Ethnic Immigrant Minorities and Mobile Learning for Schools -- A Class without Walls: A New Didactic Approach to Digital Literacy across the Curriculum

Abstract

Much like immigrants who leave the cultural comfort of their home societies and move to places with very different cultures and social practices, those who teach online leave the familiarity of the face-to-face classroom for the uncharted terrain of the online environment, whose constraints and affordances often lead to very different practices. The trans-classroom teacher who moves between the two environments, transferring ideas, strategies, and practices from one to the other, is a mental migrant. The transformations -- of the teacher and of the course -- that occur in these migrations and the two-way interactions between face-to-face and online teaching are the focus of this study. As teachers adapt their courses for the online environment, they are forced to re-examine the course design, reconsider curriculum strategies, and make many decisions about what to take out and what to keep, what to add and what to substitute. The implication for faculty who would like to implement mobile learning in their online or traditional courses is that they can begin by making content and information available to students in formats easily accessible by mobile phone or laptop computer. This would be a logical first step, since a majority of students and faculty already use these tools in many of their daily activities. Other tools, such as video iPods and MP3 players, can be phased in gradually. The following ideas could be implemented immediately with little to no additional cost. Most basic cell phones today can send and receive text messages, voice mail, and e-mail. E-mail is a convenient way to communicate information to the learning community, so the instructor can begin by sending class-wide "broadcast" e-mails that students can access via a variety of mobile devices.