A Theory of Learning for the Mobile Age

Abstract

A society which is mobile, which is full of channels for the distribution of a change occurring anywhere, must see to it that its members are educated to personal initiative and adaptability.Otherwise, they will be overwhelmed by the changes in which they are caught and whose significance or connections they do not perceive.' Dewey (1916, p. 88) When John Dewey wrote Democracy and Education, the industrialised world was undergoing a huge technological and social disruption.Railways and paved roads had enabled mass travel, wireless communication had bridged the Atlantic, and a mechanised war was being fought across continents.Today, we are experiencing similar social and technological disruption, with the Internet and mobile technologies providing global access to information and mobility of knowledge.Ten years ago a school in Russia teaching English had no access to contemporary language sources; now it has the worldwide web.Five years ago, a farmer in rural Kenya had no communication with the nearest city, now he carries a mobile phone.We live in a society in which the "channels for distribution of change" are carried with us as part of daily life.Every era of technology has, to some extent, formed education in its own image.That is not to argue for the technological determinism of education, but rather that there is a mutually productive convergence between the main technological influences on a culture and the contemporary educational theories and practices.Thus, in the era of mass print literacy, the textbook was the medium of instruction, and a prime goal of the education system was effective transmission of the canons of scholarship.During the computer era of the past fifty years, education has been re-conceptualised around the construction of knowledge through information processing, modelling and interaction (Duffy & Cunningham, 1996).Now, as we enter a new world of global digital communication, it is no surprise that there is a growing interest in the relations between mobile technology and learning.What we need, however, is an appropriate theory of education for the mobile age.Many theories of learning have been advanced over the 2500 years between Confucius and the present day, but almost all have been predicated on the assumption that learning occurs in a school classroom, mediated by a trained teacher.A few educational thinkers have developed theory-based accounts of learning outside the classroom, including Argyris (Argyris & Schön, 1996), Friere (Freire, 1996), Illich (Illich, 1971), and Knowles (Knowles & Associates, 1984), but none have put the mobility of learners and learning as the focus of enquiry.Our aim is to propose a theory of learning for a mobile society.It encompasses both learning supported by mobile devices such as cellular (mobile) phones, portable computers and personal audio players, and also learning in an era characterised by mobility of people and knowledge (Rheingold, 2002) where the technology may be