowed the students to collect simple visuals for incorporation into the Wiki too, without their having to gain access to expensive video camera equipment.

The students initially used the Wiki as a repository for their fieldwork data, including field notes, photos, maps and documents. Subsequently, the groups engaged in online and offline discussions of their materials, all of which assisted with the writing of their final, submitted field reports.

The integration of students mobile information technology will need to address infrastructure and technical issues, but the main issue is a pedagogical one. "On a general level the integration of technologies already appropriated by students supports the idea of connecting the world outside, with the activities within an educational institution," the researchers conclude.

Posted to the site on 12th November 2009