Critical Mobile Pedagogy

At the end of September, I was invited to give the closing talk to Sustainable Education 2020 (https://millenniumedu.org/), an international online conference, not only invited to give the closing talk but specifically invited to promote my forthcoming book, actually ‘our’ forthcoming book, with my co-editor, Dr Helen Crompton, from Old Dominion University[1]. Apparently advance orders on Amazon are looking good even with only a nondescript place-holder front cover. The actual front cover below is much, much more fun and is an oblique homage to the Penguin edition of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 

 

The delegates were extremely diverse, ranging from ministers to consultants to representatives of the various types of stakeholder in what has been characterised as some intersection of the ‘EdTech industry’ and ‘international development industry’. Given that my talk was about the woeful impact of their industries, and ministries, on the marginal and the oppressed I guess the delegates were fairly tolerant and appreciative. 

 

The majority of the book is contributions from communities around the world, from the San in Namibia, the Welsh valleys, Aboriginals in Australia, the Cree in Canada, villagers in the heart of Borneo, native Americans in Alaska for example, talking about their attempts to use digital technologies for the learnings they actually value. The only thing they have in common is their distance and difference from ‘modern’, global, corporate, national and Anglophone mainstreams. Wrapped around these individual accounts is the argument that ‘mobile learning’, as conceived and delivered over the last two decades, has failed, failed except amongst affluent students, affluent institutions and affluent countries[2]. 

 

The argument growing out of this was the following. These peoples are different from us, ‘us’ meaning for example researchers and developers in prestigious European universities, and different from each other. Consequently, we need to review and revise the research tools and techniques we use to understand them because they grow out of our culture not theirs and only answer the questions that we pose rather than the issues of importance to them. Only with such improved and authentic tools and techniques can we have conversations that help us truly understand the lives and needs of these communities and culture, and the type of learning that we, as outsiders, could help them develop. 

 

We propose a variety of tools and techniques with the potential for adaptation, from disciplines as diverse as development studies, personal construct theory, soft systems methods, business studies and software requirements engineering[3]. These tools and techniques might show how the widespread acceptance and usage of social media and web2.0 such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Flickr and the adaptation of pedagogies such as badges, project-based learning, curating external resources, learner-generated content, flipped learning and gamification, and then using participative and collaborative development processes might produce digital community learning spaces[4]that reconcile the preservation of local languages, traditions, livelihoods and culture with the global knowledge economy and the information superhighway.  Once the book is published, in November, we will see how people, communities and agencies pick up the ideas and whether they can gather solidity and momentum. I started a Jiscmail group, “Critical Digital Learning Research 4 Dev and Empowerment" to pursue these topics. Email CRIT-DIGIT-LEARNING-RESEARCH4DEV@jiscmail.ac.uk to subscribe. 

 

---

[1] Traxler, J. & Crompton, H. (2020) Critical Mobile Pedagogy - Cases of Digital Technologies and Learners at the Margins, New York, NY: Routledge

[2] Maybe if we use the phrase ‘mobile learning’ to refer just to delivering and discussing content within the highly regulated domains and resources of formal education and corporate training there is less of a problem. That however only serves to point to the growing discrepancy between the digital experiences of learners and trainees inside their respective organisations, learning inside a structured, bounded and managed environment, and their digital lives outside, going digitally feral, ‘going off the reservation’, digitally.

[3] Traxler, J. & Smith, M. (2020) Data for development: shifting research methodologies for Covid-19, Journal of Learning for Development

[4] Traxler, J. (2018) Community MOOCs – Back to Basics, Back to the Future in D. Jansen OpenupEd Report:  Latest Trends on MOOCs

 Learning and Researching Through Crisis

John Traxler and Helen Beetham 

In recent work commissioned by the Edtech Hub[1], a team I led from the Education Observatory at the University of Wolverhampton explored two related topics, arising out of the COVID-19 pandemic.  

The first was digital responses that might maintain the continuity of education systems through the pandemic and into its aftermath. The second was how these digital responses might actually exacerbate existing disadvantages and whether that this could be mitigated. We explored the literature extensively, we ran multiple online Delphi sessions with groups of relevant experts, and we put out requests for case studies and examples but in the end, we trusted our experience and expertise, keen to make an original and worthwhile contribution.

What became apparent was the tension between sustaining educations systems, especially national or state education systems, and helping those already failed, ignored or oppressed by these systems. These are disparate and ill-defined group of people and communities, sometimes characterised as the ‘marginalised’, including for example, travellers, the Roma and circus folk; linguistic minorities, indigenous peoples and tribal societies; nomads, the homeless and the deeply rural; refugees and internally-displaced persons; the unemployed and the under-employed and girl children, especially in the context of forced marriages, and women, in more conservative societies. The unifying characteristic, cutting across distinctions between say the Global North and the Global South or urban and rural, was being at the periphery, a long way, socially, culturally, geographically, economically or infrastructurally, from the mainstream and the established of their countries and their languages, values and practices. So, our question was, would sustaining education systems just further disadvantage these marginalised groups? 

The report will be published shortly on the Edtech Hub website. It will be part of the Hub’s rapid response to COVID-19. There was not sufficient time or resources to design and test solutions but the team’s response to both topics was to point to those technologies such as mobiles and social media and to those emerging pedagogies such as learner-generated content, game mechanics and self-directed learning that could underpin the development within communities of informal digital learning spaces.

In the wider environment of global EdTech, there is a blizzard of surveys, funds, webinars and communities, producing and consuming data, ideas and opinions, sometimes trying to fill gaps in what we know about the world as it was, sometimes trying to anticipate the world as it will be. As we begin to imagine - and to shape - the ‘new normal’ in education, we need every opportunity to learn from each other, and we need to learn as much as possible from those marginalised communities, who are usually, almost by definition ‘hard-to-reach’. 

In this context, the Association for Learning Technology is supporting the Open Covid Pledge for Education, covering all forms of research, data and know-how that can support the COVID-19 response in education around the world. 

Researchers in medicine and healthcare have from the start openly released their findings to build a shared knowledge base and save lives. Thousands have signed up to the Open Covid Pledge, hosted by Creative Commons: millions of valuable patents and datasets are now the public domain. We hope that an equivalent pledge for research and know-how in education could have a similar impact. Researchers in digital, open and online education could lead the way.

During lockdown, Open Education Resources (OER) have been critical for keeping students in touch with their learning. There are already several global initiatives to boost OER access and development, like the Open Door initiative hosted by the Commonwealth of Learning, and the OER Dynamic Coalition, launched by UNESCO in March.

But we need more than shared content: we also need credible evidence on which to base day-to-day decisions in practice and policy. We need urgent research into the experiences of teachers and learners. We need shared know-how, especially from experienced online and distance educators and learning technology specialists. 

Education globally faces many challenges, not only for the people who work and learn in the sector but for whole organisations and modes of learning. Societies depend on education to improve lives, widen economic participation, and support civic life. Education will be critical to the long-term response to the pandemic crisis.

The Open Covid Pledge for Education commits people and organisations to sharing what they know, to support the world-wide educational response. Not all research will be shareable as open data. But whether fully open, redacted, anonymised, synthesised or combined with other data sets, data should be shared whenever possible. Not all evidence will look like formal research. But outcomes should be available to everyone who can use them – educators and students around the world, trade unions and stakeholder bodies, funders and policy makers. This is true of organisational research and evidence from practice as well as research that is funded and published more formally.

The Pledge has already been signed by representatives of many global open education initiatives. Thanks to them, much of the hard work of building open principles and processes has been done, and the Open Covid response in education is in good health.

But the hard work of understanding education in a time of pandemic is still ahead. Right now, we have a chance to make ‘open’ the default for that work – to make this moment an ‘open’ pivot rather than just an ‘online’ one. Please sign the Pledge here, and persuade other people in your organisation to do the same.

 

 

 

---

[1] The EdTech Hub is a collaboration between the Overseas Development Institute, REAL Centre at the University of Cambridge, Results for Development, Open Development and Education, Brink, Jigsaw Consult, BRAC, Afrilabs and eLearning Africa. Donor support is currently provided by UK Aid, the World Bank and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

 

Not Quite the Bottom of the Pyramid

Mobile phones hold out enormous promise as the single ICT most likely to deliver education in Africa, and to do so on a sustainable, equitable and scalable basis. I think however that so far, we have not often seen much progress beyond fixed-term, small-scale and subsidised pilots and it is worth exploring whether mobile phones can really deliver their promise.

Delivering education in Africa using mobile phones probably strikes governments, institutions and practitioners as easy and obvious because mobile phones and mobile networks are almost universally accessible and reliable in places where environment, economics, infrastructure and security might variously militate against any other ICTs and where the demographics of mobile phone ownership, access and competence, unlike most other ICTs, takes us near to the ‘bottom of the pyramid’ - the actual ‘bottom of the pyramid’ is of course populated by people who can’t even afford mobile phones! Furthermore, mobile phones are an individual ICT not an institutional or corporate ICT and are not predicated on access to colleges, business centres, cyber-cafes or maybe even cities. Therefore, learning on mobile phones should work.

My contention is that whilst many good projects using mobile devices to support learning, by definition, do good work and thus deserve to be praised and celebrated, our problems start when we try to understand these projects, when we try to reason and infer about these projects, when we try to explain and disseminate them in the hope that we can reproduce and replicate them. This is all the more worrying as we overlook the far larger number of less successful projects or when we group, organise and cluster projects in order to find common generalisable themes, forces, causes and mechanisms. Therein lies our problem with scale, sustainability and equity.

Something is wrong and we need to dig beneath the surface. What are my reasons for advocating such caution?

Firstly, of course, failure often goes unreported, unpublished, and unacknowledged, and common impression is that careers and reputations are not built on failures however interesting or thought-provoking. Furthermore, many projects are doomed to success and are reported accordingly. Funders, agencies, ministries, officials, researchers and others will have all invested much prestige and resource giving projects the necessary momentum and visibility, and failure becomes unthinkable or inconceivable.

A common saying maintains that, “if you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Watching evaluations in South Africa and Kenya made me think this is true of the mind-sets we bring to our analysis and evaluation of projects. An educationalist will see educational explanations, a technologist will see technological ones, a policy-maker will see policy ones and so on. Our inferences about success are conditioned by our backgrounds. Sometimes these predispositions are built in projects from the outset. In looking at siting or sampling, people from different backgrounds and organisations bring their own ideas about where to site their cluster of project interventions in the hope of getting maximum generality from limited resource but in doing so they bring to the fore, those variables they think significant (and thereby make them significant) and push others to the background. So class size, network coverage or educational content will appear important because they were built in that they would be!

Furthermore, the dream of successful large-scale sustainable learning with mobile devices has been haunted by high-profile successes like mPesa and Grameen. These successes create the expectation and the pressure that learning with mobile devices should be a worldwide runaway success.

On top of that, some years ago, Agnes Kukulska-Hulme and I looked back at reports of mobile learning research projects from around the world and concluded that the researchers were not always very competent and trained in project evaluation. Their evaluations were often fairly informal, disconnected from project objectives, bolted on as late extras, unfocussed and not informed by the relevant literature or expertise. Also, funders and donors are not necessarily trained or critical readers of monitoring and evaluation reports. Below the executive summary and the headlines might be many caveats and nuances that get in the way of simple prescriptions and these get lost.

Of course, in saying this, I am caught between funders who want results, policy makers who want simple robust bases for policy, the development community talking about predictable unexpected consequences, social scientists telling us reality and experience are contingent and postmodernists telling us that the grand narratives of the Western European mind, of which development is undoubtedly one, are all broken and dead.

So our first conclusion must be that our inferences about success and about critical success factors in learning with mobile devices are fairly shaky.

If we look at the mechanics of mobile learning projects in particular and ask about sustainability, things do not get better.

Firstly, funders fund projects, and understandably they try to fund good projects, and as soon as their funding finishes so does most of their influence. This makes moving projects towards sustainability problematic in practical terms. It might however be starting from the wrong perspective all along. Perhaps instead of funding good projects in the hope that they will become sustainable, funders should fund sustainable projects in the hope that they will become good. Meaning that funders should pay more attention to the host, the target, the destination, to the culture, values and expectations of the people who will inherit and support the project and less to the concrete specifics of the projects and its innovations. Perhaps funders should actually avoid known innovators and early adopters on the basis that these people have least in common with the rank-and-file staff who will institutionalise, embed and appropriate educational change and have least in common with the ethos of their institution.

