Playing and Learning Across Locations: : Indentifying Factors for the Design of Collaborative Mobile Learning

The research presented in this thesis investigates the design challenges associated with the development and use of mobile applications and tools for supporting collaboration in educational activities. These technologies provide new opportunities to promote and enhance collaboration by engaging learners in a variety of activities across different places and contexts. A basic challenge is to identify how to design and deploy mobile tools and services that could be used to support collaboration in different kinds of settings. There is a need to investigate how to design collaborative learning processes and to support flexible educational activities that take advantage of mobility. The main research question that I focus on is the identification of factors that influence the design of mobile collaborative learning. The theoretical foundations that guide my work rely on the concepts behind computer supported collaborative learning and design-based research. These ideas are presented at the beginning of this thesis and provide the basis for developing an initial framework for understanding mobile collaboration. The empirical results from three different projects conducted as part of my efforts at the Center for Learning and Knowledge Technologies at Växjö University are presented and analyzed. These results are based on a collection of papers that have been published in two refereed international conference proceedings, a journal paper, and a book chapter. The educational activities and technological support have been developed in accordance with a grounded theoretical framework. The thesis ends by discussing those factors, which have been identified as having a significant influence when it comes to the design and support of mobile collaborative learning. The findings presented in this thesis indicate that mobility changes the contexts of learning and modes of collaboration, requiring different design approaches than those used in traditional system development to support teaching and learning. The major conclusion of these efforts is that the learners’ creations, actions, sharing of experiences and reflections are key factors to consider when designing mobile collaborative activities in learning. The results additionally point to the benefit of directly involving the learners in the design process by connecting them to the iterative cycles of interaction design and research