ABSTRACT
Education is undergoing a retooling. The word “tablet” no longer conjures up images of the Big Chief notebook; rather, it represents a portable digital device situated in the social, vocational, and educational habits of our interconnected daily lives. Smartphones are increasingly becoming a normative and expected tool in a global culture where smartphone sales have outpaced PC sales (Canalys, 2012) and with over 6 billion mobile subscribers worldwide (International Telecommunications Union, 2012). The ways education might harness the power and ubiquity of these devices to access content, learn, and teach with these devices are profound. This opportunity has not gone unnoticed. President Obama singled out mobile connectivity for students in the 2011 State of the Union Address (Obama, 2011), and Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski announced an aggressive 5-year goal for the adoption of digital textbooks on mobile devices across the United States (Genachowski, 2012). This chapter explores that promise of mobility in education by examining the theoretical background of m-learning, emerging themes of user practice, evaluation of one campus-wide program at Abilene Christian University (ACU), and a discussion of the reimagined classroom in a fully mobile setting.
