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Most adults and adolescents in developed countries now own mobile phones and media devices, and for many people in developing countries a mobile phone can offer the only means of sending long distance messages. In a parallel development to the spread of personal technology, since the early 1980s schools, colleges and universities have experimented with handheld technology for learning, including classroom response systems, data probes, and handheld writing tools. Universities allow students to bring laptop computers to lectures and some schools are now providing pupils with Personal Digital Assistants and tablet computers. As personal mobile technologies for learning become more widespread, studies are starting to show evidence of the value of incorporating mobile devices in teaching and learning (McFarlane, Triggs and Yee 2008; p.7) and also substantial issues, including conflicts between informal learning with personal devices and traditional classroom education (Sharples 2007). Children are developing new skills and literacies enabled by mobile devices, such as SMS texting, moblogging (writing diaries and weblogs on mobile devices) and mobile video creation. A new generation of location-aware mobile phones will offer further possibilities, of education services and educational media matched to the learner's context and interests.

Pre-print available by permission of the publisher on LSRI's website.; In the evolving landscape of mobile learning, European researchers have conducted significant mobile learning projects, representing a distinct perspective on mobile learning research and development. Our paper aims to explore how these projects have arisen, showing the driving forces of European innovation in mobile learning. We propose context as a central construct in mobile learning and examine theories of learning for the mobile world, based on physical, technological, conceptual, social and temporal mobility. We also examine the impacts of mobile learning research on educational practices and the implications for policy. Throughout, we identify lessons learnt from European experiences to date. (http://www.lsri.nottingham.ac.uk/msh/Papers/Kukulska-Hulme%20et%20al.%20IJMBL%20preprint.pdf)

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

International audience; In this paper, a novel approach to engaging children in personal inquiry learning is described, whereby they carry out scientific investigations that are personally meaningful and relevant to their everyday lives. The learners are supported by software that guides the inquiry process, extending from the classroom into the school grounds, home, or outdoors. We report on a case study of personal inquiry learning with 28 high school students on the topic of healthy eating. An analysis of how the personal inquiry was enacted in the classroom and at home, based on issues identified from a study of interviews with the children and their teacher is provided. The outcomes showed that learners were alerted to challenges associated with fieldwork and how they responded to the uncertainty and challenge of an open investigation. The study, moreover, raised an unexpected difficulty for researchers of finding the 'sweet spot' between scientifically objective but unengaging inquiry topics, and ones that are personally meaningful but potentially embarrassing. Implications for further research are shaped around ways of overcoming this difficulty.

Multi-Display Learning Spaces (MD-LS) comprise technologies to allow the viewing of multiple simultaneous visual materials, modes of learning which encourage critical reflection upon these materials, and spatial configurations which afford interaction between learners and the materials in orchestrated ways. In this paper we provide an argument for the benefits of Multi-Display Learning Spaces in supporting complex, disciplinary reasoning within learning, focussing upon our experiences within postgraduate visual arts education. The importance of considering the affordances of the physical environment within education has been acknowledged by the recent attention given to Learning Spaces, yet within visual art disciplines the perception of visual material within a given space has long been seen as a key methodological consideration with implications for the identity of the discipline itself. We analyse the methodological, technological and spatial affordances of MD-LS to support learning, and discuss comparative viewing as a disciplinary method to structure visual analysis within the space which benefits from the simultaneous display of multiple partitions of visual evidence. We offer an analysis of the role of the teacher in authoring and orchestration and conclude by proposing a more general structure for what we term ‘multiple perspective learning’, in which the presentation of multiple pieces of visual evidence creates the conditions for complex argumentation within Higher Education. (http://seminar.net/images/stories/vol6-issue1/Bligh-Lorenz.pdf)

