Making the Most of Informal and Situated Learning Opportunities through Mobile Learning

Abstract

Mobility and networking are two important emerging issues that affect educational practices nowadays. Learners and teachers are continuously involved in ubiquitous relationships with other people on the Internet, swapping information and sharing knowledge and skills. However, in the Mobile Learning area, a great deal of emphasis has been placed on mobile technologies and the transfer of content, whereas the potential to support community building processes and collaboration through their integration within social networks has tended to be underemphasized. With the advent of Mobile Learning, a certain growth in its practice and research has been activated by technological innovation and progress. Mobile technologies offer potentiality for the exploitation of contextual learning and have unbound learners and technologies out of the limitation of classrooms at the time that enhance collaborative processes in informal contexts. The emergence of mobile gadgets has democratized the access to technology, changed the concept of user-generated content, and allowed learners and technologies to experiment with technologies outside the classroom, although it has posed challenges to educational stakeholders on how to match the nature of their practice for both life and learning with those traits that educators would like to heighten.