Most mobile learning projects, especially research projects, have been based on providing learners with the necessary devices, especially first generation projects when devices were rare, expensive and complex. This was sensible in producing more rigorous evidence in coming from a uniform technology platform but not in producing evidence that was transferable into the world where funds did not exist to continue to provide learners with devices. Those mobile learning project funded by corporates, especially from within their corporate social responsibility budgets, suffered from similar problems, compounded by the shorter time-scales that characterised the corporate and commercial world. Fixed-term projects, either funded as research or as corporate social responsibility, taught us little about sustainability. By definition, they were not intended to teach us about sustainability. The fact that projects run more smoothly and produce cleaner less noisy data with provided devices rather than learner devices, that they often use the enthusiasm of project staff and the novelty of innovation, has instead created very false and contrived environments and evidence that does not transfer.

If we could produce evidence that was convincing and relevant, we then have the problem of what to do with it!

In countries of big government, where society expects government support from cradle to grave, the role of evidence is at least in theory straightforward, namely researchers take evidence to government, this impacts on policy and then releases or diverts public resources. In fact, informing policy and changing practice are much more complex than this, involving various ways of exploiting expertise as well as evidence but it is still being basically a political process underpinned by a particular set of ideals about the responsibilities of government.

In countries of small government, however, the role of evidence, expertise and experts is more complex and problematic. The players in any possible mobile learning space might include network operators, publishers, handset manufacturers, maybe government, maybe not, and possibly social entrepreneurs and various kinds of community activists. We must work towards models of learning with mobile devices that make money since this ensures that they are sustainable, big money in the case of scenarios that include corporates and small money in the case of scenarios that include social entrepreneurs.

Corporates, of course, each have a specific focus, be it handsets, content or connectivity, and so the challenge for advocates of learning with mobiles devices is moving the argument forward and fostering collaborations, with evidence and whatever else works, with these players. We must recognise however that even if a commercial operation can take learning to the mythic next billion subscribers of the global South, there will still be parts of the curriculum or parts of the population left uncovered, where governments must still recognise some responsibility and recognise the potential to build human capital and potential for the greater good, if only we knew the language, the issues and the arguments that would change their course.

The alternative is working with social entrepreneurs, those individuals embedded within their own communities, prepared to blend making a profit and delivering a social service, perhaps analogous to community teachers in rural schools in Kenya or bare-foot doctors in China. The challenge for advocates of learning with mobile devices is finding out how to design or adapt those devices or applications that hit the spot where market and education might just overlap.

Every technology embodies an ideology. The implication was that every educational technology embodied a pedagogy, embodies a specific set of ideas about teaching and learning. This ideology or pedagogy may be that of the designers or the manufacturers; the technology may however be appropriated by users and learners and the ideology or pedagogy embodied within the technology becomes theirs not the original or intended one. This issue represents one of the challenges to transferring strategies for educational technology from one culture to another, even from one community or sub-culture to another, especially when we recognise how many slightly different communities and sub-cultures inhabit phonespace and cyberspace.

Finally, one obvious way to enhance sustainability and scale is to consciously exploit learners’ own devices, to base national or institutional strategy around the phones that individuals choose, own and carry everywhere. Of course, institutional culture and regulations may actually prohibit phones on the premises and much needs to be done in order to address issues of standards, infrastructure and performance, of access and equity, of content and training but the main hurdle is teachers’ and officials’ perceptions about loss of control and agency in the class-room, about suddenly letting the animals run the zoo.

Of course we assume that using mobile phones to take learning, our learning, to different and distant communities is a good thing. Many of Africa's languages are at risk of extinction and some of the communities and cultures of these languages have an uncomfortable relation with the national language and culture. With these languages go different cultures of knowing and coming to know, of learning and teaching, of what to learn, who to learn it from and how to use what you've learned – communal stories, elders, mother tongues.

Is it right to connect these cultures to the might of the global knowledge economy on the mobile information superhighway where they might end up as exotic road-kill? Are our learning and our technologies likely to be harmful? Can we reconcile informed consent with blissful ignorance? Is this a liberal Western conceit, inconsequential compared to Millennium Development Goals?

