Mobile Phones as Mediating Tools Within a Responsive Context for Development
John Cook
Learning Technology Research Institute, London Metropolitan University
Introduction:
This paper describes a proposal for extending Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) into a
Responsive Context for Development (RCD) and provides two cases that illustrate how this was
achieved using location aware mobile devices. We have specially set out to design a mobile RCD that is
able to respond supportively to, and that acts as a challenge for, learners in Higher Education.
Vygotsky revisited
In the society’s technologically and socially driven transformation of the industrialisation of the first
third of the 20th century, Lev Vygotsky defined the characteristics of human development as a
development which is based on the instrumental conditioning of reflexes or as the extension of the body
by tools for mastering nature (Vygotsky 1978/1930, p. 19 ff.). The “higher psychological processes”, as
Vygotsky termed them, result from a relation “between human beings and their environment, both
physical and social” (p. 19). Vygotsky considered “social interactions” like ‘to speak’ as the
transformation of practical activities such as ‘to use a tool’. The leading processes are that of
internalization and that of the instrumental use of a tool; this happens where “An operation that initially
represents an external activity is reconstructed and begins to occur internally” (Vygotsky 1978/1930, p
56 f.). Further, the social situation of the external activity, like the conditions for the use of tools, is
internalized: “An interpersonal process is transformed into an intrapersonal one” (Vygotsky 1978/1930,
p 57).
These processes of internalization depend on the children’s (or older learner’s) development: “The
transformation of an interpersonal process into an intrapersonal one is the result of a long series of
developmental events” (Vygotsky 1978/1930, p 57). Vygotsky (1978/1930, pp. 84 ff.) proposed “that an
essential feature of learning is that it creates the zone of proximal development; that is, learning
awakens a variety of internal developmental processes that are able to operate only when the child is [in]
interaction with people in his environment and in cooperation with his peers. Once these processes are
internalized, they become part of the child’s independent developmental achievement.” The implication
of Vygotsky’s line of argument on internalization and child development was, and continues to be,
important in terms of learning from childhood onwards: it is not the learning object that is ruling the
learning, but the student’s development, i.e. the phases within a student’s development, the so-called
“zones of proximal development”, in which the student is susceptible to internalizing learning objects.
Pachler, Bachmair and Cook (2009) have attempted to update Vygotsky’s theoretical argument around
the ‘zone of proximal development’ in order to understand the 21st Century trend to user-generated
contexts of mobile, individualized mass communication as personally relevant contexts for
development. The term “Zone” can be seen in the traditional category of child development, or as a
developmental phase or in a situational category within a specific context. This conceptual approach
brings together child development and curricular learning by a context, the zone of proximal
development, and offers scope for the theoretical integration of teaching, learning, and development
with the culturally new user/learner generated and mediated contexts (Cook, 2009). According to
Pachler, Bachmair and Cook (2009), Vygotsky’s perspective is thus still highly relevant but, in our
view, it requires re-interpretation in terms of the process of development. Today, developmental phases
and cultural environments shape learner development. Indeed, recent cultural forms of individualized
mobile mass communication are primarily based on environmental contexts. The ongoing shift away
from a push system with a dominant program provider to a user-dominated pull system reduces the
relevance of time structures and makes to situational context structures even more important (e.g. see
Cook, 2009). But why propose a shift away from ‘proximal development’, a term readily associated
with Vygotsky, to a notion of ‘responsive contexts’? One reason is to free ourselves from the constraints
inherent in the almost stifling presence of Vygotsky’s terminology and to open up the dynamic of the
child and learner’s development again in view of the conditions of the new prevailing contexts of the
early 21st Century.
In this shift away from ‘‘proximal’, of high relevance is the focus on the quality of contexts, which
Pachler, Bachmair and Cook (2009) seek to capture with the term ‘responsive’. In so doing, we aim to
relate the importance of the quality of context to learner development: from an educational perspective,
a context has to respond supportively to, and act as a challenge for, a learner. In the rest of this paper I
describe a project that has used mobile phones as mediating tools for location based, responsive contexts
for development in Higher Education.
