Mobile knowledge sharing for situated language learners

Students are increasingly expecting HE institutions to acknowledge the universality of mobile phone use and to incorporate mobile use into learning. Many institutions are taking up the challenge, with SMS notifications of cancelled lectures to mobile access to VLE’s. However, the growing ubiquity of smartphones, equipped with powerful facilities including easy web access and media capture, points to more powerful educational uses besides admin message and lecture consumption on the move. These facilities make it feasible for user generated content to be captured and shared with peers, providing students with a powerful means of bridging the gap between classroom and outside world in natural and engaging ways. This should be an effective learning tool, as students see taught material reflected in the outside world and vice versa, enabling them to engage in mapping from classroom to lived reality and thereby deepen their understanding. Language teachers are particularly attuned to the need for students to transfer their learning to real life settings. With JISC and EU funding we have been developing a mobile language learning app that makes this bridging possible, with language learners capturing examples of interesting target language use to share and discuss in class. Alternatively teachers can ask for specific materials to be collected. In this paper we report on the evaluation of the system with foreign language learners in the UK, Norway and Italy.