21.1 Introduction

The term “learning technology” deliberately reflects this book’s scope, which includes both education and training. The terms “educational technology,” “instructional technology,” and “learning technology” are all used but with different nuances in their meaning and those differences can be culturally dependent—certainly technology or learning are not culturally neutral or necessarily benign. Mobile learning makes these terms increasingly problematic. This is increasingly true as we look at its implications for “just-in-time” mobile learning and mobile performance support, and their challenge to settled notions of learning “just-in-case.” We had a decade of seeing learning with mobiles as a kind of learning technology but however cute and innovative, it was never going to be financially sustainable or scalable. We have also seen several years in which social networking technologies have been increasingly co-opted as learning technologies and we now see their convergence and emergence as something very different. Helen Beetham, asking whether “learning technology” is an outmoded term, believes:

… the term comes from a time when institutional LTA systems were being developed and implemented for the first time. Important because one of the great powers of digital technology is interoperability, and making information easily shared among all the people and processes involved in learning. But since the emergence of VLEs, I think different strengths of digital technology have come to the fore, especially portability and ubiquity. Networks, tools and services that happen to be useful for learning have become much more available, disappearing at one end into disciplinary practices (GIS are hardly “learning technologies” but “technologies of geographical practice”), and at the other end into learners’ personal and social habits (blogs, wikis, social networks, digital media…). So it has become less useful to talk about “learning technologies”, which implies that the learning is in the system, and more important to talk about specifically educational practices (LTA and research/scholarship) in a digital environment – an environment in which activity is always already infused with digital information and communication options, and in which this fundamentally changes the meaning of the activity.

(Beetham 2010)

So Beetham placed learning technologies somewhere on a continuum between the technologies of professional practice and those of personal and social practice. This argument at least illustrates the fluidity of the term, and we can anticipate the changing affordances of technologies, for example ease-of-use, affordability, portability, continuing to alter the constituent learning technologies, and their place on the continuum. Her remarks also illustrate the shifting and uneasy relationships between learning technologies, that is institutional learning technologies, and the technologies of the outside world, the professional, social, and personal worlds. This is in essence our theme.

We are now retreating from that early confidence and that early adopter stance that characterized the learning technology community. We are trying half-heartedly (e.g., bring-your-own-device strategies) to co-opt or appropriate mobiles and social networking sites into education from the wider/outside/real world but we are uncomfortable with the facts in terms of agency, control, and authority within educational institutions. This too is our theme.

21.2 Mobile Learning as a Learning Technology

This section looks at mobile learning as a project, movement, or initiative within UK and Western European higher education in its first decade, as a consequence of the innovation mind-set, of the relative global affluence, and of a left-of-centre statist political milieu (with reference to the other early alternative mobile learning communities and their respective ethos in Asia Pacific, Southern Africa, and North America, also schools and further education). This project seemed at the outset to be the logical continuation of the e-Learning agenda, it conceptualized mobile learning as a learning technology and had many of the same patron saints: those leading researchers who have defined and embodied the objectives and methods of the community.

Underneath this compact and well-defined narrative, we see the emergence of social networking as a social, not educational, phenomenon and its gradual appropriation and colonization by innovative educators, with some recognition of the challenges in terms of the ethics of educational interventions into these emergent social spaces. We also see the recognition that outside institutional e-Learning spaces there was a growing and convergent social learning space to which mobile systems were the portal, the proxy, and the catalyst. The portrayal so far, however, is seen as a largely business-as-usual, appropriation-and-adoption, reformist analysis. It shows the existing institutions and professions absorbing the new technological systems.

A different portrayal, increasingly cogent as time passes, is one of uneasy talk of disruption and challenge, of shifts in agency, authority, authenticity, and control, leaving the idea of learning technology much more problematic and problematized. Learning technology was never merely the dumb conjunction of learning and technology. Mobile technologies and social networking challenge the nature of learning because they challenge the nature of knowing, and digital technology becomes pervasive and ubiquitous. Alongside the historical and dwindling depiction of mobile learning and social networking as a learning technology innovation within European formal education and its theoretical pre-occupations will be a growing depiction of it as a more informal, Atlantic, and retail phenomenon, and its market pre-occupations based in part on the apps economy and the rise of the smartphone. This has changed the balance and complexion of mobile learning. It has also altered the role and significance of theory, as well as its audience. The global economic climate has of course changed as well. The early depiction of mobile learning as a learning technology would have been fatally flawed as financially unsustainable, merely a cost for which the mobile learning research community failed to produce convincing and comprehensive enough evidence to counteract, even without the global economic downturn. Our account must recognize this. The mobile learning project and community also evolved in a changing global education and higher education environment where specialization, fragmentation, privatization, corporatization, and globalization go alongside MOOCs, gamification, badges, and other fads, fashions, and trends. Any account of learning with mobile and networking technology must be seen in these wider contexts. In the meantime we see the impact of mobiles on the meaning of knowing and learning. Mobile devices increasingly affect many aspects of the processes by which knowledge, ideas, images, information, opinions, and hence learning are produced, stored, discussed, distributed, delivered, and consumed. They are now part of a system that allows mobile everyone, including students, to generate, transform, and transmit content for learning, not just passively store and consume it, making mobile systems an integral part of the Web2.0 ideology that takes users from merely the Web’s readers to its writers. This happens in several ways.

As we have noted, the idea of mobile learning, which is learning with mobile digital devices, grew up within the learning technology research community at the start of the century. Much of its early rhetoric, direction, theory, and methods were inherited from this community. This included ideas about innovation, champions, critical mass, and early adopters borrowed from the accounts of the diffusion of innovations (Rogers 1994). Funding mechanisms echoed this rhetoric, and it included the same foundational disciplines, that is, education, psychology, and technology or components thereof such as artificial intelligence. Furthermore, mobile learning seemed able to deliver on the learning technology slogan of learning anywhere, anytime.

21.3 Mobile Learning as Innovation

Mobile learning did these things through a wide variety of short-term small-scale projects that seemed to demonstrate, from about 2001, that learning with mobiles could extend the reach of the education system and of the learning that it delivered, could enrich and enhance learning within the education system, could enthuse and engage learners, drawing them into the education system, and could challenge the theories of learning espoused and enacted within the education system. This is, however, to deliberately portray learning with mobiles as explicitly and consciously a project adopted within the education system.

In an attempt to impose some kind of higher order meaning on the proliferation of projects in the first decade of mobile learning, various definitions and classifications were proposed. Early approaches at defining mobile learning focused on technology, for example saying it was “any educational provision where the sole or dominant technologies are handheld or palmtop devices” (Traxler 2005), or on the mobility of the technology, describing mobile learning as “e-Learning through mobile computational devices: Palms, Windows CE machines, even your digital cell phone” (Quinn 2000). Another but contrasting view of mobile learning said it involved “any sort of learning that happens when the learner is not at a fixed, predetermined location, or learning that happens when the learner takes advantage of learning opportunities offered by mobile technologies” (Vavoula et al. 2004). The MoLeNET initiative, putting mobile learning hardware and infrastructure into the further education sector from 2007 to 2010, spending by the end over £15m, took this approach. It defined mobile learning as the “exploitation of ubiquitous handheld hardware, wireless networking and mobile telephony to enhance and extend the reach of teaching and learning” (MoLeNET 2007). USAID still does take this position, defining mobile learning as “the identification and applications of mobile technologies that can be effectively leveraged to address pressing educational issues including: literacy, appropriate educational content development and dissemination, system strengthening (such as education data for decision making), accessibility for learners with disabilities, professional development for educators, and workforce development” (USAid 2012). A recent attempt by Crompton to reach a durable consensus and to reduce ambiguity says m-learning is “learning across multiple contexts, through social and content interactions, using personal electronic devices.” As clarification, the author goes onto say:

To be clear, the word context in this definition encompasses m-learning that is formal, self-directed, and spontaneous learning, as well as learning that is context aware, and context neutral. In other words, the learning may be directed by others or by one’s self, and it can be an unplanned spontaneous learning experience; learning can happen in an academic setting, or any other nonacademic setting; and the physical environmental may or may not be involved in the learning experience. Therefore, mobile learning may occur inside or outside the classroom participating in a formal lesson on a mobile device, it can be self-directed as a person determines his or her own approach to satisfy a learning goal, or spontaneous learning as a person may use the device to look up something that has just prompted an interest. The environment may be part of the learning experience (e.g., scanning codes to obtain further information about an exhibit in a museum), or the environment may have a neutral role in the learning experience.

(Crompton 2013)

This has been quoted at length because it captures the breadth, complexity, and variety of what we are calling the mobile learning project as originally conceived. It does, however, use the phrase “m-learning,” coming out of the same lexical stable as e-Learning and t-learning, which creates the impression that there was a brand, creed, or charter that defined mobile learning, acting as a filter or a threshold. The more transparent and self-explanatory “learning with mobiles” is perhaps less exclusive and thus preferable.

These definitions represent mobile learning if we, the academic mobile learning community, looked backwards and inwards. Looking forwards and outwards (and considering the convergence with social networking) means we should be talking about learning that is credible, authentic, and appropriate to societies and cultures whose defining characteristics are the mobility and connection afforded by personal digital technologies. We might add something about these technologies and their interaction with societies and cultures redefining the nature of knowing and knowledge, and hence of learning.

A complementary activity, also intended to clarify what we are talking about, was classifying the increasing number of pilots, projects, and initiatives. In the early days, Kukulska-Hulme and Traxler (2007) saw emergent categories:

• Technology-driven mobile learning: a specific mobile technological innovation deployed to demonstrate technical feasibility and pedagogic possibility.
• Miniature but portable e-Learning: mobile technologies used to re-enact approaches and solutions found in e-Learning, porting an established e-Learning technology, onto mobile devices, a safe strategy for implementing and propagating change.
• Connected classroom learning: mobile technologies used in a classroom setting to supported static collaborative learning, connected to other classroom technologies, a particularly (but not uniquely) North American perspective.
• Mobile training and performance support: mobile technologies used to improve the productivity and efficiency of workers by delivering information, guidance, and support just-in-time and in context for their immediate priorities, roles, and duties. This is largely a corporate perspective.
• Large-scale implementation: the deployment of mobile technologies at an institutional or departmental level to understand or address organizational issues.
• Inclusion, assistivity, and diversity: enhancing educational access and participation.
• Informal, personalized, situated mobile learning: mobile technologies using their unique functionality, for example location-awareness or video-capture, and deployed to deliver enriched educational experiences, often exploring existing educational theory.

