Educational research between on devices and mobile learning

Abstract

The great potential of mobile learning devices hooks up these new contexts that are, above all, cultural and social, but also organisational and relational, forcing us to reconsider fundamental themes of pedagogical discourse. Among these themes, the first must be the construction of the student’s identity and, connected to this, the issue of personalised education. Let us consider, for instance, the by-now familiar distinction between formal, informal and non-formal. Compared with formal learning, we have always considered the two conditions of informal and non-formal education as independent or at least parallel, but essentially distinct and fundamentally different. In the moment in which teaching is done through mobility, and therefore with the effects of interference in contexts completely different from those that are somewhat predictable by the designer of distance learning, can we still think of a "distinction" between formal and informal or, at least, should we not assume a sort of context cross-breeding?

Keywords

• educational research
• mobile devices
• mobile learning
• context
• educational setting