M-Education: bridging the gap of mobile and desktop computing

Abstract

Mobile education or M-Education is a new conceptual paradigm in the use of mobile and wireless technologies for education. M-Education encourages distributed peer collaboration over wireless devices and desktop computers to create opportunities for discovery and education in the field and community. It is a project-oriented approach that will use a wireless virtual community to facilitate the learning activities of teachers, students, and peers through collaboration in a distributed environment. M-Education is significantly different from existing mobile learning systems in that it leverages its collaborative activities from an existing desktop-based online virtual community (MOOsburg), and thus offers a range of collaboration opportunities, such as synchronous and asynchronous interactions with peers, and viewing or changes to persistent data. In this paper, an innovative use of wireless and mobile technologies in education is explored as part of a scenario-based design process.