The Socio-Cultural Ecological Approach to Mobile

Learning: An Overview

Norbert Pachler


This chapter provides an overview of the conceptual and theoretical work of the
London Mobile Learning Group (LMLG; www.londonmobilelearning.net),
housed at the Centre for Excellence in Work-based Learning for Educational
Professionals (www.wlecentre.ac.uk) during 2007-2009. The LMLG comprises
an international, interdisciplinary group of researchers from the fields of educa-
tional, media and cultural studies, social semiotics and educational technology
who have been working together on a conceptual and theoretical frame for mo-
bile learning. For a much more detailed discussion of the issues covered here,
please see Pachler, Bachmair and Cook (2009), Kress and Pachler (2007) and
Pachler, Cook and Bachmair (forthcoming).
Until now, schools have mostly not considered mobile devices and atten-
dant artefacts as relevant cultural resources seriously for teaching and learning.
Why, we ask, do schools, as key agents of institutionalized teaching and learn-
ing, not take up these new resources? We believe that there are two main rea-
sons: the first derives from the traditional perspectives of schools towards the
media of everyday life, in which media are viewed as objects of enquiry and the
educational aim is for students to obtain critical (media) literacy. The second
results from the contrast between a disappearing world of discrete, bounded and
clearly framed media compared with the complex of modes inherent in the
emerging resources. Discrete media were viewed either as tools for learning or as
tools for teaching. Their specific representational features – the still photo, the
moving image etc. – defined their curricular ‘media’ function for learning and
teaching. Curricular application followed representational affordances. Media
convergence facilitated by, and characteristic of the web and its flexible plat-
forms and services are far more difficult to control and hence to integrate or to
subsume into the purposes of a traditional curriculum.


Linking mobility, learning and ecology

From our perspective on the relationship between mobile devices and learning,
we agree with Wali, Winters and Oliver (2008), who foreground the importance
154 Norbert Pachler

of location and context. With Gay, Rieger and Bennington (2002) we consider
one of the defining characteristics of learning with mobile devices to be the mov-
ing of “computational power to the site in which the user is engaged” (p. 511) as
well as the context-awareness of the devices and augmented physical spaces.
This, in our view, opens up new possibilities for the relationship between learn-
ing in and across formal and informal contexts, between the classroom and other
sites of learning.
Rather than subverting ‘direct experience’ and communion, mobile devices
have the potential to move the learning experience from the artificial confines of
the classroom and out to more naturalistic field settings. This is in sharp contrast
with traditional schooling practices, in which what is being taught is abstracted
from its naturalistic (ecological) space where it has real function with the world
and, instead, is taught to learners in a classroom context, ‘where the school-
assigned meanings become the goal – complex problems are solved to get a good
grade, completed for the purpose of satisfying a teacher or parent, not for the
functional purposes for which these practices initially merged as important.’
(Barab 2002, p. 535)
Barab coins the term ‘content-culture incongruity’ (p. 353) for school-based
activity driven by pedagogic, rather than student need. This is also one of our
key concerns. Barab finds the notion of an ‘ecology’ appealing for it suggests to
him that “instruction implies mediating key elements of the larger context so as
to facilitate the merging of learner and environment into a single system. ... The
role of the learning facilitator is no longer to play ‘teacher expert’ or ‘didactic
caretaker’ of information. Rather, it is his or her responsibility to establish and
support an environment that affords goals from which the individual develops
intentions whose realization requires the appropriation of specific practices that
bring about functional object transformations.” (p. 535-6)
The metaphorical use of notions of ‘ecologies’ or ‘ecosystems’ in relation to
the integration of information technologies into educational settings, processes
and practices is by no means new. Indeed, in some of our earlier work on mobile
learning (Kress and Pachler 2007), we referred to the work of Bruce and Hogan
(1998), who conceptualised the integration of technology in the ‘ecology’ of
everyday life as a ‘disappearance’. We also want to refer to a frequently cited
piece by Zhao and Frank (2003), who used the notions of ecology and ecosys-
tems to theoretically integrate and organise various factors affecting the imple-
mentation of information and communication technologies (ICT) in school-based
education. Whilst readers who are familiar with the history of the implementa-
tion of ICT in mainstream education, certainly in the UK, might rightly wonder