UNICEF workshop on Mobile Learning in South Africa, with Department of Basic Education

1. Future trends in mobile
learning
John Traxler
16h15 on 7 August 2017

2. Some Fundamental Truths and Tensions
that Drive Future Trends

3. The transition in the global mobile technology environment
from
A fragile, institutional, costly, scarce technology, needing theories, experts,
institutions and subsidies, working inside ‘education’
to
A robust, individual, social, pervasive, cheap, ubiquitous technology , needing no
theories (apparently), experts, subsidies and institutions, in which ‘education’ is
largely absent

4. There is a tension between,
‘mobile learning’, an extension of e-learning, delivered and controlled by
the established professions and institutions of formal education;
teachers teach learners
and
‘learning with mobiles’, individuals and cultures able to produce, share,
discuss, store, transform ideas, information, identities, communities and
opinions; everyone teaches everyone else
(cf edtech vs technology for education)

5. Resources for learning with mobiles
(communities, contacts, content)
Were
Scarce - we had to create them and could control them
Now
Ubiquitous - everyone creates them; no-one can control them

6. Institutions and governments promote ‘open’
but
People and communities prefer ‘free’

7. There is a tension between different aspects of learning and mobiles,
The global knowledge economy and international banking; mobile digital
technologies embodying the language, values and resources of the Anglophone
global North; the international imperatives to succeed, scale, transfer, sustain;
the mainstream and the established
and
Minority, marginal and nomadic languages, livelihoods, peoples and cultures;
diversity and change; the periphery and subsistence; the subversive and
counter-cultural

8. Technology trends: smarter, faster, cheaper, profitable
Social trends: fashion, appropriation, subversion; more complex digital
divides
Economic trends: ‘hollowing of the labour market”
Education trends: BYOD, curation, digital literacy, heutagogy, MOOC,
learner analytics … challenging the role of teachers, designers,
librarians, the nature of the curriculum

9. Technological trends are driven by market forces (sometimes by much, much
weaker regulatory forces).
Educational technology is mostly parasitic
previously on corporate digital technology
now on social and personal digital technology
Except for dedicated educational technology with
no economies of scale
no real-world credibility

10. Thanks