Mobile practices have become integrated into everyday life through organized social activities and relationships. While mobile technologies can be seen as just objects, when adopted into human practices they take on relational meanings. Mobile devices are subtly shaping social interactions and maintaining networks of communication. In educational contexts, mobiles offer opportunities for new forms of learning but also challenges around distraction and equitable access. Schools must consider how to teach mobile literacy skills to avoid widening digital divides.

1. Mobile practices in everyday life:
opportunities and challenges for
learning
Guy Merchant
Sheffield Hallam University

2. When they first developed computers, they didn’t
catch on because the screens were blank....

4. Perspective 1
Were technologies merely objects totally
divorced from human praxis, they would be so
much 'junk' lying about. Once taken into
praxis one can speak not of technologies 'in
themselves', but as the active relational pair,
human-technology.
(Ihde, 1993:34)

5. Perspective 2
• Mobile practices have become part of
‘organized nexuses of activity’ everyday
‘doings’ and ‘sayings’ (Shatzki, 2001)
• the mobile phone is ‘subtly insinuating itself
into the capillaries of everyday life’ (Gergen,
2002:103).

7. What is it?
• an over-priced toy?
• an intelligent machine?
• a fashion accessory?
• the next step in convergence technology?
• a totem of consumersim?
• a basic necessity for 21st century living?

8. the mobile
market (Ofcom 2011)
•64% of UK sales are
smartphones
•30% of mobile internet
users are under 25
•16-24s: 52% of media
activity is simultaneous
•text-based
communication is the most
popular media activity in
the daytime
•12-15s: 50% of those with
smartphones use them for
social networking

9. Layered networks
‘We may imagine here that dwelling about us at
all times are small communities that are unseen
and unidentifiable. However, as we stroll the
thoroughfare or sip coffee in a café their presence
is made constantly known to us. Each mobile
phone *….+ is a sign of a significant nucleus,
stretching in all directions, amorphous and
protean.’
(Gergen, 2003: 105)

10. We use mobiles
• maintaining lightweight contact with friends
and family members
• casual entertainment (watching and sharing
short movies, photo-albums and playlists)
• arranging both formal and informal meetings,
navigation and micro-co-ordination
• capturing objects and events (usually as
still/moving images)
• checking web-based information

11. Classroom ecologies
possibilities for different kinds of learning
relationship, different kinds of interaction,
different forms and purposes of communication
BUT
institutions are patterned by established
relationships, mediated by sets of accepted
schooled practices and instructional routines,
which in their turn are powerfully structured by
curriculum discourses

13. The reaction!
Yes, Paul it is an experiment; tinker enough with this
country's children's education and you end up with
morons; exactly what the lefties want! How better to
destroy this country than by allowing total anarchy in
the classroom? The result; conveyor-belt system of
non-educated , complaint morons who will (on leaving
school )want to spend a life time sitting at home
playing computer games and texting their mates, who
will, if they can be bothered to at all, almost certainly
vote Labour- for more of the same!!!
- Anon, Haywards Heath, W.Sussex., 14/10/2009 20:57’

14. The evidence against?
‘technology obsession hinders spelling skills,
implicitly encourages plagiarism, and disrupts
classroom learning.’
(Daily Mail, 14/10/09)

15. 3 possibilities
1. Understanding information access
2. Understanding hyperconnectivity
3. Understanding the new sense of space
_________________________________________________________
Mobile literacy ‘ ...how to use these technologies effectively
to ensure they end up on the right side of the digital divide:
the side that knows how to use social media...’
(Parry, 2011)

16. 3 concerns
1. is the fact that we can do these things
sufficient justification - what advantages do
they confer?
2. how do teachers manage the potential levels
of distraction?
3. which students have devices that are
sufficiently nimble, who owns them, and who
pays for them ?

18. Campsmount
• After the fire: no student contact numbers or
addresses, no coursework, no VLE....no servers
• Within 24 hrs a Wordpress blog, Twitter feed,
Facebook group (1,500 members), and a
YouTube video press release (3,000 views)
• Working with donated laptops, iPod touches
• Spurred on to extensive blogging, QR codes,
Soundcloud, Coveritlive etc

19. Some uses
• Photographing notes, experiments, activities
(the things you can’t take away)
• Video records of projects or products being
tested
• Video, voice and image responses to learning
tasks
• Mobile desk referencing
• Organising learning (timetables, timelines etc)

20. Mapping practices
• photographing notes, • capturing objects and
experiments, activities events
• mobile desk referencing • checking web-information
• video records of projects or • casual entertainment (short
products being tested movies, photo-albums etc)
• video, voice, image • maintaining lightweight
responses to learning tasks contact
• organising learning • arranging meetings,
navigation and micro-co-
ordination

21. think its funny every one that eva went to campsmout wished it
would burn down and it did am sad to see it go but am all well
so
amused i had some gd memorys in that place thats the place that
made me who i am and i thank that place 4 that but the fucking
irony ey hahahahhahahahahahhahahahahaha-hahahahhahahaha

22. Some questions
• Mobiles can clearly help in organising learning
but how are they advantageous in learning?
• What (and whose)devices are most
appropriate in different learning contexts
(smartphone, iPod touch, tablet)?
• What should we be teaching about mobile
social networking?

23. Mobile literacy
‘ ...teach them how to use these technologies
effectively to ensure they end up on the right
side of the digital divide: the side that knows
how to use social media to band together.’
(Parry, 2011)

24. In conclusion
• What practices are legitimate/legitimated in
learning contexts?
• What constitutes ‘advantageous practice’?