Mobile Learning in the Digital Age: A Clash of Cultures?

This chapter reports and discusses the findings of an empirical study on the cultural models of education underlying the adoption and appropriation of mobile learning devices in higher education classes. Particularly it focuses on the difference between the culture of education of the institutions promoting mobile learning and the students’ culture of education. Contemporary enthusiasm towards emerging mobile learning technologies is deeply rooted on what some scholars have defined the American common images of technology. These images “highlight its rational, ordered, controlled aspects and strongly associate technology with notions of efficiency and progress” (Kerr, 2004, p.113). Education is certainly one of those field in which north western societies have long assumed that technology is the solution to increase order, productivity and efficiency (ibidem; Caron, 2008). This happened for the computer, for the Internet, for e-books and today for mobile digital audiovisual players. Actually it is mostly on the basis of such a shared positive bias and commonsensical assumptions, that several North American universities (among which Duke, Michigan and UC Berkeley) have promptly launched programs involving the use of the mobile audiovisual player as new learning device. The reasons commonly advanced for the adoption of mobile learning and teaching devices in education are usually economical, political and educational. A number of educational institutions acclaim the unique advantages provided by these technologies: together with e-learning programs, open distance education, mobile learning devices seem to be a solution for coping with budget constraints. But economic factors are not the only ones at play. The adoption of mobile learning devices (MLD) is also justified by political reasons. Not only would they possibly lower the costs for the institution (the ratio teacher/students, classroom spaces, number of students) but moreover they would open new educational opportunities for students who could not be physically present in the classroom (i.e. working students, students living far from universities, young people living in rural areas, Belderrain 2006; Lee & Chan, 2007). In this context, mobile teaching and learning devices are thoughts to be a means to overcome economic, spatial and temporal constraints and consequently contribute to the democratic diffusion of education and to the recruitment university students. The educational reasons supporting the adoption of such devices seem to be even more persuasive: in the so called knowledge society mobile learning and teaching are supposedly valuable per se. As knowledge is conceived as an unfocused set of information, diffused and distributed in a vague anywhere, knowing becomes a trans-contextual activity. Consequently, traditional distinctions such as formal and informal education, education Vs socialisation, intentional and non-intentional education, collapse: the boundaries of such spheres need to be broken down in favour of a wider learning environment. The spatial and temporal boundary markers, traditionally defining the institutional contexts of education, are seen as no longer relevant to define what an educational activity is. If provided with tools giving them access to this knowledge society, individuals are supposed to teach and learn in every single where and when. Freeing learning and teaching from temporal and spatial constraints, mobile learning& teaching devices would help in transforming every moment and place in a learning environment. Contents and information conceived and formatted by teachers may be consumed by students anywhere and at anytime. The students may also seek contents and information by themselves, evaluate their relevance, download them on their mobile audiovisual player, and bring them to classroom to share them with classmates and teachers. Time-shifting and flexible contexts of learning are the Leitmotiv in most discourses promo...