Educational aims of the project
Below I provide a brief report of the implementation and evaluation of two cases of mobile phone based
responsive context for development, which are part of the CONTSENS project (http://tiny.cc/5wdUr).
The aim of the London Metropolitan University workpackages for this project were to
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Provide a responsive, contextualised, social and historical account for two cases (Urban
Education and Archaeology) by focusing, where possible, on systems and beliefs or units that
contribute to the construction of the surrounding discourses and/or buildings.
Scaffold the trainee teacher, or archaeologist tutor, understanding of what is possible with
mobile learning in terms of filed trips.
The project made use of HTC smart phones, running the Mediascape authoring environment
(http://www.mscapers.com/). Nokia N95s allowed students to produce video podcasts of themselves and
take photos. The Mscape player on the HTCs was designed to allow learners to move through the
physical world and trigger digital media (which was stored on the phone) with GPS via an invisible
interactive map. Mediascape is freely available, open source software that is easy to set up; this is seen
as an advantage in that it is part of a mediating infrastructure that will enable a responsive Contexts for
development to become more pervasive. What makes the approach described here of interest, I hope, is
the proposal for extending the ZPD into an RCD, two cases that examine how this was achieved, the
learner feedback on these RCD’s, and a qualitative dialogue analysis that provides a preliminary look at
an RCD event. In other words, the project team have specifically set out to design a mobile RCD that is
able to respond supportively to, and that acts as a challenge for, collaborating learners. The use of rich
visualizations and multimedia, we predicted, would allow collaborating learners to interact with each
other, the tools and the physical environment in order to generate their own responsive context for
development.
Evaluation of usability and educational use in Urban Education
In this work package an urban area close to London Metropolitan University, from 1850 to the present
day, was used to explore how schools are signifiers of both urban change and continuity of educational
policy and practice. Students worked in pairs. There were three distinct groups of BA and MA students.
Quantitative feedback was obtained from students by a questionnaire, through informal group
interviews afterwards, and from the tutor via an interview.
Although some issues were reported about GPS signal, 91% thought the mobile device enhanced the
learning experience. The information was regarded as easy to assimilate allowing more time to
concentrate on tasks, allowing instant reflection in situ. The mobile tour promoted “active learning” in
that (i) they were less passive than they would have been on a tutor-led tour, (ii) they were not “merely
taking in information”, and (iii) the mobile tour triggered their own thoughts and encouraged them to
think more about the area. One student commented: “The information given was underlined by the
‘experience’ of the area and therefore given context in both past and present.” Another student: “it was
triggering my own thoughts and I was getting to think for myself about the area and the buildings.”
Evaluation of usability and educational use in Archaeology
This workpackage developed a RCD for Archaeology students to explore Cistercian Chapels in
Yorkshire, England. The students were MA Landscape Archaeology students from Sheffield University.
Students were given details of the building blocks of the Chapels (e.g. carved stones, rose windows,
pillars, vaults, etc.) and were asked to investigate how these were used in the construction of the
Fountains Abbey and consider what had changed over time. The big problem is that, by their very
nature, the ruined Chapels do not indicate how these buildings looked when they were originally built.
Virtual reality representations of heritage sites were used to offer innovative solutions to the challenges.
In order to allow for the greatest degree of flexibility in learning, the outputs of the Cistercian Chapels
project are visualized in multiple ways; these include the 3D/rotatable wire frames installed onto the
handheld devices. Thus GPS was used to locate the learner and present the appropriate reconstruction
(see right hand screen shot below for an example).
All the learners surveyed by questionnaire made extremely positive comments about what they thought
of the mobile learning course, describing it as “more fun” than expected, “I enjoyed it”, “interesting”.
