Defining Mobile Education
In spite of the activity cited above, the concept of mobile education or mobile learning is still emerging and still unclear. How it is eventually conceptualised will determine perceptions and expectations, and will determine its evolution and future. There are different stakeholders and factors at work in this process of conceptualising mobile education and the outcome is uncertain.
There are obviously definitions and conceptualisations of mobile education that define it purely in terms of its technologies and its hardware, namely that it is learning delivered or supported solely or mainly by handheld and mobile technologies such as personal digital assistants (PDAs), smartphones or wireless laptop PCs. These definitions, however, are constraining, techno-centric, and tied to current technological instantiations. We, therefore, should seek to explore other definitions that perhaps look at the underlying learner experience and ask how mobile learning differs from other forms of education, especially other forms of e-Learning.
If we take as our starting point the characterisations of mobile learning found in the literature (the conference proceedings from MLEARN and WMTE for example), we find words such as 'personal,' 'spontaneous,' 'opportunistic,' 'informal,' 'pervasive,' 'situated,' 'private,' 'context-aware,' 'bite-sized,' and 'portable.' This is contrasted with words from the literature of conventional 'tethered' e-Learning such as 'structured,' 'media-rich,' 'broadband,' 'interactive,' 'intelligent,' and 'usable.' We can use these two lists to make a blurred distinction between mobile learning and e-Learning. This distinction, however, is not only blurred but in part is also only temporary. Many of the virtues of e-Learning are the virtues of the power of its technology (and the investment in it) and soon these virtues will also be accessible to mobile devices as market forces drive improvements in interface design, processor speed, battery life, and connectivity bandwidth. Nevertheless, this approach underpins a conceptualisation of mobile learning in terms of the learners' experiences and an emphasis on 'ownership,' informality, mobility, and context that will always be inaccessible to conventional 'tethered' e-Learning.
Tackling the problem of definition from another direction, we see that mobile devices and technologies are pervasive and ubiquitous in many modern societies, and are increasingly changing the nature of knowledge and discourse in these societies (whilst being themselves the products of various social and economic forces). This, in turn, alters both the nature of learning (both formal and informal) and alters the ways that learning can be delivered. Learning that used to be delivered 'just-in-case,' can now be delivered 'just-in-time,' 'just enough,' and 'just-for-me.' Finding information rather than possessing it or knowing it becomes the defining characteristic of learning generally and of mobile learning especially, and this may take learning back into the community.
Mobile technologies also alter the nature of work (the driving force behind much education and most training), especially of knowledge work. Mobile technologies alter the balance between training and performance support, especially for many knowledge workers. This means that 'mobile' is not merely a new adjective qualifying the timeless concept of 'learning'– 'mobile learning' is emerging as an entirely new and distinct concept alongside the 'mobile workforce' and the 'connected society.'
Mobile devices create not only new forms of knowledge and new ways of accessing it, but also create new forms of art and performance, and new ways of accessing them (such as 'pop' videos designed and sold for iPods). Mobile devices are creating new forms of commerce and economic activity as well. So mobile learning is not about 'mobile' as previously understood, or about 'learning' as previously understood, but part of a new mobile conception of society. (This may contrast with technology enhanced learning or technology supported, both of which give the impression that technology does something to learning.)
In a different sense, ongoing developments on implementing e-Learning, for example in developing the ontologies of learning objects, makes us examine and question how knowledge is organised and interrelated. Here too our notions of knowledge and learning are evolving. It could be argued that the need to organise and navigate through 'bite-sized' pieces of mobile learning content (whether or not as Learning Objects) will also impact on these notions of knowledge and learning and perhaps individual learners will create their own ontologies on-the-fly as they navigate through a personalised learning journey.
One can also focus on the nature of mobility in order to explore the nature of mobile learning. For each learner, the nature of 'mobility' has a variety of connotations and these will colour conceptualisations of mobile education. It may mean learning whilst traveling, driving, sitting, or walking; it may be hands-free learning or eyes-free learning. These interpretations impact on the implementation and hence the definition of mobile learning.
Having earlier discounted technology as a defining characteristic of mobile learning, it may in fact transpire that different hardware and software platforms support rather different interpretations of mobile learning. At the risk of over-simplification, the philosophy behind the Palm™ based brand of handheld computers (or rather, organisers) initially led to a zero-latency task-oriented interface with only as much functionality as would fit inside the prescribed size of box and this would coax maximum performance out of the processor, the memory, and the battery. Microsoft-based mobile devices by comparison inherited a PC-based interface with considerable latency, making much higher demands on memory, battery, and processor. This dichotomy may be less sharp than it once was, but it could be viewed as underpinning two different interpretations of mobile learning; the former a 'bite-sized' 'just-in-time' version near to the one described above, the latter more like a portable but puny version of 'tethered' e-Learning described above. Similarly, if we were to address whether learning delivered or supported on the current generation of laptop and Tablet PCs should be termed 'mobile learning' then the answer must be 'no.' Learners, and indeed people in general, will carry and use their phones, their iPods, or their PDAs habitually and unthinkingly; however, they will seldom carry a laptop or Tablet PC without a premeditated purpose and a minimum timeframe.
Another technical factor, however, may hinder direct comparison with e-Learning. That is the geometry of mobile devices. For several years, proponents of mobile learning have looked for the eventual convergence of mobile phone technologies and handheld computer technologies, creating a basic generic mobile learning platform to which extra (learning) functionality could be added as desired. This might include camera and other data capture, media player capacity, and location awareness using, for example, global positioning systems (GPS). This now looks unlikely to happen and currently the hardware manufacturers and vendors treat their markets as highly segmented and differentiated. This may be due to the nature of the hardware itself. Unlike desktop PCs, where functionality and connectivity can be easily added or subtracted by adding or subtracting internal chips and cards, mobile technologies are fairly monolithic. In the case of laptops, external slots and ports can provide extra connectivity or memory. Anything smaller, such as a handheld or palmtop computer, has one or at best, two slots. This means that a handheld device has only the functionality with which it was made. Manufacturers cannot position and reposition variations on a basic chassis to suit changing markets. Therefore, it is unlikely that we will be able to build a conceptualisation of mobile learning upon the idea of a generic and expandable mobile hardware platform in the way that 'tethered' e-Learning has implicitly been built upon the PC or personal computer platform.
In any case, hardware devices and technical systems are all without exception designed, manufactured, and marketed for corporate, retail, and recreational users. Any educational uses of the devices and the systems are necessarily parasitic and secondary. Therefore, conceptualisations of mobile learning are also constrained by the distorting nature of the technologies and the devices.
The community of practice cohering around mobile learning nevertheless may feel the need for a theory of mobile learning (although in a postmodern era, the role of theory as an informing construct is under threat). Such a theory may be problematic since mobile learning is inherently a 'noisy' phenomenon where context is everything. e-Learning has certainly gained credibility from the work of many outstanding authors. Finding similar beacons for mobile learning may be more challenging and proponents of mobile learning are still struggling to find a literature and a rhetoric distinct from conventional 'tethered' e-Learning.
The discussion so far has implicitly focused on conceptions of mobile learning based on the culture and affordances of developed countries. If we look at the emerging practice of mobile learning based around phones and PDAs in developing countries, especially the poorest, a different picture emerges based on wholly different affordances. The radically different physical infrastructure and cultural environment – including landline telephony, Internet connectivity, electricity, the rarity of PCs, and the relative inability of societies to support jobs, merchandising, and other initiatives based around these prerequisites – has meant that prescriptions for mobile learning a