Educational research between on devices and mobile learning

The great potential of mobile learning devices hooks up these new contexts that are, above all, cultural and social, but also organisational and relational, forcing us to reconsider fundamental themes of pedagogical discourse. Among these themes, the first must be the construction of the student’s identity and, connected to this, the issue of personalised education. Let us consider, for instance, the by-now familiar distinction between formal, informal and non-formal. Compared with formal learning, we have always considered the two conditions of informal and non-formal education as independent or at least parallel, but essentially distinct and fundamentally different. In the moment in which teaching is done through mobility, and therefore with the effects of interference in contexts completely different from those that are somewhat predictable by the designer of distance learning, can we still think of a "distinction" between formal and informal or, at least, should we not assume a sort of context cross-breeding?

The question does not arise from considerations of quantitative, but instead arises from qualitative, evaluations. In our opinion, here exists a paradigm: the learning context not only escapes the teaching team’s realm of predictability, but somehow eludes even the predictability of the learner, and indeed, it is the very nature of the context that takes completely different characteristics and connotations.

We are on the verge of justifying a major revision of some paradigms that relate to the nature of the context, the role of the teacher and the position (in the sociological sense) of the student, which also affect the nature of the message and, more generally, the “entire educational setting”. It means working in this direction.