The Benefits And Challenges Of Mobile Learning For Child Education

The Benefits And Challenges Of Mobile Learning For Child Education

General Word:

Our review of the literature on mobile learning has revealed three main benefits, compared with the more sedentary PC-based learning. 

First, using mobile devices in the wild can be highly motivating, increasing children’s engagement with their learning. This is especially so when the physical activity involves an element of the unknown, where children have to discover information to progress the task through their own physical actions. 

Second, being mobile while learning can encourage children to participate more, facilitating a diversity of key social and cognitive processes. 

Third, it offers quite different forms of information flow (ways and means of accessing information) and information management (ways of storing, recording, and reusing information) compared with the conventional use of PCs, enabling children to better integrate their ideas and knowledge with ongoing physical activities (Rogers and Price, 2008). 

 

Description:

We have also identified three main challenges in using mobile technologies  to augment learning: first, avoiding information overload; second, preventing children from becoming too distracted by their mobile devices; and third,  constraining the design of the learning experience so that children do not work largely by themselves, if the desired goal is for them to collaborate. Let’s consider how these factors can inform the design of mobile learning activities. Many mobile learning experiences are well suited to supporting active exploratory activities in which children can make their own discoveries about a concept being learned. 

Physical exercise activities can be designed to allow children to explore the effect of their actions on different abstract representations, to support conceptual understanding. Participatory simulations can be designed to enable children to act out individual roles and see the effects of their physical actions in relation to other children’s actions on a combined digital display. Augmented field trips can be designed to enable children to collect data from the environment and view it as part of a larger scientific pattern. Content creation activities can be designed to be more meaningful, enabling children to construct richer and more complex narratives.

 Common to these mobile learning activities is switching between the specific experiences of an activity and a global view of it. One of the potential benefits of moving between different levels is the opportunities it affords to do more “joined-up thinking.” By this we mean making connections among observations, ideas, previous knowledge and learninggamesforkids. For example, augmented field trips enable children to connect contextually relevant information accessed via a mobile device with their partially formed educational children’s websites, ideas and understandings. Through integrating the accessed digital information with their observations, they can begin to make generalizations from them. Observations made in the environment can also be closely combined with information accessed on a mobile device in the same location and time. 

This means that children do not have to “hold back” from pursuing further thinking or inquiry until they have returned to the classroom, where they can look something up (but where they often forget what they have noted in the field) and instead can progress with their reasoning and thinking while still in situ. If certain kinds of relevant information are brought to the center of children’s attention at critical moments, they can use it to formulate inquiries. In addition, multiple pieces of data can be integrated, tracked over time, analyzed, and used as a basis from which to reason about further incoming data. Data can also be automatically collected, logged, aggregated, and stored in ways that can be made reaccessible to child education, either in that setting or subsequently in a different one.

Being able to revisit such data, especially since it has been personally collected, can aid understanding of the “difficult stuff” (Scaife and Rogers, 1998); for example, data points that are aggregated and transformed into abstractions, such as information visualizations and trend graphs, become more accessible and meaningful when analyzed if children have had some personal involvement in their creation. It is important to design mobile learning experiences so that they are not too bewildering or overly complex. In particular, children could find it difficult to switch between digital content and the physical world in the ways anticipated by the designers.

 

 For example, they might focus their attention on the mobile device at the expense of what is happening around them. Teachers or facilitators could also face difficulties when confronted by the increase in number of choices they have to make—for example, how to manage the interplay between physical and digital interactions and how much control or guidance to exert over the children’s activities as they explore a physical space. Guidance by teachers or facilitators, together with roles for the children and structure in the preschool activities, are key components. The participatory simulations would end in chaos if it were not for the instructors’ and designers’ careful orchestration of the learning activities fun educational activities. 

The same is true for physical exercise games: “Without the constant guidance of a teacher, students […] easily become distracted, confused, or frustrated” (Scarlatos, 2006). More generally, the extent to which devices are shared raises the question of what is an optimal number of mobile devices to distribute among a group of children. In the Ambient Wood project, pairs of children shared devices, resulting in the children communicating their findings with each other. Now that the price of mobile phones is much lower, it is possible for every child to have one and hence all be able to interact with a particular mobile learning application. However, this approach might be counterproductive because it would mean that children no longer need to share or request information from each other.

 An alternative strategy is to design the learning activity to be explicitly structured so that each student takes on a specific role, requiring them to relay certain kinds of information or messages to others at certain times. The role of remote (and even agent) facilitators could also be made more prescriptive, where facilitators provide cues, prompts, and feedback when it is deemed that the students need a particular kind of support. 

Conclusion:

It remains to be seen, however, whether providing more or less structure in the learning activity and allotting one mobile device per child result in enhanced collaborative interactions. In sum, mobile learning offers new possibilities for transforming learning that can extend the way children understand their world and how they communicate this understanding, and can reveal how this understanding relcal can equip them with the ability to cope with an increasingly changing world. Mobility should not only be about learning “on the go” or “anytime, anyplace” but about providing opportunities for making important connections or more “joined-up learning.”

You Also Like: Mobile Phones To Deliver Education To Children In Developing Countries