Contexts of Learning and Challenges of Mobility: Designing for a Blur Between Formal and Informal Learning

Abstract

The chapter will discuss challenges for design based on a context-dependent and complex understanding of mobile learning. The chapter elaborates on contextual aspects of learning and how these are related to mobility in terms of various issues involving physical space (locations), conceptual space (content), social space (social groups), technology, and learning dispersed over time. Through these aspects, mobile learning is emphasised as a complex social process that includes learning through communication between learners participating in multiple contexts mediated by personal, wireless, and mobile devices. Four challenges are discussed based on this complex understanding of mobile learning. Three of these challenges involve the relationship between learning and educational settings. The first challenge concerns how to learn at multiple intersections of physical locations and social groups. The second concerns the impact that personal, mobile, and wireless Internet-connected technology has on the monopoly of knowledge. The third concerns the blurring of the boundaries between formal and informal learning. To reach a coherent conceptualisation useful in designing for mobile learning, the chapter links these challenges to pragmatist and sociocultural ideas about the relationship between human beings and the surrounding context. These three challenges are embraced by a fourth challenge: to include the complexity of contextual aspects in conceptualisation and designing for learning. To meet these challenges, designing for mobile learning benefits from the deployment of concepts built from a transactional worldview. Such a worldview suggests the use of intersectional concepts that embrace several conceptual aspects of mobility in designing for learning.