On the Role of Mobile Scaffolding in Learning

The widespread use of mobile devices, particularly by young people, offers new and exciting possibilities for learning. The mobility and pervasiveness factors inherent to mobile technologies allow learning at any time and in any place. This has led to some new developments in educational pedagogy based on the affordances that mobile technology brings to learning. “Mobile scaffolding” is a new research area which brings together the fields of traditional pedagogy with mobile learning. In mobile scaffolding the learner is provided with assistance and support by means of communication through their mobile devices with a More Knowledgeable Other (MKO). The purpose of this paper is two-fold: firstly to address the question of whether the ubiquitous availability of scaffolding significantly improves the learning and secondly to identify and characterise usage patterns of learners in mobile settings and secondly to compare the effectiveness of different types of scaffolding (none, scaffolding via email, scaffolding via mobile)