Road Map for Research in Mobile Learning

This workshop focused on the mobile device user and areas where research was needed to understand how to successfully deploy mobile technologies to support learning in and out of school, college or university.

Jocelyn Wishart presented feedback from the Kaleidoscope European Network of Excellence funded workshop Big Issues in Mobile Learning. There the mobile device user was discussed at length under issue 3: affective factors in learning with mobile devices and the impact of having mobile phone and PDA users in the classroom under issue 4: the conflicts between personal informal learning and traditional classroom education. The full report of the workshop is available from Mike Sharples' website.

Maírín Murray (BBC Senior Producer - Factual and Learning) from BBC Blast and Learning Online then presented

“The BBC's experience of people’s  current use of mobile devices and ways in which we can hope to capitalise on/learn from this”

focusing on  the BBC Blast site  and led an extremely informative discussion about how young people had been using it with mobile phones. Despite costs involved it was clear that young people are keen to share music and video via mobile technologies.

Pointers and signposts for a roadmap for research into understanding and supporting the mlearner were then discussed by different groups.

• Red: young people (11-18)
• Orange: university students
• Green: children (4-11)
• Blue:  recreational or informal learning with adults

Interestingly no-one took up the challenge of discussing the need for research into the use of mobile devices for training and professional development in the workplace.