In this study we report on our experiences of creating and running a student fieldtrip exercise which allowed students to compare a range of approaches to the design of technologies for augmenting landscape scenes. The main study site is around Keswick in the English Lake District, Cumbria, UK, an attractive upland environment popular with tourists and walkers. The aim of the exercise for the students was to assess the effectiveness of various forms of geographic information in augmenting real landscape scenes, as mediated through a range of techniques and technologies. These techniques were: computer-generated acetate overlays showing annotated wireframe views from certain key points; a custom-designed application running on a PDA; a mediascape running on the mScape software on a GPS-enabled mobile phone; Google Earth on a tablet PC; and a head-mounted in-field Virtual Reality system. Each group of students had all five techniques available to them, and were tasked with comparing them in the context of creating a visitor guide to the area centred on the field centre. Here we summarise their findings and reflect upon some of the broader research questions emerging from the project. (http://tinyurl.com/edwild)

The workshop explored recent innovations into location-based, or geospatially-informed, contextual mobile learning, and issues arising from them. Location-based technologies offer opportunities for new forms of learning that engage more deeply with physical surroundings and support continuity of understanding across settings; they also pose technical difficulties of modelling and maintaining continuity of context, and ethical challenges including the right to privacy of location and escape from continual monitoring. The workshop brought together experts in mobile learning from educational and technical backgrounds, with newcomers (including PhD students) across Europe and North America. The goals of the workshop were threefold: 1. to share good practice of research innovations and case studies 2. to engage in debate and discussion of critical issues surrounding contextual and location-based mobile learning both currently and in the future 3. to conduct future-scanning activities in contextual and location-based learning

This paper explores the value of employing multiple modalities to facilitate science learning with technology. In particular, it is argued that when multiple modalities are employed, learners construct strong relations between physical movement and visual representations of motion. Body interactions with visual representations, enabled by interactive technologies, can encourage rhythmic cycles of engagement and reflection. A study was carried out to investigate how students interpret distance-time and velocity time graphs created through hand movement. It explored the dynamic coupling between their body movements and graphs, and their subsequent interpretation and production of graphs on paper. The results show that physical manipulation of kinematics graphs has a significantly greater effect on students’ ability to relate graphs to movement than observing the graphs being produced by someone else. (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8535.2009.01017.x/full)

[About the book] \ud \ud The report follows on from a 2-day workshop funded by the STELLAR Network of Excellence as part of their 2009 Alpine Rendez-Vous workshop series and is edited by Elizabeth Brown with a foreword from Mike Sharples. Contributors have provided examples of innovative and exciting research projects and practical applications for mobile learning in a location-sensitive setting, including the sharing of good practice and the key findings that have resulted from this work. There is also a debate about whether location-based and contextual learning results in shallower learning strategies and a section detailing the future challenges for location-based learning.

A new report has been published by the LSRI/University of Nottingham that gives an essential overview of research into location-based contextual mobile learning primarily across Europe, edited by Elizabeth Brown. The report follows on from a 2-day workshop funded by the STELLAR Network of Excellence as part of their 2009 Alpine Rendez-Vous workshop series. Contributors have provided examples of innovative and exciting research projects and practical applications for mobile learning in a location-sensitive setting, including the sharing of good practice and the key findings that have resulted from this work. (http://www.lsri.nottingham.ac.uk/ejb/preprints/ARV_Education_in_the_wild.pdf)

We propose six challenges in evaluating mobile learning: capturing and analyzing learning in context and across contexts, measuring mobile learning processes and outcomes, respecting learner/participant privacy, assessing mobile technology utility and usability, considering the wider organizational and socio-cultural context of learning, and assessing in/formality. A three-level framework for evaluating mobile learning is proposed, comprising a micro level concerned with usability, a meso level concerned with the learning experience, and a macro level concerned with integration within existing educational and organizational contexts. The article concludes with a discussion of how the framework meets the evaluation challenges and with suggestions for further extensions.

This paper reports findings from a survey and interviews with children aged 11–16 years, teachers and parents on their attitudes to e-safety in relation to social networking and media creation (Web 2.0) and their practices at school and at home. The results showed that 74% of the children surveyed have used social network (SN) sites and that a substantial minority regularly interact socially online with people they have not met face-to-face. Online interaction forms a different, although overlapping, social space to that of face-to-face friendships. Despite a desire from some teachers to explore the benefits of Web 2.0 for creative and social learning, they report being constrained by a need to show a duty of care that avoids worst-case risk to children, to restrict access to SN sites. The respondents also report more direct concerns about Internet bullying and exam cheating. We also report a Policy Delphi process with a panel of 30 people with expertise in Web 2.0 and e-safety. The panel reached a general consensus that schools should move towards allowing access to Web 2.0 sites, with children being educated in responsible and creative learning.

A project called MyArtSpace, funded by the UK Department for Culture Media and Sport, is today exploring how children can engage in similar enquiry-led learning supported by mobile technology and how this can link to school and home learning. Using MyArtSpace as an example, we discuss the possibilities for mobile technology to form bridges between formal and informal learning. We also offer guidelines, drawn from our experience with MyArtSpace, for designing such bridges.

To foster synergy between research on collaborative, mobile and inquiry learning and between different scientific and methodological perspectives (namely, educational design, psychology and computer science) and to strengthen the cohesion of the community, the Kaleidoscope network has decided to organise a “Convergence Workshop” in conjunction with the 2006 Contractors' General Assembly in Amsterdam, Dec. 4-6. The two fields of collaborative and inquiry learning have been represented in the network as Special Interest Groups from the beginning. Mobile learning was established more recently as an initiative. The three themes actually complement each other in that collaborative learning focuses on a general modality of learning which is not particularly related to a specific content or domain, whereas inquiry learning does indeed come with a specific domain focus in the areas of science, mathematics and technology. Mobile learning takes up the potential of a new generation of networked interactive and communicative devices. We though this complementarity it would be a good precondition for synergy, but of course we also hope for wider synergies, e.g. with learning at work or AI in education, in the future. In accordance with the idea of stimulating synergy in the network, workshop contributions were sought from within Kaleidoscope in the categories of full paper presentations, young researcher papers and system demos or interactive presentations. Integration of at least two of the three fields of technology enhanced learning as well as multiple methodological perspectives were required for each single paper to be accepted. This collection comprises the five papers that have been selected for publication and for presentation at the workshop in a peer reviewing process. Two of the selected papers are in full paper category (Walker and Bourdeau et al.), one is a young researcher paper (Niramitranon et al.) and two describe system demos (van Joolingen and Bollen et al.). We hope that these presentations at the Convergence Workshop will indeed promote integration and synergy between different lines of research and thus contribute to the advancement and sustainability of the Kaleidoscope network. The Convergence Workshop Task Force

International audience; no abstract

(D33.2.2). EU Sixth Framework programme priority 2, Information society technology, Network of Excellence Kaleidoscope, (contract NoE IST-507838), project "Mobile learning in informal science settings"; This report combines: a literature review of work on mobile learning in informal science settings, a report on empirical work on mobile learning in each of the partners, and guidelines on context-awareness.

University of Birmingham, and Microsoft. Also available at http://download.microsoft.com/documents/uk/education/solutions/wireless/downloads/wireless-lan-guide.pdf; This guide is for IT managers responsible for running a network of computers and who are thinking about introducing a wireless network into the organisation. The document aims to look at the way wireless technology functions and it discussesa range of technical, physical and security considerations for deploying a wireless system.

International audience; Trainers of radiologists face the particular challenges of teaching normal and abnormal appearance for a variety of imaging modalities, providing access to a large appropriately-indexed case library, and teaching a consistent approach to the reporting of cases. The computer has the potential to address these issues, to supplement conventional teaching of radiology by providing case-based tutoring and diagnostic support based on a large library of images of normal and abnormal anatomy, described in a consistent terminology. The paper presents a new approach to computer-based training in radiology that combines a knowledge-based tutor with an on-line medical atlas. It describes two existing computer systems, the MR Tutor and ATLAS, and discusses the medical, computational, epistemic, and pedagogic issues involved in developing a combined Atlas-Tutor. Integrating an atlas with a training system could significantly improve the teaching and support offered, but practical difficulties include the need to merge knowledge representations and to incorporate techniques for registering atlas plates on images that exhibit abnormalities. The paper addresses these problems, and concludes by indicating how the Atlas-Tutor might be employed in practical radiology training.

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.