BYOD4L – Our Open Magical Box to Enhance Individuals’ Learning Ecologies

This chapter describes our search for a design and an appropriate conceptual vocabulary to describe an approach to encouraging, supporting and recognising individuals’ lifewide learning gained through their engagement with an open online opportunity for learning and sharing learning about the use of mobile devices and a suite of social media applications. We called this opportunity 'Bring Your Own Device for Learning' abbreviated to BYOD4L. The chapter describes the thinking underlying the learning design, the design itself and a flavour of the dynamics of the community process of learning. It draws on theories of learning that appear to offer the most useful explanations for this type of lifewide learning. We draw attention to the potential role of Open Educational Practices (OEP) and Open Educational Resources (OER) in lifewide learning and highlight a number of theories of learning that are particularly relevant to our ecological process.