Frances Bell’s Blog

Agnes Kukulska-Hulme introduced the symposium by using images to explore the tensions between personal space and social space in mobile learning, showing how people seek out spaces that suit them and what they are doing, amenable contexts for working or learning.� Across the world, different technologies are offered and positioned to suit cultural contexts.� People may work alone or socially, virtually and/or physically co-present.� Agnes described the yellow arrow system where people tell location-related stories that can be shared with others simply through mobile phones (SMS).� Buying coffee in an Internet caf� may provide the excuse to linger, and menu choices may increase that motivation.� Environments may be traditional or futuristic, reflect or reject surrounding culture.

Tom Boyle addressed the individual perspective – the personal net.� He used the example of an individual wanting to find out about waterfowl in a park near home.� A mobile learning device is a personal configurable device, freed from extraneous social structures.� It offers freedom to the learner but demands disciplines.

John Cook spoke about social space as hyper (as in linked) local (as in location) m-learning – a new kind of city in which you’re never out of touch with other friends and learners, and never out of learning choices ( see July Wired).� In the City Centre, you can photo the ‘real world’, get information about buildings around you using Google streetview mashups, communicate with friends through Facebook.

The presentation part concluded with John Traxler, looking back to requirements gathering approaches from earlier.� How can we get people to imagine the future?� People tend to create based on what they already know – it can be difficult to make a leap to the inconceivable.� We need to plan for change and expect serendipity, since innovations are often used in different ways from first envisaged� e.g Teflon, SMS.

Participants then worked in small groups and came up with some interesting ideas about how city spaces could be created and used.

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