Mobile Literacies: Learning in the Mobile Age

Introduction

Over the last decade, consumer access to mobile phones has increased to the point where there are nearly as many mobile device subscriptions on the planet as there are people (International Telecommunications Union, 2013). The ubiquity of Internet-capable mobile devices in the lives of people around the world has given rise to new learning practices that occur in an increasingly complex digital ecosystem. Mobile learning enables teachers to deliver instructional materials to a student when they need them, at points where the relevance and value of the knowledge are highest. To achieve the promised benefits of mobile learning, instructional designers and developers will need guidelines for designing mobile learning systems and materials effectively. It is also important for instructional designers to master the skills required “to design multimedia messages that promote meaningful learning” (Mayer & Moreno, 2002, p.107). This article will examine the work of leading experts such as Dr. John Traxler (2009) at the University of Wolverhampton in the UK, Dr. James Gee (2011) of Arizona State University, and Dr. Aaron Doering (Doering, Veletsianos, Scharber, & Miller, 2009) at the University of Minnesota.

Current knowledge in the field of mobile message design comes from a number of sources, including theories of learning, perception, and communications theory. Early research in this area (Wang & Shen, 2012) defined some of the formal characteristics of mobile learning such as captioning and font sizing, and offers guidelines for understanding the uses of particular constellations of mobile technologies. Other projects investigated psychological and pedagogical properties of mobile learning experiences, such as cognitive load and inquiry-based learning (Shih, Chuang, & Hwang, 2010). Further, many of the findings on cognition and eLearning, as presented by Clark and Mayer (2011), are applicable to learning with mobile devices.

In this chapter, we will present a brief examination of the new developments in the field of the Learning Sciences, and how these developments have opened new possibilities for the design of mobile learning experiences. We aim to expand the definitions of mobile learning message design to account for the growing presence of mobile Internet access in the lives of learners. We argue for the treatment of mobile learning as a fundamentally new form of literacy that is situated in the social fabric of the learner, enabled by technology, and supportive of spontaneous learning. As we propose in this chapter, mobile learning has evolved into a new phase of research that we call ‘mobile literacy.’ For the purposes of this discussion, mobile literacy may be defined as a system of meaning-making wherein learners use mobile technologies to achieve their goals and communicate with others in their communities of interest. This definition removes the study of mobile learning from a focus on a particular technology and places the focus on how people learn and achieve their goals through the use of mobile technologies.