Crisis and The Call

Call for Proposals: TEL, the Crisis and the Response

The Alpine Rendez-Vous

The Alpine Rendez-Vous (ARV) is an established but unusual scientific event focused on Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL). The ARV series of events are promoted by TELEARC and EATEL associations. These took up the legacy of the FP6 NoE Kaleidoscope and Prolearn, and the FP7 NoE Stellar, which sustained them along past years. The goal of the Alpine Rendez-Vous is to bring together researchers from the different scientific communities doing research on Technology-Enhanced Learning, in a largely informal setting, away from their workplace routines. Although originating in Europe, the ARV is open to other continents’ researchers and proposals. ARV is structured as a set of independent parallel workshops located at the same time in the same place. Workshops may last two to three days each, half of the workshops taking place in the first part of the week and the other half in the second part, possibly with a “common day” in the middle. The Alpine Rendez-Vous of 2013 will take place from January 28th to February 1st, in Villard-de-Lans, a village in the middle of Vercors. Breaks and meals are organized in a way that promotes informal encounters between participants from the different workshops.

An informal group concerned about the relationships between TEL research and change, discontinuity and dislocation in the wider world have had a workshop proposal accepted and are now calling for proposals and participation.

Background

The TEL research community has undoubtedly been successful over the last fifteen or twenty years in extending, enriching and even challenging the practices and theories of education within its professions and within its institutions, and through them has engaged in turn with the institutions and professions of industry and government. These have however been largely inward-looking discourses best suited perhaps to a world characterised by stability, progress and growth. These are all now problematic and uncertain, and call for new discourses within the TEL research community and across its borders. The world is now increasingly characterised by challenges, disturbances and discontinuities that threaten these dominant notions of stability, progress and growth. These represent the grand challenges to the TEL research community, challenges to the community to stay relevant, responsive, rigorous and useful.

Earlier discussions (eg purpos/ed, http://purposed.org.uk/  & e4c, education-for-crisis, http://educationforthecrisis.wikispaces.com/) had outlined the emergent crisis in broad terms and identified different perspectives and components, including

• economic and resource crises, including long-term radical increases in economic inequality within nations; youth unemployment across Europe, the polarisation of employment and the decline in growth; sovereign debt defaults and banking failures; mineral and energy constraints;.
• environmental and demographic crises, in particular, the implications of declining land viability for migration patterns; refugee rights and military occupations; nation-state population growth and its implications for agriculture, infrastructure and transport
• the crisis of accountability, expressed in the failure of traditional representative democracy systems especially in the context of global markets, the growth of computerised share-dealing; the emergence of new private sector actors in public services; the growth of new mass participatory movements and the rise of unelected extremist minorities both challenging the legitimacy of the nation-state and its institutions
• socio-technical disruptions and instability, exaggerated by a reliance on non-human intelligence and large-scale systems of systems in finance, logistics and healthcare, and by the development of a data-rich culture;  the increasing concentration and centralisation of internet discourse in the walled gardens of social networks; the proliferation and complexity of digital divides;  the dependency of our educational institutions on computer systems for research, teaching, study, and knowledge transfer
• the dehumanisation crisis, expressed in the production of fear between people, the replacement of human flourishing with consumption, the replacement of the idea of the person with the idea of the system, the replacement of human contact with mediated exchange, the commodification of the person, education and the arts

and specifically, in relation to TEL;

•            TEL and the industrialisation of education; marginal communities and the globalization and corporatisation of learning; futures thinking as a way to explore TEL in relation to resilience; the political economy of technology in higher education and technological responses to the crisis of capitalism; the role of openness as a driver for innovation, equity and access; digital literacies and their capacity to shift TEL beyond skills and employability in an increasingly turbulent future; connectedness and mobility as seemingly the defining characteristics of our societies; the role and responsibility of research and of higher education as these crises unfold, the complicity or ambiguity of TEL in their development; is the current TEL ecosystem and environment sustainable, is it sufficiently responsive and resilient, how extent does TEL research question, support, stimulate, challenge and provoke its host higher education sector?

TEL is at the intersection of technology and learning and encapsulates many of the ideals, problems and potential of both.  Education and technology permeate all of the perspectives outlined above, some more than others. It is possible however that they could ameliorate some of their consequences or amplify and exaggerate others. TEL has been a project and a community nurtured within the institutions and organisations of formal education in the recent decades of relative stability and prosperity in the developed nations of Asia-Pacific, North America and Western Europe. Some of the critical challenges directly relate to the perceived missions of the TEL project and its community. Contemporary formal education in schools, colleges and universities is increasingly reliant on TEL. The TEL community is however currently poorly equipped either to resist the progress of these crises today or to enable individuals and communities to flourish despite their consequences tomorrow. The transition movement, the open movement and the occupy movement are all parts of wider responses to differing perceptions and perspectives of the underlying malaise.

