CHAPTER TWO
LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 HISTORY OF M-LEARNING
Mobile learning had some fascinating pioneering work in the early 1970’s by Xerox, the photocopier company, who set up a new group to develop what they called the Dynabook, a personal dynamic medium that was about the size and shape of a book. It’s niche was that anyone could use it and it had high definition simulations and material from around the world, which forty years ago was an amazing concept. Unfortunately the technology couldn’t keep up with it then.
It was around the early 2000’s that practical mobile learning really started up with the introduction of tablet computers. An early project was started at Birmingham University, surrounding the idea that people should have access to learning whenever and wherever they needed it.
2.1.1 MOBILE LEARNING TIMELINE
The mobile learning timeline describes the evolution of mobile learning through a series of significant ‘firsts’. The events on the timeline are of various kinds; notable research projects, the establishment of relevant journals and conference series, and some technology related innovations. In each case, an attempt has been made to identify the first occurrence of each type of mobile learning project, forum or application. This has two main purposes. First, it allows the reader to see the roots of mobile learning research, and to appreciate its history. Second, it reveals some important themes in the field that are explored in more detail in the mind map described later in this article. The timeline was partially crowd sourced by seeking contributions and debate among members of the International Association for Mobile Learning via their shared mailing list. The first two items on the timeline are separated by several years from the main body of activity. The first of these is Alan Kay’s visionary Dynabook, a vision for future mobile learning, which laid out many of the affordances for a mobile learning device that we now take for granted (Kay, 1972.) However, it was many years before anything like Kay’s vision could be realized in a practical way. The first attempt to use a small device for learning seems to be the use of Micro writers in Infant Schools (High & Fox, 1984). Of course these simple word processing devices were very primitive compared to the concept of the Dynabook, and classifying them as mobile learning might be stretching a point. Nevertheless they were small semi-portable devices used to encourage autonomous and collaborative learning, so that within the technical limitations of the devices, this project was pioneering in some of the concepts that were to prove central to mobile learning. The first attempt to take mobile learning out of the classroom, to make it truly mobile, appears to have been the Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow (ACOT) project in 1991, including the first use of mobile devices for field trips (Grant,1993),
which has since become a core context for mobile learning. 1993 saw the Pupils’ Learning and Access to Information Technology (PLAIT) project, which was probably the first project to use truly portable (though not really mobile) computers in the classroom (Gardner et al., 1994.) If nothing else, this project first raised the seemingly endless debates about how mobile learning might or might not impact on learning performance and learner attitude.
While early field-based projects used devices that might be better described as portable rather than mobile, the first project to use truly mobile devices for learning in the field was probably the Cornell Plantations projects in 1997, which utilized the (then new) Windows mobile devices (Rieger & Gay, 1997.) At around the same time, the indoor equivalent of the field trip, the museum or gallery the increasing move away from standalone mobile learning tools deployed on disconnected PDAs to connected tools, utilizing the content and collaboration opportunities of wireless mobile devices. 2002 was a very significant year in the development of mobile learning. As technology developed, more ambitious forms of mobile learning became possible with ambient, pervasive and ubiquitous technologies. Perhaps the pioneers of this type of mobile learning were the related Hunting of the Snark and Ambient Wood projects, explorations in contextual learning through ambient devices that pushed the boundaries of mobile learning in outdoor environments (Price et al., 2003, Harris et al, 2004). In a similar vein, the first augmented reality location based mobile learning game, Environmental detectives, was developed (Klopfer, Squire & Jenkins, 2002.) The first authored book on mobile learning appeared in 2002, and interestingly was based not on classroom learning but on work-based learning, reflecting a quick uptake in the United States of mobile technology by employers who saw the potential for mobile learning in a work-based training context (Gayeski, 2002). 2002 also saw the beginning of the first major mobile learning projects to be supported by European funding. The M-Learning Project was funded by the European Fifth Framework programme to help disaffected learners aged 16 to 24, while the more ambitious Mobilearn Project was a worldwide European-led project exploring context-sensitive approaches to informal, problem- based and workplace learning. Further major events in 2002 were the first meetings of two conference series that have continued to act as significant forums for the research community. The First IEEE International Workshop on Wireless and Mobile Technologies in Education (WMTE) took place at Växjö University in Sweden, while the first World Conference on Mobile and Contextual Learning (mLearn) was held at the University of Birmingham, UK, though it was initially called the European Workshop on Mobile and Contextual Learning. mLearn is the longest continuously running international conference series on mobile learning. A further conference ‘first’ took place in 2005, with the IADIS Mobile Learning conference series being inaugurated in Malta. This conference series differed from its predecessors in that it remains focused on European venues. 2005 also saw the publication of the first edited book on mobile learning (Kukulska-Hulme & Traxler, 2005.) The Advanced Mobile and Ubiquitous Learning Environments for Teachers and Students (AMULETS) project in 2006 might also be seen as innovative in its blending of mobile device use in the field with integral classroom activities, bringing together the two contexts of mobile learning (in the classroom or in the field) that had been previously explored separately.