Learners said it was “very interesting”, it was a “good idea”, “good!”, a “fantastic experience”, and
“very stimulating lots of good ideas”. 80% rated it as being useful for learning the subject. 60% thought
the mobile device enhanced the learning experience. On the negative side, three found that having to
look at the mobile devices was a distraction from engaging with the archaeology/site itself, and one
would like more archaeological and historical explanation. However, 80% agreed that the mobile
learning experience was fun, and 9 out of the 10 users (90%) would take another mobile learning course
if it was relevant to their learning needs and would recommend mobile learning as a method of study to
others, which is a good indication that most of them had a positive experience (the other user answered
‘uncertain’ to both of these questions). One student commented that “The ability to be in a particular
position but get a variety of views/different visual perspective was a very useful opportunity. The whole
thing also got everyone talking in a way I hadn't experienced on field trips to Fountains before.”
A qualitative analysis of video data of students interacting (left below) showed that the gap between
physical world (i.e. what is left of Cistercian Chapels), and the virtual world on mobile is inhabited by
the shared representations of the students, and that this appears to indicate deep learning.
Transcribed interaction: tools enabled the learners to generate their own responsive context for
learning development.
(Lots of pointing at screen and abbey)
Student 1: So those windows, up there isn’t it, still? Is that right? So those have all changed since then.
Student 2: Yeah there was like another stage between this one and this one.
Student 1: High up.
Student 2: With three vaults.
Student 1: There’s three on that side at the moment and three on that side.
Student 2. Yes
Student 1: So three have come down haven’t they, along with the window.
Student 2: And from this (? points screen) that one is equal to that one, and actually we can not see that
one (points). We can see three vaults there …
Student 1: There must have been …
Student 2: That’s the big one there. Can you see that? (points at screen)
Student 1: Do mean with the pillar?
Student 2: Yeah, you can see it’s this way (?) but it’s stopped there.
Student 1: That’s right (makes gestures for a pillar and they both stare into the space where the
missing pillar should be).
There is a real sense in the above transcript of the pair collaborating to solve the problem of what
happened to the Abbey across time. Student 2 frequently uses the word ‘see’, indicating that the
physical and digital representations interact and inform one another in real time. The tools provided for
this case study enabled the learners to generate their own ‘responsive context for development’. I
suggest that the use of the word ‘see’ and the gestures in the transcript indicate that the students are
arriving at a joint or shared cognitive visualization/representation and explanation that solves problem of
what changes have occurred over time. There are clearly some transformational processes at play here,
with a rapid interplay between external, tool-based and internal representations.
Issues and future work
There is much to commend Responsive Context for Development or RCD as a catalyst for active and
deep learning. There appears to be a generality of our ‘visualisation’ oriented approach in terms of
supporting learner reflexivity that engages learners in a discourse and supports their representations of
past and present. However, it should be noted that ethical issues surrounding tracking location and
activity need constant attention.
Future work questions:
1. During their activity, what will the learning trail left behind by learners tell us as they move from one
learning context to the next? How does this relate to developmental events?
2. Can the case studies be used to generate parameters that can in turn be used to build Responsive
Context for Development in other areas?
3. Will it be possible to produce intervention guidelines that can be used (perhaps in modified forms)
across many contexts and/or developmental events?
4. What are the transformational processes at play in the Cistercian Chapels transcript? Were we really
seeing a rapid interplay between external, tool-based and internal representations?
Acknowledgements
Carl Smith developed both GPS enabled systems. Simon Pratt-Adams acted as pedagogical advisor on
the Urban Planning Project. Claire Smith gathered questionnaire feedback. CONTSENS is funded by
the EC Lifelong Learning Programme and is headed by Ericsson Ireland. Professor Ben Bachmair
provided the analysis of Vygotsky that I draw up in this paper.
Reference
Cook, J. (2009). Mobile Learner Generated Contexts: Research on the Internalization of the World of
Cultural Products. In B. Bachmair (Ed.) Media Literacy in New Cultural Spaces (Medienbildung in
Neuen Kulturräumen). Wiesbaden, Germany: VS-Verlag für Sozialwissenschaft.
Pachler, N., Bachmair, B. and Cook, J. (2009). Mobile Learning: Structure, Agency, Practices. New
York: Springer. To be published November 2009.
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Vygotsky, L. (1986/ 1934). Thought and language. Edited by A. Kozulin, Cambridge, MA. MIT Press.