This is a continuation of my short series of blog posts on mobile learning. In previous posts I have argued that mobile learning is increasingly popular as an informal activity, and that personalisation of learning is an important characteristic of smart phone use. We are a now mobile, itinerant society where tethered computing is becoming increasingly anachronistic.

I read a blog post recently called 12 Principles of Mobile Learning, which gave a useful, brief overview of  12 key characteristics of learning on the move using smart phones. Yesterday in Mobile learning and personal metrics I tried to expand on some of the principles mentioned in the article. Here are two more:

"With asynchronous access to content, peers, and experts comes the potential for self-actuation. Here, learners plan topic, sequence, audience, and application via facilitation of teachers who now act as experts of resource and assessment."

Self actuation is all about having control over your own learning. It is about personal agency. A time is coming when people will no longer be told what to learn, when to learn it, and in what environment. Now, and in the future, we can expect that time, place and pace will no longer be prescribed. Learning of the future will have a 'just for me' and 'just enough' capability, relying on each learner's access to personal mobile devices. Workplace learning will never be the same again.

Another extract from the post suggests an agility and flexibility of learning that can be achieved through the use of mobile devices:

"With mobility comes diversity. As learning environments change constantly, that fluidity becomes a norm that provides a stream of new ideas, unexpected challenges, and constant opportunities for revision and application of thinking. Audiences are diverse, as are the environments data is being gleaned from and delivered to."

Diversity is clearly one of the most important attributes of mobile learning. One size does not fit all, and everyone has different expectations for their learning. Adaptability too, is an important affordance learners demand, and mobile devices can provide the impetus for this. Mobile devices also have a similar provisionality to their bigger cousins, the laptop and desktop computers. Provisionality is the state of being temporary, non-permanent. Things can be recorded, captured or written, and then deleted, repurposed, added to, adapted or shared in a variety of formats. This is an important aspect of personal mobile devices, because life is never straight forward and human thought processes are rarely linear. As a tool that can be used to extend and enhance the capabilities of the human mind, mobile devices can offer users endless possibilities and alternatives. Learning on the move has never been richer or more diverse.

Photo by Derek Olsen


Self actuated mobile learning by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.