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MOBILE learning is the study of how to harness personal and portable technologies for effective education. The term also covers research into technology-enabled learning across contexts and learning in an increasingly mobile society. The first phase of mobile learning, originating more than 60 years ago, was to equip classrooms and lecture theatres with handheld response systems to aggregate individual responses from students and to provoke discussion based on differences in answers to open response questions. The more recent technologies of graphing calculators and wireless handheld devices offer new learning opportunities for rapid sharing of data and knowledge, simulation and visualization, and computer-managed groupwork [3]. The second phase was strongly influenced by two major projects funded by the European Commission, MOBIlearn and m-Learning [1], with related efforts occurring across the globe. These projects explored the opportunities for learning with mobile technologies in nonformal settings, including homes, museums, workplaces, and outdoors. The emphasis of these projects was on the mobility of the learner and support for learning across contexts and life transitions. Studies by Livingstone [2] and colleagues have shown that adults, on average, engage in 13-17 hours per week of active learning and this is maintained throughout their lifetimes. Yet, less than 5 percent of this learning is within a school or formal education setting. So, we have a significant opportunity for personal technology to support the other 95 percent of lifelong learning. During the course of this second phase and continuing into the present, a huge wave of mobile technology adoption has swept throughout the world. Now, almost every adult and adolescent child in industrially developed countries owns a multimedia communicator with more computing power than guided the first landings on the moon. For many people in developing countries, the personal mobile phone is their only means of distance communication, automated calculation, precise timekeeping, and, increasingly, image and sound recording. In a seminal 1991 paper, Weiser argued “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it” [4]. In an emerging third phase of mobile learning, learning becomes embedded into everyday life. Children own tools for learning that they can carry with them from home, to school, to college, and into the workplace, constructing a personal and shared history of knowledge enrichment. Buildings, parks, and cities can be augmented to explain their history, ecology, or structure, enriching a tourist visit or field trip. Such pervasive learning technologies pose substantial practical and ethical problems. How can schools manage the disruption of children bringing their powerful personal technologies into the classroom? How far should formal education and training extend into the daily lives of children and employees? What rights do people have over learning-related materials they originate and share? A common theme of this special issue is the lowering of barriers between these three types of mobile learning: in the classroom, outside the classroom, and as part of everyday life. In “A Mobile Live Video Learning System for LargeScale Learning—System Design and Evaluation,“ Carsten Ullrich, Ruimen Shen, Ren Tong, and Xiaohong Tan describe a large-scale learning system that provides university students with access to live streamed lectures after work and on weekends, responding to the quadrupling of students in China enrolled in university education. Efficient compression provides high quality images of the lecture slides on students’ mobile phones, along with audio and video of the lecturer. The students can interact with the lecturer using SMS messaging and can respond to polls and activities initiated by the teacher. Two classes from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, with about 1,000 students in each, successfully used the system to study from lectures at home and on the move. At the other end of the spectrum of technology access, Divya Viswanathan and Jan Blom describe a design workshop in India with children aged 8-11 that proposed concepts for an engaging mobile learning device for children in their paper “New Metaphors from Old Practices—Mobile Learning to Revitalize Education in Developing Regions of the World.” They converge on the simple design metaphor of an electronic “slate” with the properties of touch interaction, small size, support for social use, and audio output. Two general requirements for effective learning are the ability to use the device across multiple contexts, for informal as well as formal learning, and to support both individual and group use. The Indian 4 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES, VOL. 3, NO. 1, JANUARY-MARCH 2010

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The National Science Foundation-funded Center for Innovative Learning Technologies (CILT) is designed to be a national resource for stimulating research and development of technology-enabled solutions to critical problems in K-14 science, math, engineering and technology learning. The Center, launched at the end of 1997, is organized around four themes identified as areas where research is likely to result in major gains in teaching and learning, and sponsors research across disciplines and institutions in its four theme areas. CILT brings together experts in the fields of cognitive science, educational technologies, computer science, subject matter learning, and engineering. It engages business through an Industry Alliance Program and is also training postdoctoral students. CILT's founding organizations are SRI International's Center for Technology in Learning, University of California at Berkeley (School of Education and Department of Computer Science), Vanderbilt University's Learning Technology Center, and the Concord Consortium. Through its programs, CILT seeks to reach beyond these organizations to create a web of organizations, individuals, industries, schools, foundations, government agencies, and labs, that is devoted to the production, sharing and use of new knowledge about how learning technologies can dramatically improve the processes and outcomes of learning and teaching. This paper describes the rationale and operations of the Center, and first-year progress in defining a set of CILT partnership projects with many other institutions that came out of our national theme-team workshops.

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Prior research and development demonstrates that dynamic notations and multiply-linked representations can enable ordinary students to achieve extraordinary learning of scientific and mathematical concepts (Kaput, 1992). However, prior techniques for building such software have resulted in expensive, incompatible, and inflexible products (Roschelle & Kaput, 1996). The vast majority of educational software projects, many of which are funded by the public sector, show promising results in small tests but never reach a larger market (OTA, 1988; PCAST, 1997). How can sustainable and scalable production of high quality math and science software be achieved? The Educational Software Components of Tomorrow (ESCOT) project is exploring one promising direction of innovation: assembling math education software from components rather than hand-crafting new programs or applications for each curricular need. Typical components include graphs, tables, simulations as well as tools for manipulating geometry and algebra. Using capabilities of the Java language and associated frameworks, it is possible to construct individual educational components so that non-technical authors can flexibly combine them, composing new activities and lessons. One way to understand the potential of this approach is by analogy. Only a very few people can build their own stereo system by wiring together transistors and other components at the circuit level, but many people can assemble a stereo system to meet their needs by attaching cables to their preferred amplifier, receiver, disc player, turntable and speakers. The move to higher level components has created a much larger marketplace of compatible products that yield flexible arrangements for particular needs. Similarly, ESCOT is raising the level of components for educational software from the programming language level to the pedagogic/curricular level. In this paper, we report some of the early results from our testbed for developing interoperable components for middle school mathematics, as well as some of the difficult challenges that lie ahead.

