Mobile Learning

Introduction

Rapid change in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) affect our world in a tangible way. This movement of change transforms education, health, industry and many more fields dramatically. Thus, new technologies are constantly uncovered by this transformation. One of the most rapidly spreading and familiar technologies is mobile technologies. Mobile technologies involve different type of portable devices such as wearable devices, smart-phones, media players, game consoles, laptops and virtual reality devices. Common functions of mobile devices are communication between people and other devices. Mobile technologies influence our interaction with information as never happened before. Mobile devices are among the essential elements of life because wireless internet access and mobile service providers has great developments.

Mobile technologies have been met with great interest and anticipation like every new technology. Usage potential of mobile technologies as a supporting formal and informal learning anywhere and anytime causes increased interest. Every new medium arises interest when considering the history of educational technology. Over the time, this interest disappears because medium encountered extreme interest and generally cannot meet these expectations such as radio, television and computer (Reiser, & Dempsey, 2011). In terms of education, important sides of mobile technology are connectivity and mobility. Today, mobility is not a big issue because of the nano-technological developments but connectivity is still. Nowadays, the fourth generation (4G) compatible devices are used in many countries. 4G is the last version of the mobile technology. The 2G and 3G compatible devices were followed after 1G compatible devices which were seen in the 1950s (Dunnewijk & Hultén, 2007). 4G provides high internet speed for different aims such as multimedia services, social media, learning management system, teleconference and whatever technology which need high speed internet. In addition, 5G is expected to be released around 2020. 5G should be more improved technology than we never have. Some of the 5G technology specifications are listed (Sapakal & Kadam, 2013, p. 570):

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  High speed and cheaper connectivity;

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  Supporting interactive multimedia services;

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  Global access and service mobility;

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  Providing large broadcasting capacity up to Gigabit;

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  Combined with artificial intelligent;

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  Very high upload and download speed.

The wide adoption of mobile technology revealed the idea of mobile learning. Educators and instructional designers who are in intense expectation from mobile technology to perform various research since the technology emerged. The proliferation of access to information from mobile devices by students provides the necessary supports and research for mobile learning by different institutions. The views of educators about mobile learning is considered very important because educators are the practitioners of mobile learning in different institutions. Educators admits that mobile learning has some advantages such as learning in anytime, anywhere, easy access to content, efficient use of time, increased learning opportunities, providing collaboration, personalization and responsibility of learning. On the contrary, educators draw attention to some disadvantages of mobile learning such as cost, screen dimension, connectivity issue, difficulty of control, battery life, capacity, health and time-consuming (Yılmaz, 2011). Mobile learning is not just seen as learning that occurs with transfer e-learning contents to mobile devices. Instructional designers should design and produce mobile learning contents on the basis of mobile learning design principles. Mobile learning contents should be small, meaningful parts instead of much information. These types of mobile learning contents called as “nuggets” or “bite-sized” learning contents (Parsons, Ryu ve Cranshaw, 2006). Mobile design principles were listed (Herrington, Herrington and Mantei, 2009, p. 134):