Using Smartphones and Mobile Web 2.0 to Create a Mobile Computing Platform for Tertiary Education.

Today’s smartphones are mobile multimedia computers, in Nokia’s words: “It’s what computers have become”. Smartphone manufacturers have seen the potential to partner with online social software (Web2.0) sites (e.g. Flickr, YouTube, Vox, Ovi etc…) to produce a mobile computing platform to capture and share our daily lives with friends and family, anywhere, anytime. These tools can be utilized within tertiary education to create context independent collaborative learning environments. Pedagogical design of learning experiences using mobile web2.0 allows a tutor to create rich learning environments for students beyond the classroom or lecture theatre. This paper illustrates this by analysing students responses to a third year Product Design project that transformed a traditionally paper-based learning journal into an interactive, collaborative, online eportfolio using mobile web2.0 technologies facilitating an explicit social constructivist pedagogy. Students were provided with a Nokia N95 smartphone, a bluetooth folding keyboard, and a 1GB 3G data account. They created an online eportfolio, and used the smartphones to capture and record learning events and ideas from a variety of contexts. The learning outcomes included the development of a far more media rich and critically reflective collaborative experience than was previously possible using traditional approaches.