Inquiry experiences can provide valuable opportunities for students to improve their understanding of both science content and scientific practices. However, the implementation of inquiry learning in classrooms presents a number of significant challenges. We have been exploring these challenges through a program of research on the use of scientific visualization technologies to support inquiry-based learning in the geosciences. In this article, we describe 5 significant challenges to implementing inquiry-based learning and present strategies for addressing them through the design of technology and curriculum. We present a design history covering 4 generations of software and curriculum to show how these challenges arise in classrooms and how the design strategies respond to them.

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Acknowledgments: This work was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF#0354453). Any opinions, findings and conclusions expressed in the paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. The authors wish to thank the following individuals for their contributions to the chapter: Leah Bricker, Hank Clark, Barbara Conboy, Joan Davis, Katie Hardin, Beth Koemans, Tiffany Lee, Laurie McCarthy, Maisy McGaughey, Raj Raizada, Suzanne Reeve, Maritza Rivera-Gaxiola, Tom Satwicz, Yang Zhang, and Heather Toomey Zimmmerman.

Over the next 10 years, we anticipate that personal, portable, wirelessly-networked technologies will become ubiquitous in the lives of learners - indeed, in many countries, this is already a reality. We see that ready-to-hand access creates the potential for a new phase in the evolution of technology-enhanced learning (TEL), characterized by "seamless learning spaces" and marked by continuity of the learning experience across different scenarios (or environments), and emerging from the availability of one device or more per student ("one-to-one"). One-to-one TEL has the potential to "cross the chasm" from early adopters conducting isolated design studies to adoption-based research and widespread implementation, with the help of research and evaluation that gives attention to the digital divide and other potentially negative consequences of pervasive computing. We describe technology-enhanced learning and the affordances of one-to-one computing and outline a research agenda, including the risks and challenges of reaching scale. We reflect upon how this compares with prior patterns of technology innovation and diffusion. We also introduce a community, called "G1:1," that brings together leaders of major research laboratories and one-to-one TEL projects. We share a vision of global research, inviting other research groups to collaborate in ongoing activities.

Schools today face ever-increasing demands in their attempts to ensure that students are well equipped to enter the workforce and navigate a complex world. Research indicates that computer technology can help support learning, and that it is especially useful in developing the higher-order skills of critical thinking, analysis, and scientific inquiry. But the mere presence of computers in the classroom does not ensure their effective use. Some computer applications have been shown to be more successful than others, and many factors influence how well even the most promising applications are implemented. This article explores the various ways computer technology can be used to improve how and what children learn in the classroom. Several examples of computer-based applications are highlighted to illustrate ways technology can enhance how children learn by supporting four fundamental characteristics of learning: (1) active engagement, (2) participation in groups, (3) frequent interaction and feedback, and (4) connections to real-world contexts. Additional examples illustrate ways technology can expand what children learn by helping them to understand core concepts in subjects like math, science, and literacy. Research indicates, however, that the use of technology as an effective learning tool is more likely to take place when embedded in a broader education reform movement that includes improvements in teacher training, curriculum, student assessment, and a school's capacity for change. To help inform decisions about the future role of computers in the classroom, the authors conclude that further research is needed to identify the uses that most effectively support learning and the conditions required for successful implementation.

Handheld computers will become an increasingly compelling choice of technology for K-12 classrooms because they will enable a transition from occasional, supplemental use to frequent, integral use [1, 2]. Early evaluations suggest teachers and students respond to handhelds favorably [3]. At the same time, these devices will become communication enabled, through wireless technologies such as infrared beaming or radio-based local area networks. The clarity with which we can see the potential has led some to declare that the revolution has arrived and that by rapidly moving to this new technological platform, innovators could achieve large scale impact on learning. Perhaps. But perhaps not. Every new generation of learning technology brings with it a new deep conceptual issue that learning technologists must entangle in order to unlock the learning value of raw technological potential [4]. The field of computer supported collaborative learning has already successfully tackled two key issues, control and representation [5]. This current research base, however, is insufficient to unlock the value of wireless internet learning devices (WILDs). A third issue, hinted at but not fully explored in prior work [6], now must become our central focus of attention. The issue is the nature of the coupling between social and informatic worlds, and within the social and informatic worlds [4]. (http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=/iel5/8056/22273/01039214.pdf)

Inquiry-based science instruction offers great promise as a means of actively engaging students in authentic scientific problem solving, including consideration of re- search design issues. At the same time, inquiry introduces some difficulties. In particular, familiar "cultural tools" for classroom discourse, such as Initiation-Reply-Evaluation se- quences, are no longer appropriate because they are premised on known answers and teacher-driven activity. To help support productive open-ended science inquiry, coaching strategies that allow for strong student voice ut~d teacher influence are necessary. We describe the sociocultural theory motivating one such strategy, transformative communi- cation, as well as a specific dialogue sequence that can be used as a cultural tool for accomplishing such interaction. We then illustrate the utility of the dialogue sequence in four key episodes within an inquiry-based high school Earth Science class. 0 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Sci Ed 85:223-238, 2001.

In press; In this chapter, we argue that the learning sciences are poised for a "decade of synergy." We focus on several key traditions of theory and research with the potential for mutually influencing one another in ways that can transform how we think about the science of learning, as well as how future educators and scientists are trained.