Integrating Mobile Web 2.0 within Tertiary Education.

T. Cochrane¹, R. Bateman², and I. Flitta²

¹ Centre for Teaching and Learning Innovation, Unitec, New Zealand.

² Bachelor of Product Design, Unitec, New Zealand.

Based on three years of innovative pedagogical development and guided by a participatory action research methodology, this paper outlines an approach to integrating mobile web 2.0 within a tertiary education course, based on a social constructivist pedagogy. The goal is to facilitate a student-centred, collaborative, flexible, context-bridging learning environment that empowers students as content producers and learning context generators, guided by lecturers who effectively model the use of the technology. We illustrate how the introduction of mobile web 2.0 has disrupted the underlying pedagogy of the course from a traditional Attelier (face-to-face apprenticeship) model, and has been successfully moved to a context independent social constructivist model. Two mobile web 2.0 learning scenarios are outlined, including; a sustainable house design project (involving the collaboration of four departments in three faculties and three diverse groups of students), and the implementation of a weekly ‘nomadic studio session'. Students and lecturers use the latest generation of smartphones to collaborate, communicate, capture and share critical and reflective learning events. Mobile friendly web 2.0 tools are used to create this environment, including: blogs, social networks, location aware (geotagged) image and video sharing, instant messaging, microblogging etc… See Figure 1. below for a graphical representation of this learning context bridging. Feedback from students and lecturers has been extremely positive, and the course is being used as a model of implementing mobile web 2.0 throughout the institution.

Figure 1. Mobile Web 2.0 Concept Map.

Keywords mobile; web 2.0; social constructivism; mlearning.