ABSTRACT
South Korea presents a rich environment for investigating mobile learning (mlearning) in higher education. Higher education in South Korea is itself a sophisticated orchestration of sociocultural factors heavily influenced by its historical legacy. Higher education institutions and the South Korean government have invested in the development of Korea Open CourseWare which is designed to utilize lectures and lecture data that Korean universities have made openly available. KakaoTalk, a mobile messaging application that enjoys predominate market share, is deeply integrated into South Korea socialized practice, both informal and formal, activated through mobile technology; it is used by university students to maintain participation across informal and formal communities. KakaoTalk inexorably and implicitly links these communities, even encourages migration between them, by presenting them simultaneously in its interface. Once linked, KakaoTalk allows for maintenance of community participation across a myriad of media channels with little effort; every emoticon builds connection across informal communities.
