Book edited by Vavoula, Pachler and Kukulska-Hulme, published in 2009 by Peter Lang, Oxford.
Have you read/used our book? Feedback welcome.
Synopsis:
Learning with mobile technologies is an emerging field with a developing research agenda and many questions surrounding the suitability of traditional research methods to investigate and evaluate the new learning experiences associated with mobility and support for increasingly informal learning. This book sets out the issues and requirements for mobile learning research, and presents recent efforts to specify appropriate theoretical frameworks, research methods and tools. Through their accounts of particular mobile learning projects, leading researchers in the field present their experiences and approaches to key aspects of mobile learning research such as data capture and analysis, and offer structured guidance and suggestions on adopting and extending these approaches.
Last updated 443 days ago by Agnes Kukulska-Hulme
Joshua Underwood
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Yes, have read and to some extent used your book :-)
The book provides a very helpful overview of a range of approaches in mobile learning and I found several chapters particularly useful. However, in all cases I was left wanting to know more and looking for follow up reading, which I guess is a good thing :-) For many chapters this wasn't particularly difficult to find but might have been facilitated if there was a web page associated to the book. For other chapters I guess related work is yet to be published. Here again a web page, which authors could keep up to date with links to related research/publications for each chapter as this comes out, would be useful. For example, I found the chapter on Mobile Enabled Research (Dearnley & Walker) to be a useful starting point for thinking about ethics issues and method (together with the MUITEL report) and the Rose i Sole chapter on ethnographic approaches to MALL is interesting together with the ReCALL article reporting this work.
Despite the broad coverage of the book I didn't find anything I felt really helped me with understanding the temporal/narrative aspects of mobile learning (especially from the learner perspective) and particularly with regard to turning accounts of these into design guidelines.
My feeling is that the case-based (Pachler, Cook & Bradley) and ethnographic (Ros i Sole) approaches described come closest to catching the kind of data required for this but I didn't feel either of these papers really provided an analytic framework that would help turn these into guidance for design of (prompts for) technology enhanced learning experiences. I think this is a long recognised challenge for trying to use 'rich data' of this type in interaction design (e.g. Hughes, Randall, & Shapiro, 1992).
My feeling is that the temporal/narrative aspects of mobile learning are particularly important because the setting of learning/learner context is constantly changing. As Benford et al (2009) note 'transitions' are points at which the coherence and continuity of experience are most a risk and therefore also points which call for particular care in terms of designing (support for) experiences/learning.
John Traxler's chapter on the gulf between modernist approaches to mobile learning research and post-modern mobile societies got me thinking. However, I have trouble working this through into working out what the implications might be for mobile research - so if anyone can help?
Mark Kramer's chapter on mobile HCI/Design methods was a useful summary but I was really hoping he might have written more about his personal experience as a mobile learner.
So, overall I found the book really useful but I am still looking for work that particularly addresses temporal/narrative aspects of mobile learning - any suggestions?
Joshua Underwood 440 days ago