Deep Learning: Enriching Teacher Training through Mobile Technology and International Collaboration

Literature Review

As digital technology advances, it follows that teachers and pre-service teachers need to understand the ways that their students consume and produce knowledge, which is increasingly via mobile technology (Burden & Hopkins, 2016). Mobile technology is defined as portable, handheld devices and mobile or m-learning is the process of learning mediated by a mobile device (Kearney et al., 2012). Baran (2014) in her review of research into mobile learning in teacher education, analysed various definitions of mobile learning and distilled the various qualities that different authors have attributed to mobile learning; mobility (Sharples et al., 2009), access (Parsons & Ryu, 2006), immediacy (Kynäslahti, 2003), situativity (Cheon, Lee, Crooks, & Song, 2012), ubiquity (Kukulska-Hulme et al., 2009), convenience (Kynäslahti, 2003), and contextuality (Kearney, Schuck, Burden, & Aubusson, 2012). According to Sharples et al., (2009), mobile learning includes the characteristics of mobility in physical, conceptual, and social spaces. Baran (2014

p.3) identifies a definition that she pinpoints as defining what is unique to mobile learning, which is that the “relationship between the context of learning and context of being” is very specific to mobile learning, as learning may occur in independent, formal, or socialized contexts (Frohberg et al., 2009, p.313). The research for this particular study focused on pre-service teacher training and the use of mobile devices, specifically iPads, so three themes in the literature will now be examined which are of particular relevance to this paper; the types of knowledge needed by pre-service teachers, the use of iPads as a tool for learning and models of mobile learning.