The Call

The proposed workshop will enrich conversations by bringing in new perspectives and will explore how the different communities can learn from each other, perhaps bringing about more open, participative and fluid models of education. It brings together researchers seeking to articulate these concerns and responses, and develop a shared understanding that will engage and inform the TEL community. It is timely, necessary and unique, and will contribute to a clearer and more worthwhile formulation of the Grand Challenges for TEL in the coming years.

One of the outputs of the workshop will be a special edition of a peer-reviewed journal; other options, such as an open access journal, a book or a website, are possible if there is a consensus.

Please submit an individual or collective two-page position paper, or propose a structured discussion or debate on the role and place of TEL in the light of our analysis. Contributions will be selected by the organisers on the basis of individual quality of the papers and the overall balance and coherence of the programme.

Deadline

Submission by 17 August 2012

Organisers

·       Doug Belshaw, Researcher, Mozilla Foundation

·       Helen Beetham, Consultant, JISC

·       Hamish Cunningham, Professor, University of Sheffield

·       Keri Facer, Professor, University of Bristol

·       Richard Hall, Reader, De Montfort University

·       Marcus Specht, Professor, Open University, Netherlands

·       John Traxler, Professor, University of Wolverhampton, john.traxler@wlv.ac.uk (corresponding organiser)

The Sustainable University

Does the impact of mobiles and mobility on our society mean that the education system, especially the institutions of formal learning, need to make tactical, technical changes and reforms in order to be sustainable, ask whether business-as-usual is still possible. Or do these changes suggest that the education system is somehow broken, no longer fit-for-purpose and unsustainable? Or perhaps some more complex and fragmented answer lies between these extremes?

The personal, cultural and social aspects of the impact of mobiles on the education system hinge on the essential difference between desktop technologies and mobile technologies, a difference that means we can ignore the former but not the latter. Interacting with a desktop computer takes place in a bubble, in dedicated times and places where the learner has their back to the world for a substantial and probably premeditated episode. Interacting with a mobile is different and woven into all the times and places of people’s lives.

Mobiles have created simultaneity of place, the juxtaposition of physical space and multiple virtual spaces full of conversational interactions, where identity, ideas, images and information are generated, shared, discussed and transformed. This changes learners' sense of time, space, place and location, their affiliations and loyalties to institutions, groups and communities, the ways in which they relate to other individuals and to groups, to learning, knowing and understanding, their sense of their identity, and their ethics, that is their sense of what is right, what is acceptable and what is appropriate. The literature of mobilities research documents and analyses these changes but fails to see their significance for formal education. The literature of mobile learning research highlights disruption and mobiles but usually fails to unpack the deeper significance.

Desktop technologies can be ignored but not mobile technologies; desktop technologies operate in their own small world, mobile technologies operate in the world. Desktop technologies are tied to buildings, mobile technologies to people. Mobiles demolish the need to tie particular activities to particular places or particular times. They reconfigure relationships between public and private spaces, and the ways in which these relationships are penetrated by virtual spaces. Virtual communities and discussions were previously mediated by static networked computers in dedicated times, places and spaces. Now, mobiles propel these communities and discussions into physical public and private spaces, forcing changes and adjustments to all three as we learn to manage more fluid contexts. Mobiles also shift agency and ownership from institutions to people and challenge the role of formal institutions as gatekeepers and custodians of society's knowledge, education and learning. These changes are clearly challenging the legitimacy and credibility of formal institutions, rooted in fixed times, places, relationships, configurations and roles

