Personal Mobile Cloud Computing Affordances for Higher Education

Abstract

Within the cloud computing ecosystem and its different permutations, there exists personal mobile cloud computing. The latter has not been covered and investigated much in relation to its affordances for higher education (HE), especially in South Africa. Thus, this chapter argues that personal mobile cloud computing can offer HE significant educational affordances in the form of cloud computing value chain. It does so by providing one South African example entailing a two-project study in the HE sector in which the cloud affordances of Twitter and Facebook were leveraged for educational purposes. Regarding Twitter, one of its affordances is that it was exploited as a cloud based virtual blackboard for a course content, thereby facilitating micro-teaching and micro-learning. Concerning Facebook, one of its affordances is that it served as a cloud based mobile computing environment in which a course-specific writing process was mounted by the instructor and participants. A collective affordance for both Twitter and Facebook was both consumerization and BYOD approaches to teaching and learning.