Mobile learning - as we understand it - is not about delivering content to mobile devices but, instead, about the processes of coming to know and being able to operate successfully in, and across, new and ever changing contexts and learning spaces. And, it is about understanding and knowing how to utilise our everyday life-worlds as learning spaces. Therefore, in case it needs to be stated explicitly, for us mobile learning is not primarily about technology.
We find the definition by Sharples, Taylor and Vavoula (2007, p. 225) attractive, who view mobile learning as “the processes of coming to know through conversations across multiple contexts among people and personal interactive technologies”. However, we prefer to think of the processes of ‘coming to know’ to be located more broadly within communication which, we feel, rather thanfocusing more narrowly on the interpersonal, better captures the fact that meaning-making is bound up in economic, socio-cultural, technological and/or infrastructural systems including the mass media and technological networks/infrastructure.
Sharples, M., Taylor, J. and Vavoula, G. (2007) 'Theory of learning for the mobile age.' In Andrews, R., & Haythornthwaite, C. (Eds.) The SAGE Handbook of E-learning Research. London: Sage, pp. 221-47