Transforming the practice of mobile learning: promoting pedagogical innovation through educational principles and strategies that work

Abstract

This chapter deploys Denning’s (2004) powerful assertion that “an innovation is a transformation of practice in a community” (p. 1) through the elaboration of three key educational principles: engagement; presence; and flexibility. Each principle is accompanied by an elicitation of practical strategies that have proved effective in implementing the principles sustainably within particular courses and programs of study, as well as factors that inhibit that implementation. The authors use these principles and strategies that work as an evaluative lens for examining the pedagogical innovativeness of mobile learning and teaching environments. The application of that lens highlights a set of challenges and opportunities facing those technologies and their proponents, specifically in the authors’ host institution and in higher education more broadly. Provided that those technologies can be used to engage with those challenges and opportunities, mobile learning can indeed contribute simultaneously to pedagogical innovation and to transformed practice in university learning and teaching.