This was a bottom-up classification and a snapshot of the era, and not logically very satisfying. A more comprehensive alternative looks at the capacity to enhance, extend, and enrich the concept and activity of learning itself, beyond earlier conceptions of learning and beyond the capacity of earlier technologies. It includes ideas of:

• contingent learning and teaching: learners and/or teachers react and respond in real-time to their environment and their changing experiences
• situated learning: learning takes place in surroundings that make learning relevant and meaningful
• authentic learning: meaningful learning tasks are related to immediate learning goals
• context-aware learning: learning is informed by the history, surroundings, and environment of the learner
• augmented reality mobile learning: learning builds on local physical context supplemented by an appropriate audio and/or video overlay
• personalized learning: learning is customized for the preferences and abilities of individual learners or groups of learners
• collaborative learning: linking learners together meaningfully on a shared task
• learning support: guidance and information for learners in formal courses or institutions
• recommender systems: using the context, goals, and preferences of mobile learners to suggest personalized learning objects
• pastoral support: enabling students to access non-academic services and support
• game-based learning: now increasingly mobile
• assessment: aligned to these mobile affordances
• user-generated learning: created as well as consumed by learners and everyone else, for example, Podcasts—although some come from formal institutions, such as universities, broadcasters or publishers, many more come from informal groups and passionate individuals
• social networks, micro-blogs, blogs, and other forms of Web2.0 (of which more later)
• user-generated content, for example YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia
• apps.

These are overlapping categories, but all are progressively characterized by increased retail and popular availability, falling costs and learner familiarity, and by a decreasing institutional and professional provision, confidence, and control.

21.4 Mobile Learning as Social Intervention

Mobiles have been used to overcome distance, separation, and sparcity, to deliver education to individuals, communities, and regions where other educational delivery would have been too difficult, dangerous, or expensive. This too can be classified in terms of the nature of the hurdle, challenge, or distance being overcome:

• geographical, geometric, or spatial distance, for example reaching into deeply rural areas
• sparsity: connecting thinly spread and perhaps nomadic learners to create viable communities of learners
• infrastructural or technical barriers: supporting those communities lacking mains electricity, secure clean buildings, or landline connectivity
• social exclusion: for example reaching students unfamiliar with, and lacking confidence in, formal learning, or lacking the necessary economic or social capital
• physiological or cognitive differences: essentially assistivity, for example reaching and supporting students with mobility problems, visual impairment, or dyslexia
• privacy and enforced seclusion or separation for cultural reasons: reaching and supporting girls from traditional or conservative communities
• dead time: small bursts of otherwise unused time, reaching people in buses and queues
• corporate training: delivering training to spread-out peripatetic workforces

This was, however, not part of the earlier research and innovation ecosystem, nor was it confined to a small number of institutions of formal learning. It was more of a pragmatic response to conditions and constraints. It responded to needs or deficits rather than opportunities. Also, it was not straightforwardly benign; mobile technologies propelled the learning of the institutions of the education systems into spaces, times, and communities that were previously more isolated but also more autonomous, and delivered a particular set of values and understandings at the expense of indigenous or local ones that were less robust or explicit.

Across all these broad classifications we must recognize the historical drift as mobile technologies, that is, handset hardware, network connectivity, and software applications, became increasingly popular phenomena, that is, increasingly profitable, mass retail phenomena. At the same time institutions, specifically universities, colleges, schools, and ministries, lost their primacy in learning technology and lost their rhetoric and mechanisms of innovation that would propel change down from an elite of early adopters. This has given way to a recognition that people—including learners—are now putting pressure on institutions and their staff to catch up or keep up with social and demographic change pressing inwards. The role of the learning technologist changes from institutional innovator and change agent to educational opportunist, watching and gauging social, professional, technical (and epistemological) trends in the outside world.

21.5 The Evidence and Impact

We conclude with a judgment on this phase of mobile learning. Whilst we have seen a considerable range of achievements, both practical and theoretical, we have also seen a failure to scale, to embed, and to sustain. These were perhaps inherent in the conceptualization of mobile learning from the outset; they were a consequence of funders’ inability to find the levers that would have realized arguments, resources, or pressures that they could use on host institutions. The only apparent exceptions were niche environments, such as medical education, with their own funding arrangements and clearer linkages to outcomes. We have discussed elsewhere how the issues of evidence, evaluation, and impact have been problematic throughout the existence of mobile learning as a learning technology project. Briefly, it seems that mobile learning researchers are amateurs as evaluators; they can only deploy one perhaps two standard methods, chosen from questionnaires, focus groups, semi-structured interviews, or system logs, with little triangulation or sequencing; they have not read the literature of evaluation (or its ethics) and they do not look for any methodological or epistemological consistency (Traxler and Kukulska-Hulme 2006). These failings, we argue, become less irrelevant once we no longer see learning with mobiles as part of the institutional learning technology project or initiative and begin to see it as part of learning aligned to the ways that the world uses technology for knowing, discussing, and finding out. The role of research and evidence then becomes the task of aligning learning with mobiles within educational institutions to the expectations, practices, and trends outside educational institutions and, if necessary, finding out how, when, and why people as social beings—not as merely institutional learners—use their mobiles. (We should, however, draw attention to a handful of programs, MoLeNET, mentioned earlier, at LSDA and Learning2Go in Wolverhampton for example, where policymakers and managers trusted their judgment without necessarily much evidence and put resources behind substantial investments.)