Mobiles, Learning, Africa, Development

There is much activity, much discussion and much interest in the capacity of mobile devices to deliver, support and enhance learning for the disenfranchised, the disadvantaged and the developing communities and regions of the world. Much of this discussion, interest and activity is however uncritical, simplistic and poorly synthesised.
In general the argument for using mobile phones or other mobile devices to address educational disadvantage is straightforward: their ownership and acceptance are near-universal and cut across most notions of ‘digital divides’; their use is based around robust sustainable business models; they are, unlike other ICTs, found at the BOP amongst the next billion subscribers; they deliver information, ideas and, increasingly, images.
Research is needed now because of the rapidly increasing ownership of more powerful handsets in the developing world, the decreasing real costs of this hardware and connectivity, the increasing coverage of higher specification networks in these regions and the increasing activity of corporates representing publishing, handsets, services and infrastructure looking for sustainable business models based on the educational use of mobile devices in developing regions. This represents an opportunity to intervene, to promote and to guide this activity in order that worthwhile educational experiences and opportunities become more widely and more equitably distributed.
Research is also needed now because various communities, necessary actors in facilitating successful learning using mobile devices and technologies, each come with considerable potential but often inappropriate contributions, partial understandings and flawed assumptions:
i. Mobile learning is an emerging mature global research, policy and practitioner community that has exploited mobile devices to extend the reach of learning and of educational opportunities, and has developed applications and formats that enhance and extend the concepts of learning and education. The projects and pilots of the mobile learning community now impact on policy and provision in many parts of the developed world thanks to judicious advocacy and credible evidence. The achievements of the mobile learning community are not characterised specifically by any ‘developing’/’developed’ divide but are not widely known or understood in the developing regions.
ii. The m4d (and larger ICTD) community of researchers, activists and practitioners have currently generally only addressed learning and education as ‘service delivery’, using mobile technologies to smooth the operations of educational institutions, and have not engaged significantly with education processes or practices.
iii. Mobile learning, insofar as it takes place in Africa, has been seen as part of e-learning in Africa and as part of the rhetoric of ‘catching-up’ and ‘leap-frogging’. The technologies of e-learning necessarily but perhaps implicitly embody ideas and practices of teaching and learning native to America or Western Europe. Furthermore the model for procuring and deploying and supporting ICT for education is no longer appropriate, being based on institutional provision rather than learner provision.
iv. The pace at which mobile devices and technologies are brought to market and more importantly are exploited, domesticated and appropriated leads to a very fragmented understanding of their affordances and of the nature and significance of any medium-term trends.
v. Mobile devices increasingly allow users to generate, share and discuss ideas, images and information, specific to them, their locations and their own physical or virtual communities, in effect to determine and manage their own learning and knowledge. This problematises the role, status and credibility of formal education and its institutions but also impacts and perhaps threatens learners’ indigenous cultures, languages and social structures, perhaps rooted in stable hierarchies and a more oral tradition.
Areas to be explored must include the balance between ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ approaches, ‘progressive’ versus ‘traditional’ values in education, the relationships between mobile learning, lifelong learning, distance education and classroom teaching, the ethical and cultural aspects of educational interventions and the boundaries and differences between various research communities and their methodologies for example between participative design and anthropology.

random thoughts on 'development' and e-learning

• African universities, professionals, researchers, educators (and maybe ICTD in general) etc are not exposed to the most exciting, most innovative work in European e-learning (ideas, concepts, communities and people, not just gadgets, systems and technologies) including mobile learning (and vice versa)

• The m4d (mobile-for-development) community seems preoccupied with ‘service delivery’ / with infrastructural & organisational solutions - education is not just another service
• there is a plethora of not-for-profits/community activists in this space esp. South Africa
• Methodologies (and ethics, epistemology) do not travel well; they are genuine meaningful challenges
• Confusion and overlap of research, development, consultancy, philanthropy, capacity building etc
• Big awareness of funding/financial possibilities (corporates conscious of the 'next billion subscribers' / consultants & researchers mining donor and development funds) esp. in South Africa
• There are considerable discrepancies between informal/community expectations about technology, education and those formal expectations within institutions, funders/donors
• Mobiles don't merely replicate existing 'digital divides' eg North/South, gender, age
• In Africa, the relationships between projects, evidence, sustainability, private sector, equity, policy, governance are variable and weak
• African universities, professionals, researchers, educators etc are however exposed to big business selling products that are usually wholly inappropriate (technically, infrastructurally, culturally, financially and pedagogically)
• Moreover these products and their sales pitch resonate with uncritical ideas of ‘leap-frogging’ within Africa itself amongst some officials in ministries and universities; e-learning in Africa is too often conceptualised as a deficit to be redressed
• The rhetoric of ‘catching-up’ is drowning out any discussion of ‘appropriate’.