Mobile Technologies in Education - Ubiquitous Scaffolding and Support for Undergraduate Students

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 support for learning at any time and in any place. A common problem among young undergraduate students is that many are disinterested in learning. Often very little private study is done inside or outside of the classroom. This paper presents the findings of two research studies that show the affinity of young undergraduate students with their mobile devices, their openness to the possibility of using their mobile devices for educational purposes, their assessment of a mobile field study and their expectations of any effective future m-learning pedagogy. In addition an experimental design is proposed that facilitates the comparison of “mobile scaffolding” with other scaffolding techniques. Mobile scaffolding is a new research area which brings together the fields of traditional pedagogy with mobile learning