21.6 Social Networking as a Learning Technology

Social networks, of which Facebook is the obvious exemplar, started life amongst networked desktop computers. They were part of the wider Web2.0 revolution that produced wikis, RSS feeds, blogs, and podcasts.

Education, or rather its institutions, had embraced Web1.0 technology enthusiastically, with hindsight because of its capacity to manage and control institutional assets and resources (such as teaching content, library books, assessments, and students). Virtual learning environments (VLEs) were the principal technology. In some quarters they were seen as the Trojan horse of social constructivism in the fortress of behaviorism, the weapon of discussion in the war against content. Their alternative title, learner management systems (LMSs), may, however, have given the game away—they were about managing learners not necessarily helping them learn—and 20 years later they were still as likely to be used as repositories for content, that is, hand-outs and slide-decks, as they were for facilitating discussion amongst learners and helping them to construct their own knowledge.

These technologies absorbed or co-opted various emergent Web2.0 technologies and agencies, such as Joint Information Services Committee (JISC 2015), in the university and higher education sector promoted this trend (and gaming and immersive virtual worlds) as part of their remit to encourage innovation. The potential of social networking technology in education has been comprehensively analyzed and reviewed (Minocha 2009).

Alongside this piecemeal absorption came an awareness of social networking as a potential learning technology in its own right (Bryant 2006), not merely as an appendage to older broadcast technologies. Social networking or using social networking sites uses:

web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system. The nature and nomenclature of these connections may vary from site to site … What makes social network sites unique is not that they allow individuals to meet strangers, but rather that they enable users to articulate and make visible their social networks. This can result in connections between individuals that would not otherwise be made, but that is often not the goal.

(Ellison, Steinfield, and Lampe 2007)

This is a definition in terms of core functions and activities but within the social networking space there is considerable volatility, differentiation, and diversity. Facebook, first launched amongst college students in 2004, has since its major growth spurt around 2006 been the defining social networking site. There are a wealth of more specialist sites, for example professional and business sites like LinkedIn, activity sites like Couchsurfing, identity sites like BlackPlanet, and affiliation sites like MyChurch. There were originally regional social networking sites, Hi5 in smaller countries in Latin America, South America, and Europe, Bebo in the UK, New Zealand, and Australia, but Facebook is now clearly the leader, with a population comparable to one of the world’s largest countries and a verb of its own, facebooking. Within any of these sites, but especially the larger and more generic, it is easy to find groups or cultures dedicated to specific topics or to special interests, perhaps formally constituted as special interest groups or just amorphous and informal. We have argued that these groups have most of the characteristics of any conventional, face-to-face community (Traxler 2012; Greenhow and Robelia 2009; Pimmer, Linxen, and Gröhbiel 2012) and that educationalists should see them as such so they can be researched accordingly (Minocha and Petrie 2012). A considerable literature charts the evolution of social relations, for example the notion of friendship, under the impact of social networking sites (Ellison, Steinfield, and Lampe 2007) and draws attention to their social significance.

Social networking sites have variously accreted extra functions. Facebook, for example, incorporates apps, whilst wikis such as BlogSpot, Wordpress, and Ning (Wagner 2004; Parker and Chao 2007; Bryant 2006) provide similar functionality to social networking sites and have evolved to acquire comparable features but for closed dedicated groups. There is a view that the capacity of social content management systems, for example YouTube and Flickr, allowing users to share content, to communicate within groups, and to connect to other users, qualifies them as social networks. This is not a strong argument but these points all illustrate the complexity of Web2.0 systems.

Apparently, “Social networking sites, like much else on the Internet, represent a moving target for researchers and policy makers” (Livingstone and Brake 2010) and educators too. A shared interest for all three groups has been the attempt to categorize the users of social networking sites and adjacent parts of cyberspace. Prensky’s (2001) simplistic dichotomy, digital natives and digital immigrants, gained early visibility; now other metaphors such as White and Le Cornu's visitors and residents (2011) have more credibility. This has fed research that tries to relate the learners’ experience of digital life to their expectation once they enter higher education (Green and Hannon 2007) and the implications for the institutions of higher education (Traxler 2010).

All of these technologies allow and facilitate the creation, maintenance, and performance of multiple online identities or personae, formally through profiles but informally through ongoing interactions and images where users present specific selves. They also create spaces where these selves can meet, forming communities of shared interests and values. These selves and groups have a persistence, often ignored, forgotten, or unknown, a digital footprint that may come back to haunt or embarrass their owners many years later. Identity, and what is often called “identity-management,” is now a significant aspect of life online and is a component of the digital literacy agenda (Eshet-Alkalai 2004). Other components are privacy, visibility, confidentiality, and the broader ethical and legal aspects of life online. Within UK higher education, the digital literacy agenda has over the last two years been driven and articulated by the e-Learning program within JISC (e.g., see JISC 2014).

