Mobile Learning in Higher Education

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Mobile Learning in Higher Education

Multiple connections in customized learning spaces

4/23/2008

By Ruth Reynard

The term "Nomadic" has been used to describe the current college students' culture of wireless and mobile connectedness in the sense that they are not "rooted" but incredibility flexible and fluid when it comes to their social connections and their virtual life culture. This refers not only to their uses of social networking tools but also to the reality that they are connected wirelessly in any situation and for any reason. They are essentially nomads when it comes to their life "space."

Bryan Alexander, in his article, Going Nomadic: Mobile Learning in Higher Education (2004) says, "More broadly, mobile and wireless computing has altered the rhythms of social time and has changed uses of social space." (p.28) Within higher education, instructors are beginning to realize the impact of this both positively and negatively in creating communities of learners within their courses. Students bring to the course an extensive network of information input, peer connections, and the potential of a wider scope of application than what has been the case until now. The negative side of things is the challenge of "managing" not only the multitasking of the students but their insistence upon continual connectivity even when participating in a physical learning space with an instructor and other physical peers around them. Some instructors have seen this as something to be controlled through disabling access for the duration of the class while others are trying to integrate this reality into the learning environments (Alexander, 2004).

Whether you choose as a professor to exclude the connectivity from your classroom or to include it, there exits the potential of creating learning communities with broader impact than ever before possible and this can bring wonderful enhancement to any course of study or academic field.

From Linear to Customized
Most of us as higher education faculty were taught to think in a linear flow and were taught thoroughly how to progress logically from one stage of the flow to the next. In fact, much of our expertise was established when we had an exhaustive knowledge of what that flow entailed and how exactly it was organized. Many of us were educated before the personal computer or individual access to the Internet and truly think and organize information accordingly even to this day. The Internet brought with it the concept of the "web" and developed a generation of thinkers who organize information within a webbed environment. In incorporating this flow, faculty have increased the use of problem solving approaches that provide opportunity for students to "web out" as they explore options towards solutions. Increasingly, however, and beyond webbing comes the concept of mobile, multi-connections with little possibility to find a start and most often to always leave the solution open-ended for other contributions. For the purposes of this discussion I will refer to these as "multipoint mobile connections--MMCs". The first wave of this came with blogs and wikis to which various authors could contribute and now we have twitter and live-feed connections which are on-going and multi-purposed. There are three main characteristics of the MMCs which must drive any planning around the use of these in instruction: