Modernity, mobility and the digital divides

The phrase ‘digital divide’ has been crucial over the last ten years in focusing attention and resources on the issues of access to and use of ICT, including e-learning, by a succession of excluded and marginal individuals and communities. This paper argues however that this is now a dangerously simplistic notion, especially in societies characterised by the postmodernity that has been catalysed by increasing mobility. The paper provides an introduction to some of the ideas and issues

Students and mobile devices: choosing which dream

There is a crisis looming and a paradox emerging. Many educators advocate, promote and encourage the dreams of agency, control, ownership and choice amongst students whilst educational institutions take the responsibility for provision, equity, access, participation and standards. The institutions traditionally procure, provide and control the technology for learning but now students are acquiring their own personal technologies for learning and institutions are challenged to keep pace. These allow students to produce, store, transmit and consume information, images and ideas; this potentially realises the educators’ dream but is for institutions potentially a nightmare, one of loss of control and loss of the quality, consistency, uniformity and stability that delivered the dreams of equity, access and participation. This paper traces the conflicting dreams and responsibilities

Learners - should we leave them to their own devices?

Emerging technologies for learning report - Article exploring learner owned devices and their potential for edcuatio

Psychopaths in the Courtroom: A Preliminary Report on Judicial Sentencing for Violent Offenses

Every day, judges are faced with making decisions about a defendant’s potential risk as it relates to setting bail, sentencing, and a variety of other contexts. In making these decisions, judges must balance issues of fairness and protection of the individual rights of the accused with protection of society from dangerous predators who may commit future acts of physical or sexual violence. As professionals who are not specifically trained in violence assessment, judges must rely on others, including probation agents, attorneys, and expert witnesses, for information to assist in their decision-making. Through expert witnesses and up-to-date training of criminal justice professionals, judges should have access to a significant body of knowledge regarding the risk factors that are known to be related to future violence, particularly risk factors such as psychopathy which has been found to be the single best predictor of future violence in a wide variety of populations. A preliminary study was carried out in western Michigan counties using transcripts from sentencing hearings of violent offenders convicted of rape, felonius assault, or homicide/attempted homicide to determine whether known risk factors influenced judges’ decisions regarding sentencing and whether such information impacted a judge’s decision to depart from the Michigan sentencing guidelines. Results suggest that risk factors are often not mentioned during the sentencing hearings and that when they are, they rarely appear to influence judicial decisions. In particular, no mention of the term psychopathy or of expert testimony related to risk or of the names of scientifically validated instruments for assessing violence risk was found in all transcripts reviewed. Implications of these results for professional training and improvement in judicial sentencing are discussed

Evaluating Mobile Learning: Reflections on Current Practice

The field of mobile learning is at present characterised by a proliferation of pilots and trials that allow mobile technologies to be tested out in a variety of learning contexts. The sustained deployment of mobile learning will depend on the quality of these pilots and trials, which includes evaluation methodology and reporting. The paper examines current evaluation practice, based on evidence drawn from conference publications, published case studies, and other accounts from the literature. The authors also draw on their work in collecting case studies of mobile learning from a range of recent projects. Issues deserving examination include the apparent objectives of the pilots or trials, the nature of the evaluations, instruments and techniques used, and the analysis and presentation of findings. The paper reflects on the quality of evaluation in mobile learning pilots and trials, in the broader context of evolving practices in the evaluation of educational technologies

Designed and user-generated activity in the mobile age

The paper addresses the question of how to design for learning taking place on mobile and wireless devices. The authors argue that learning activity designers need to consider the characteristics of mobile learning; at the same time, it is vital to realise that learners are already creating mobile learning experiences for themselves. Profound changes in computer usage brought about by social networking and user-generated content are challenging the idea that educators are in charge of designing learning. The authors make a distinction between designed activity, carefully crafted in advance, and user-generated activity arising from learners’ own spontaneous requirements. The paper illustrates what each approach has to offer and it draws out what they have in common, the opportunities and constraints they represent. The paper concludes that user-generated mobile activity will not replace designed activity but it will influence the ways in which designed activity develops

The evaluation of next generation learning technologies: the case of mobile learning

Mobile learning is at a leading edge of learning technologies and is at present characterised by pilots and trials that allow mobile technologies to be tested in a variety of learning contexts. The sustained deployment of mobile learning will depend on these pilots and trials, especially their evaluation methodology and reporting. The paper examines a sample of current evaluation practice, based on evidence drawn from conference proceedings, published case studies, and other accounts from the literature and draws on the authors' work in collecting case studies of mobile learning from a range of recent projects. The issues discussed include the apparent objectives of the documented pilots or trials, the nature of the evaluations, instruments and techniques used, and the presentation of findings. The paper reflects on the quality of evaluation in mobile learning pilots and trials, in the broader context of evolving practices in the evaluation of educational technologies

Mobile Learning Research: The Focus for Policy-Makers

Mobile learning has moved in the last decade from being a small, scattered research interest to being viewed by many international agencies as a way of delivering their humanitarian missions to the developing contexts of the global South. This paper explores and documents fundamental concepts and concerns that characterize or perhaps jeopardise the relationships between the ‘old’ research communities and ‘new’ policy maker communities working to improve the nature and scope of learning in the developing contexts of the global South using personal mobile digital technologies. As becomes apparent, these concepts and concerns are relevant and interesting across a broader range of domains, touching perhaps under-privilege and access to education and technology in both the global North and the global South, the uses of technology to extend, enhance and transform learning and the various pressures and determinants of policy-making and of the public funding of research

Learning with Mobiles in the Digital Age

Personal mobile devices are central to the current digital age, and will soon be pervasive and ubiquitous, and unremarkable in most of the world’s societies and cultures. They are central to the educational futures for the digital age, to both in theory and practice. They are, however, not straightforward. Whilst the relationships of these technologies to formal education and its professions and institutions, conceptualised as ‘mobile learning’, seemed straightforward, it has also become increasingly marginal and irrelevant whilst the relationship between mobile devices and society outside formal education is increasingly problematising the nature, role and purpose of both education and learning. This article explores this tension; it characterises and conceptualises it in terms of competing paradigms.Published onlin