There has been an ambitious and coherent campaign to engage the higher education sectors in the developed world, from grass roots teaching staff to university managements, in discussion, development, and publication. This has taken place in order to formulate a consensus about the kinds of attitudes, skills, and capabilities that students will need to have to get the full benefit of the technology and resources available to support their learning. A pragmatic approach to definition might be to see what we expect of these constituent capabilities, for example:

• they are a pre-requisite or foundation for other capabilities
• they are critical to an individual's life chances
• they are essential to the making and sharing of culturally significant meanings
• as a result, there is or should be a society-wide entitlement to these capabilities at some level. (Beetham 2010, 1)

The programme has also documented the differing ways in which higher education institutions have defined and supported the acquisition of these skills and capabilities within their own briefs, and has sponsored projects to promote further development, publication, and dissemination. This digital literacy agenda is a direct consequence of the social networking movement and its attempted appropriation or colonization by educationalists. We can summarize this educational activity in social network space and identify three sorts of intervention:

• field-trips, taking students into social networks because of the extra affordances and opportunities
• out-reach, recruiting students from social networks because of inclusion and participation missions
• life-skills, safe-guarding students in social networks, essentially part of the e-safety and digital literacy agenda.

There has been considerable nervousness about social networks, especially their legal implications in educational settings, for example Facing up to Facebook: A Guide for FE and HE from JISClegal (JISC 2013), and likewise their ethical implications (Traxler 2012).

Meanwhile other changes were afoot. These included the increasing ownership of increasingly powerful personal mobile devices, increasing ease and power of network coverage, increased competition and regulation amongst networks, and the acceptance of cloud-based services, many migrating from their LAN and desktop origins. The latter have included services such as email, office, and storage including video and images, and increasingly diverse forms of connectivity. And of course, leisure, entertainment, shopping, and recreation. All these were made possible by the evolution of technology alongside the evolution of the business models and the revenue streams to sustain them.

Uniting these two, technology and business, at a conceptual level was mass customization replacing mass production, reaching into the long-tail specialist and minority tastes and requirements to generate new revenue streams. We can look back on Web1.0 learning as the first generation of industrialized learning. One critique of this might be to portray it as the instrument of mass production, the mass production of educational capital demanded by the political rhetoric of inclusion, participation, and opportunity. Critics continue to argue that the education system is still stuck in a mass-production mode, stuck in a batch-processing mode, even though the technologies are now widely available to deliver a more timely, personalized, and contextual experience for learners. Clearly social networking and mobile technologies are the core of such experiences.

Mobile learning within higher education had seemed to deliver on the earlier promise of learning technology to deliver learning anywhere, anytime and research demonstrated its capacity to deliver learning just-in-time, just-for-me but the wider conceptual potential challenge of learning for the long tail remains vague and unarticulated in spite of the examples of the various recommender systems used by Amazon and by Google to personalize the retail and searching experiences, and possibly lost in wider concerns about the re-industrialization of learning.

21.7 Mobile Learning and a Mobile Society

Mobile devices as the portals onto Web2.0 technologies including social networking affect many aspects of the individual and social processes by which knowledge, ideas, images, information, opinions, and hence learning are produced, valorized, stored, distributed, delivered, and consumed. They are now part of a system that allows everyone, including students, to generate and transmit content for learning, not just passively store and consume it, making mobile systems an integral part of the Web2.0 ideology and social networking technology that takes users, learners, from merely the Web’s readers to its writers. This happens in several ways. A very specific example is citizen-journalism, the phenomenon of people using their camera-phones to capture news events and then using perhaps YouTube or Flickr to broadcast the images and comments, with no intervention or control from the centralized government, media, or news corporations. This may make it more demotic but not necessarily more democratic since the technologies are still owned and controlled by large and unaccountable corporations. Nor does it make it more objective and impartial since is it prey to whatever spin and position the originator, the media, and the commentators impose.

A more general example includes Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia, and other file-sharing or wiki-based technologies that are migrating onto mobile devices as connectivity and usability improve. Now built into mobile devices, these technologies exploit the capacity to capture or retrieve information that is context-aware and location-specific, curiously both dependent and independent of location. Google on mobiles, for example, offers a “local search experience” based on the expectation that there is a market for area information such as cinema listings and restaurant reviews and this has become commonplace. Content, information, and knowledge have become location-specific and this could eventually lead to much richer, more diverse, and more economically viable forms of context-aware learning than the early project-based dedicated systems exemplified by the MOBIlearn project (Lonsdale et al. 2004). These changes do, however, produce more fragmented, transient, and local knowledge, challenging education institutions’ role as the custodians and arbiters of knowledge and learning so these are the technologies of learning but not learning technology as we know it.

The significance of social networking technologies such as Facebook in facilitating virtual communities has been widely documented (e.g., Wellman et al. 2001; Haythornthwaite 2005) and is already being exploited or appropriated by universities. These technologies have migrated from desktop computers to mobile devices and are supplementing technologies that are “native” to mobile devices, systems such as Twitter and Jaiku, micro-blogging systems that connect communities on the move, including many research communities. Multi-user virtual worlds such as Second Life may take on a mobile dimension soon, further complicating the performance of identity. These changes will further interweave physical and virtual communities and spaces, and identities. Their significance for education is that they facilitate the creation and support of discursive communities able to learn collaboratively whilst moving, linking to the “smart mobs” concept (Rheingold 2003). Mobile devices will consequently support every pedagogic option, including the didactic and the discursive, the individual, and the social. They do, however, also break down the notion of a stable and commonly accepted corpus of knowledge distributed through privileged channels by socially sanctioned individuals—now everyone, as we said, can produce content to learn, and everyone one can discuss it anywhere, anytime and just-in-time, just-for-them.

