It’s 12:30 PM and your lunch period is (finally) here. Seizing your half hour to chat with friends, you scarf down three slices of cafeteria pizza in rapid succession. All-too-quickly, the bell rings and you’re off to science class, reinvigorated. Fifteen minutes in, though, as you settle in your seat, the pizza hits your gut and you hit a familiar post-lunch slump. Your mind is fuzzy and your chances of learning from this lecture on mitosis are looking less and less likely. You daydream about taking a field trip, playing games with your friends online, or working on fixing up the car with your Dad. You fall further behind in the lecture, but your teacher continues on, unaware.

Such moments, perhaps familiar from childhood, suggest an important truth: the mind is situated in and inextricably linked to a moving, perceiving, social body. This link has powerful implications for teaching and learning, as well as the tools we use to support the two. The mind-body-culture connection may seem obvious from our 21st century vantage point, but for much of the last century the education system in the United States operated under a different set of assumptions. One-directional lectures to students sitting in isolation targeted the mind as a discrete information-processing system. Progressing from this industrial-cognitivst pedagogical approach, continued research and analysis in the learning sciences have led to today’s socioconstructivism: a model that more effectively explains and responds to the complex, intertwined roles that the personal, the social, and the cultural play in the process of knowledge building.

The Places: Seamless Learning Across Contexts 

When we think about the performance of the embodied mind, the places in which it operates become important variables. The mind and the body may spend a slice of each day in formal learning – in class, on campus, at a workplace training session – but are otherwise occupied in transit, in communication, at work, at play, at rest. Each of these contexts offers unique performance challenges and opportunities for learning. Tools that can respond to our changing needs as social and physical agents operating across such diverse learning spaces are powerful partners indeed.

It is little surprise then that mobile devices have taken up long-term leases in our pockets. The unique physical characteristics of mobiles – their small size and wireless connectivity in particular – make them especially well suited to accompany us across a continuum of learning contexts as presented by Sharples: from curriculum-based learning in a fixed setting to a more informal, personal, and mobile variety (Sharples, p. 3).

The Spaces: Mobiles and the Movements They Afford

Just as the places of learning become important when we consider the embodied mind, so too do the spaces (and the movements they afford). Consider how students sitting in desks are largely restricted to individual inquiry. Likewise, learners parked behind desktop computers have limited opportunities for face-to-face collaboration with their peers. If we subscribe to the socioconstructivist model, which argues that deep inquiry and collaborative work are key components of knowledge building, the traditional spatial arrangement of many classrooms is problematic.

Here, too, the portability of pocket-sized mobile devices is a powerful affordance. Greater freedom in movement for both the learner and the teacher can in turn permit greater opportunities for perception, collaboration, and production. As Pea and Moldanado discuss, students working in small groups can easily cluster and communicate while sharing information through their small mobile screens. In turn, inter-device connectivity gives teachers a comprehensive, birds-eye view of learner progress, allowing them to “conduct” classes flexibly and responsively (Pea and Moldanado, p. 429).

The Faces: Who Is Left Behind?

These compelling features, among others discussed by Pea and Moldanado, have made networked mobile devices increasingly popular across all levels of the American education system and in American society more broadly. As Moore’s Law, Metcalfe’s Law, and Reed’s Law combine to make mobile devices ever more affordable and powerful, smartphones in particular inch annually towards uniform adoption (from 35% of American adults in 2011 to 64% in 2015 as reported by the Pew Research Center).

Despite these reported increases in ownership, gaps of access to digital media in the home remain a substantial driver of inequality in U.S. society – one that has significant implications for students’ use of and outcomes with technologies for learning. Warschauer and Matuchniak offer a series of striking insights that remind us of the outsized role that social and cultural factors play in an individual’s learning process. Even as digital devices in school become more prevalent, students with limited access to such tools at home have comparatively less experience with and support for using technology for learning. Further, Warschauer has found that teachers in low SES schools in general demonstrate less experience with, confidence in, and motivation to use technology to promote “deep constructivism” and 21st century literacy skills rather than more rote, drill-based applications (Warschauer and Maldonado, p. 199).

The evidence presented in Warschauer and Matuchniak’s analysis serves as a cautionary counter-balance to the enthusiasm of Pea and Moldonado and Sharples’ texts. It’s clear that the features and functionalities of mobile devices have great potential to support the performance of administrators, the praxis of teachers, and the “deep understanding” of learners. At their best, mobile phones can act as ubiquitous mediators between what Don Norman in “The Design of Everyday Things” calls “knowledge in the head” and “knowledge in the world” (Norman, p. 74). Still, researchers, educators, and community activists have much work to do. Knowing the stakes, we must press forward to ensure that all students have the access, support, and guidance needed to use these powerful devices to their fullest potential across all of the spaces and places they share.

Sources:

Heimlich, R. (2011, July 19). Own a Smartphone. Retrieved from http://www.pewresearch.org/daily-number/own-a-smartphone/

Norman, D. (2013). The design of everyday things. Philadelphia, PA: Basic Books.

Pea, R. D., & Maldonado, H. (2006). WILD for learning: Interacting through new computing devices anytime, anywhere. In K. Sawyer (Ed.), Cambridge University Handbook of the Learning Sciences (Chapter 25). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Sharples, M. (2013). Mobile learning: research, practice and challenges. Distance Education in China, 3(5), 5-11.

Smith, A. (2015, April 01). U.S. Smartphone Use in 2015. Retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/04/01/us-smartphone-use-in-2015/

Warschauer, M., & Matuchniak, T. (2010). New technology and digital worlds: Analyzing evidence of equity in access, use, and outcomes. Review of Research in Education, 34(1), 179-225.