Mobile Learning, Digital Literacies, Information Habitus and At-Risk Social Groups

Abstract

Certain potentials of mobile devices seem predestined to connect those distanced from education with learning in the widest sense. To use these potentials requires a disposition of these ‘learners-to-be’ as able to assume responsibility for their learning. Characteristics of that disposition are identified, with requisite concepts: the information habitus; a pedagogy of social inclusion; in the frame of New Literacy Studies. The central element in the requisite information habitus is the action by an individual to get information via their own agency (Holschuld) contrasted with a reliance on others to bring information to them (Bringschuld). The role of institutional sites of learning are discussed, both for those categorized as ‘at risk’ and for the wider, new task of ‘social learning’, in which all come to see themselves as learners able to shape contexts for learning requisite to their needs.