Integrating Digital and Mathematical Practices across Contexts: A Manifesto for Mobile Learning

Abstract

Reconciling the increasingly digital lives of today's youth with traditional school-based practices that have yet to catch up with the information age, particularly in a domain like mathematics, requires approaches that simultaneously embrace students’ existing, informal digital and mathematical engagements and extend conventional, school-based activities beyond the classroom. We propose an approach that integrates an emerging array of informal practices and tools for mobile computing with a corresponding set of mathematical practices: capturing and collecting, communicating and collaborating, viewing and consuming, and designing and creating. The article describes each of these categories of practice as they occur via mobile technologies within informal settings and discusses their analogs to key forms of mathematical activity. Ultimately, mathematics educators should see youth mobile practices as advantageous, rather than irrelevant or threatening, to deep and authentic learning.