There are other changes. Mobile devices deliver knowledge chunked, structured, and connected in very different ways from the lecture, the web, and the book. Knowledge is not purely abstract, unaffected by how it is stored, transmitted, or consumed. In its earliest forms, knowledge, and learning came from the lecture, a substantial linear format from an authoritative sage-on-the-stage with no facility to pause or rewind, and from the book, also authoritative, substantial, and linear but segmented and randomly accessed. The delivery of knowledge and learning by networked computers using the Web meant a break from linearity with the introduction of hyperlinks and the need for new heuristics of usability (e.g., Nielsen 1992) that described how knowledge and learning should be best chunked and presented. With mobile technologies, using a small screen and a limited input medium, the chunks become much smaller but the navigational overhead has become much, much larger. In essence, small pieces of knowledge and learning can be easily presented but their relationship to each other and to anything else may be difficult to understand, thereby fragmenting and perhaps trivializing what students learn. As Marshall McLuhan says, “It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame” (see McLuhan and Zingrone 1997, 273). Technology is neither a dumb conduit nor a dumb receptacle for knowledge; learning is no longer merely technology supported or technology enhanced (in fact, at some point, surely other forms of learning will be labeled “technology deficient”). At the same time social networking technologies challenge and disrupt the earlier formats and genres of knowledge representation.

Finally, mobile devices will catalyze other challenges to formal learning. Historically, education presented a reductionist and foundationist account of reality within the lecture theatre, managed within curricula and subjects, and delivered within books and now within computers. Mobile devices allow students to learn in vivo instead in vitro, to go outside the campus and away from the computer simulation, into the mess and noise (as in the phrase signal-to-noise) of the outside world and to challenge the order and arrangement of subjects and curricula. The slogan about the transformation of the sage on the stage into the guide by your side takes on real significance when viewed as the transformation of education from a (contrived) performance on a stage, to a shared experience of a (contingent) reality that no-one, lecturer or student, has experienced before and is not entirely sure what sense to make of it. This is potentially unsettling for education systems that manage and constrain (and assess) learning by partitioning it into subject divisions (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.) and into levels (introductory, foundation, undergraduate, etc.). Taken together these various interactions between social and mobile technologies and the ways we know and the ways we learn are taking us a long way away from “learning technology” but perhaps imperceptibly.

21.8 Mobile Learning – Moving Across the Atlantic, Moving into the Market

At the same time as this epistemological revolution (in the sense broadly outlined in Des Bordes and Ferdi 2008), a phrase expressing the fact that computers, then networks and now mobile technologies are revolutionizing what we know and how we know it, and hence what we learn and how we can learn it, a rather different manifestation of change was taking place. At some point, perhaps three or four years ago, in relation to mobile technology, the United States got it. At some point, and iPods, iTunes, and iPhones must be implicated as both cause and effect in this process, the United States saw the potential of personal, portable, connected digital technologies. This had three profound and interrelated effects on mobile and social networks technologies as learning technologies. First, the emergence of far more robust business models, of which the apps economy (Genachowski 2010) is still the most obvious expression. Second, a shift in the balance of pedagogies and styles away from the earlier theory-driven European preoccupations. Third, a sense that learning with mobiles or social networks no longer needed research or researchers to work with managers, practitioners, and policy makers. Frameworks, concepts, and models were no longer needed as components of mobile and social network learning as commerce and common sense took their place. In the wider practitioner and policy communities, everyone now owned and understood a powerful mobile and its affordances, systems, and networks, for learning and anything else. They were clearly common sense, no longer requiring specialist research input. A corollary of this is that everyone, including those outside formal education organizations, has a theory of education and a theory of learning with mobiles, perhaps several, perhaps not ones that are proven or particularly complex or rational, perhaps only something like “content is king.” The role for the research community has become increasingly marginal in learning technology. At the same, certainly in the UK, we have seen the emergence over the last 10 years of the learning technologist as a profession, one appearing regularly in academic job vacancies. This is clearly indicative of shifts in how we conceive and conceptualize learning technology, somehow more and less than it used to be.

