ABSTRACT

In this chapter the context for design is unashamedly the technological context, that is designing for learners ‘equipped with mobile technologies’. Part of the challenge is that the mobile technologies that learners are equipped with are most often their own personal technologies. These are technologies that have already been appropriated for social and informal activities, which may or may not be educational. Designing for mobile learning then provides a glimpse of what designing for the future could be – where education is no longer ‘designed and delivered’ to a group of learners situated in an expected, defined context, but where each individual engages in their own learning, through their own devices, from their own setting and on their own terms. This chapter lays out how our design principles need to evolve to support us to design content, activities, communications and spaces for such a context.