oa Mapping Mobile Learning in Space and Time

Mobile learning has been a topic of research and development for 20 years. Over that time it has encompassed a wide range of concepts, theories, designs, experiments and evaluations. With increasing interest in the subject from researchers and practitioners, a comprehensive, yet accessible, overview of mobile learning that encompasses its many facets and features can provide a useful snapshot of the field. Although there have been many reviews of the mobile learning literature, these have tended to focus mostly on the nature of the work from a research perspective. Further, they have focused on a specific subset of the overall literature. Some review articles have, for example, confined themselves to a particular type of mobile learning, such as mobile language learning (e.g. Viberg & Gronlund, 2012). Others have focused on a specific conference series (e.g. Wingkvist & Ericsson, 2011) or subset of journals (e.g. Pollara &Broussard, 2011). In contrast, we have attempted to provide a more generic overview, and analyzed a large number of articles on mobile learning according to their main themes, concepts and concerns. These articles have come from a representative range of journals, books and conference proceedings. This poster provides a full-landscape view of the field of mobile learning in the form of a mind map. Whilst this approach to visualization is relatively subjective, it is a qualitative approach that allows us to find creative associations between ideas, as opposed to some other approaches that simply present quantitative data (Davies, 2011). It also potentially supports additional services such as certain types of information search (Beel &Gipp, 2010). Through an iterative process of refinement, we have applied the main analysis categories of research, learner, learning, content, design and technology, with a range of subcategories and representative exemplars. In addition, we contextualize the key developments in mobile learning in a timeline, in order to trace its evolution as a field of research.