21.9 Learning with Mobiles as a Social Phenomenon

In order to give this account some structure, we move to a portrayal of mobile learning not as an activity within the formal structures of education but as a fact of everyday life, an everyday life where mobile devices are cheap, robust, familiar, pervasive, and ubiquitous. As we said above, mobile devices increasingly affect most aspects of the processes by which knowledge, ideas, images, information, opinions, and hence learning are produced, stored, discussed, distributed, delivered, and consumed. They are now part of a system that allows mobile everyone, including students, to generate and transmit content for learning, not just passively store and consume it, making mobile systems an integral part of the Web2.0 ideology that takes users from the Web’s readers to its writers. This took us from an era when learning technology practice needed to be evidence-based to an era when learning technology practice should be just a simple and continued alignment between education and the world. Earlier attempts to justify and promote mobile learning on the basis of evidence and evaluation were at best flawed and incomplete. Now they are no longer necessary. The argument should have moved from a focus on whether to exploit mobile technology within education to an imperative for education to catch up with the rest of society. An urban myth describes a school pupil having to “power-down at school”—a point made with characteristic polemic by Marc Prensky (2008). This same argument would be equally valid across other digital technologies that have become almost universal in the past five years, conspicuously social networks and micro-blogging but maybe also e-Book readers and podcasts. Connected mobile digital technologies are, however, the predominant platform and portal for all the others. This argument, however plausible, attractive, and transformative, does present the stable, static institutions, professions, organizations, and conceptualizations of formal education with challenges; ones that will not necessarily be adequately addressed by a tactical adoption of bring-your-own-device/system/technology policies alongside business-as-usual (CoSN 2012; Traxler 2010). Whereas the foundational disciplines of mobile learning had been education, psychology, and technology or components thereof (such as artificial intelligence and cognitive science), increasingly information systems, sociology, or anthropology were candidates. The process of designing mobile learning began to need a radical rethink; one that recognized the new affordances and dispensations of mobile technology in society. Design becomes the design of educational activities rather the design of educational artifacts. The roles of the teachers and designers become blurred as they struggle to find methods and approaches that recognize the abundance of content, communities, and collaborators to engage their students, and the changing responsibilities as mobile and social technologies make the institutional boundaries more and more permeable. At the same time, the expectations, attitudes, and experiences that learners bring to mobile and social technologies for learning are not those rooted in computing, certainly not educational computing, but the social, personal, recreational, and informal use of mobile and social technologies.

21.10 Learning Technology: No Longer Recognizable

As a focus for concluding this chapter we return to the phrase “learning technology.” Mobile technology and social networking have transformed the nature of learning whilst much “technology” becomes progressively more inconspicuous and unremarkable as it becomes ubiquitous and pervasive. Meanwhile learning becomes more fragmented, partial, transient and subjective as it moves away from the solidity of the professionals, the curriculum, and the university. Clearly this is a provisional account written arbitrarily at a time of change. We should point out that it is also an account largely of the global North; elsewhere, to the South and to the East, there are conspicuous differences in infrastructure and environment, less conspicuous differences in epistemology and pedagogy, and a tension between the globalizing effects of technology and competition from above and from outside against local expressions of language, identity, culture, and community. The role of technology and the role of learning are nowhere straightforward nor wholly benign.

