Understanding mobile and ubiquitous learning?

As I described in Specht (2009) technologies today are in rapid changing process influencing daily use of media, especially mobile and embedded use of media in real life situations.  The impact mobile and ubiquitous technologies is not only visible in every day life especially with the younger generation, but also in education as described in the Horizon resports (2005-2010). As such we are confronted with a rapidly changing technological environment offering new options and media related innovations enabling new educational support. Therefore necessary actions for a successful research on mobile and ubiquitous learning technologies is threefold

 Developing a theory of learning in technology enhanced environments: Understanding the effects of embedded and mobile media artefacts in the real world and their effects on learning has to consider a variety of cognitive science research, educational sciences, and psychology of learning, as also underlying research as mobile HCI, Internet of Things. These approaches and theories have to be considered and a theory about what is learning, performance, and education in such an technology enhanced world has to be developed.

Abstract modeling of technology enhanced learning process and environments: Understanding design options and possibilities of new technologies and defining an abstracted model that allows the specification of learning support of the future. The designed models can be seen independent from current technological developments but aligned with a future vision of what we expect technology to be able to support in the coming 10-15 years.

Evaluation with design oriented research practices: based on the theory, the abstract modeling of technology enhanced educational artefacts and the interaction with those specific implementation and instantiations of these have to be built and empirically evaluated.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *