Mobile Devices to Support Advanced Forms of E-Learning

Background

The learning of the future will be characterized by a growing need among learners to access local content and to develop both personal and global knowledge in different social contexts and environments. There are many different situations of learning outside the classroom and the workplace that could employ chunks of knowledge that are produced and shared through social learning experiences. This scenario has been envisaged and supported by several methodological studies and European research projects.

Many methodological studies have shown that a variety of approaches and best practices concerning the use of mobile devices to support learners are being applied, however some of them lack of a sound analysis from a pedagogical and human-computer interaction point-of-view.

The pedagogical point-of-view addresses the process of designing, communicating and presenting new content and learning resources on small devices for different users with different needs in different contexts. These include identifying appropriate conceptual organisational frameworks for content and specifying the range of interaction modes made possible in different contexts and using different devices. Furthermore robust pedagogical theories of how mobile media mediate the learning process are still lacking in much of the research and development literature.