References

1. Beetham, Helen. 2010. “Review and Scoping Study for a cross-JISC Learning and Digital Literacies Programme.” Bristol: JISC. Accessed 18 February 2015: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/elearning/DigitalLiteraciesReview.pdf.
2. Bryant, Todd. 2006. “Social software in academia.” Educause Quarterly 29 2: 61–64. Accessed 18 February 2015: https://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/eqm0627.pdf.
3. CoSN. 2012. Making Progress: Rethinking State and School District Policies Concerning Mobile Technologies and Social Media. Washington: Consortium for School Networking. Accessed 18 February 2015: http://www.nsba.org/sites/default/files/reports/MakingProgress.pdf.
4. Crompton, Helen. 2013. “A Historical View of m-Learning: Towards Learner-Centered Education.” In Handbook of mobile learning, edited by Zane Berge and Lin Muilenberg: pp. 3–14. New York: Routledge.
5. Des Bordes, Anne and Samira Ferdi. 2008. “Do Knowledge and New Technologies Need a New Epistemology?” In Proceedings of BOBCATSSS 2008 Providing Access to Information for Everyone. Bad Honnef: Bock + Herchen. Accessed 18 February 2015: http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/conferences/bobcatsss2008/.
6. Ellison, Nicole B., Charles Steinfield, and Cliff Lampe. 2007. “The benefits of Facebook ‘friends’: Social capital and college students’ use of online social network sites.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12 4: 1143–68.
7. Eshet-Alkalai, Yoram. 2004. “Digital literacy: A conceptual framework for survival skills in the digital era.” Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia 13 1: 93–106.
8. Genachowski, C. Julius. 2010. “Mobile Broadband: A 21st Century Plan for US Competitiveness, Innovation and Job Creation.” (Speech). Washington, DC: New America Foundation.
9. Green, Hannah and Celia Hannon. 2007. “Their Space: Education for a digital generation.” London: Demos. ISBN 1841801755.
10. Greenhow, Christine and Beth Robelia. 2009. “Old communication, new literacies: Social network sites as social learning resources.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 14 4: 1130–61.
11. Haythornthwaite, Caroline. 2005. “Social networks and Internet connectivity effects.” Information, Community & Society 8 2: 125–47.
12. JISC. 2013. “Facing up to Facebook: A Guide for FE and HE.” Accessed 19 February 2015: http://www.jisclegal.ac.uk/ManageContent/ViewDetail/ID/2114.aspx.
13. JISC. 2014. “Developing Digital Literacies.” Accessed 19 February 2015: http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/infokits/digital-literacies/.
14. JISC. 2015. “We Provide Digital Solutions for UK Education and Research.” Accessed 19 February 2015: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/.
15. Kukulska-Hulme, Agnes and Traxler, John. 2007. “Designing for mobile and wireless learning.” In Rethinking pedagogy for a digital age: designing and delivering e-learning, edited by Helen Beetham and Rhona Sharpe: pp. 180–92. London: Routledge.
16. Livingstone, Sonia and David R. Brake. 2010. “On the Rapid Rise of Social Networking Sites: New Findings and Policy Implications.” Children & Society 24 1: 75–83.
17. Lonsdale, Peter, Chris Baber, Mike Sharples, Will Byrne, Theodoros Arvanitis, Pat Brundell, and Russell Beale. 2004. “Context Awareness for MOBIlearn: Creating an Engaging Learning Experience in an Art Museum.” In Mobile Learning Anytime, Anywhere: A Book of Papers from MLEARN 2004, edited by Jill Attewell and Carol Saville-Smith: pp. 115–18. London: Learning and Skills Development Agency. Accessed 19 February 2015: www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~rxb/Online%20papers/mlearn2004lonsdale.PDF.
18. McLuhan, Eric and Frank Zingrone (eds). 1997. Essential McLuhan: p. 273. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-16245-9.
19. Minocha, Shailey. 2009. “Role of social software tools in education: A literature review.” Education and Training 51 5/6: 353–69.
20. Minocha, Shailey and Marian Petre. 2012. Handbook of Social Media for Researchers and Supervisors. Milton Keynes: Open University.
21. MoLeNET. 2007. Mobile Learning Net: MoLeNET. Accessed 19 February 2015: http://www.m-learning.org/case-studies/molenet-.
22. Nielsen, Jakob. 1992. “Finding usability problems through heuristic evaluation.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems: pp. 373–80. Monterey, CA. New York: ACM.
23. Parker, Kevin and Joseph Chao. 2007. “Wiki as a Teaching Tool.” Interdisciplinary Journal of E-Learning and Learning Objects 3 1: 57–72. Accessed 18 February 2015: http://www.editlib.org/p/44798.
24. Pimmer, Christoph, Sebastian Linxen, and Urs Gröhbiel. 2012. “Facebook as a learning tool? A case study on the appropriation of social network sites from mobile phones in developing countries.” British Journal of Educational Technology 43 5: 726–38. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8535.2012.01351.x.
25. Prensky, Marc. 2001. “Digital natives, digital immigrants.” One the Horizon 9 5: 1–6. Accessed 17 February 2015: http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf.
26. Prensky, Marc. 2008. “Turning on the lights.” Educational Leadership 65 6: 40–45. Accessed 18 February 2015: http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/mar08/vol65/num06/Turning-On-the-Lights.aspx.
27. Quinn, Clark. 2000. “mLearning: Mobile, Wireless, in your Pocket Learning.” LineZine. Accessed 19 February 2015: http://www.linezine.com/2.1/features/cqmmwiyp.htm.
28. Rheingold, Howard. 2003. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. New York: Perseus Books. ISBN-10: 0738208612.
29. Rogers, Everett. 1994. A history of communication study: A biographical approach. New York: Free Press.
30. Traxler, John. 2005. “Mobile Learning: It's Here But What Is It?” Interactions 9 1. Warwick: Warwick University. Accessed 19 February 2015: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/ldc/resource/interactions/issues/issue25/traxler.
31. Traxler, John. 2010. “Students and Mobile Devices.” Research in Learning Technology 18 2: 149–60. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v18i2.10759. Accessed 19 February 2015: http://www.researchinlearningtechnology.net/index.php/rlt/article/view/10759.
32. Traxler, John. 2012. “Educators go over the garden wall.” Interactive Learning Environments 20 3: 199–201.
33. Traxler, John and Agnes Kukulska-Hulme. 2006. “The Evaluation of Next Generation Learning Technologies: the Case of Mobile Learning.” In ALT-C 2006: The Next Generation. Research Proceedings of the 13th Association for Learning Technology. Oxford: Association of Learning Technology. Accessed 19 February 2015: http://www.academia.edu/189346/The_Evaluation_of_Next_Generation_Learning_Technologies_the_Case_of_Mobile_Learning.
34. USAid. 2012. Mobiles for Education Alliance: Mission. Accessed 19 February 2015: http://www.meducationalliance.org/page/mission.
35. Vavoula, Giasemi N., Paul LaFrere, Claire O'Malley, Mike Sharples, and Josie Taylor. 2004. “Producing Guidelines for Learning Teaching and tutoring in a Mobile Environment.” In 2nd IEEE International Workshop on Wireless and Mobile Technologies in Education (WMTE). Taoyuan. New York: ACM.
36. Wagner, Christian. 2004. “Wiki: A technology for conversational knowledge management and group collaboration.” Communications of the Association for Information Systems 1313: 265–89. Accessed 19 February 2015: stu.hksyu.edu/~wkma/notes/jour395/wagner2004.pdf.
37. Wellman, Barry, Anabel Quan Haase, James Witte, and Keith Hampton. 2001. “Does the Internet increase, decrease, or supplement social capital? Social networks, participation, and community commitment.” American Behavioral Scientist 453: 436–55.
38. White, David S. and Le Cornu, Alison. 2011. “Visitors and Residents: A New Typology for Online Engagement.” First Monday 16 9. Accessed 19 February 2015: http://firstmonday.org/article/view/3171/3049.