Mobile Devices in Classroom

Mobile practices in everyday life: Popular digital technologiesand schooling revisited

Guy Merchant

Guy Merchant is Professor of Literacy in Education in the Faculty of Development & Society at SheffieldHallam University. Address for correspondence: Prof Guy Merchant, Sheffield Hallam University, Faculty ofDevelopment and Society, Sheffield Hallam University, 122 Charles Street, Sheffield S1 2NE. S41 9QW, UK.Email: [email protected]

AbstractMobile phones have rapidly been absorbed into the fabric of our day-to-day lives. Theyare now a key consumer item, a symbol of social capital and they connect their users toa mobile web with multiple applications. As ownership and access to smartphones hasspread into the teenage years, their place in institutions of formal education has beenmarked by contention. The dominant view that mobiles have no place in the classroomhas recently been contested by educators, such as Parry, who suggest that mobile learn-ing, and the literacies involved, should play an important role in education. This paperargues for a more nuanced view of mobile technology, one that focuses on everydaysocial practices as a way of understanding the relationship between mobiles and learn-ing. Using practice theory as a starting point, I suggest a way of mapping everydaymobile practices on to educational activity to illustrate potential areas for innovationand evaluation. I conclude by returning to the debate about mobiles in education, notingthat familiar arguments about popular digital technology and schooling are once againbeing rehearsed. If ways of accessing, sharing and building knowledge are changingthen a more principled consideration of how educational institutions relate to thesechanges is needed.

IntroductionEarly images of computing depict lab-coated scientists—usually white males—in room-sizedenvironments surrounded by large cabinets, spools of tape and coils of wire. In less than 50 yearswe have seen the development of powerful and affordable pocket-sized devices, such as smart-phones and MP3 players. Development and diffusion has been remarkably rapid. Moreover, it isapparent that mobile practices have evolved as rapidly as the technology itself. In urban environ-ments, the air is filled with the half conversations of passers-by, the corner cafes with individualschecking their messages. Couples share digital photo albums, as others move around themcocooned in an audio world tethered by their earbuds to hidden devices. And so the idea of thecomputer, a machine that processes huge databanks of information, housed in a room, has givenway to the seemingly straightforward everyday social and portable uses of technology. Technol-ogy is on the move; it moves with us now. It is as mobile as we are. If we are to learn from this rapiddevelopment and diversification of digital technology—or even if we are to learn with this newtechnology—it may well help us to stand back, for a moment, to examine some of its key char-acteristics. It has been argued that educators would benefit from “a stronger focus on students’everyday use and learning with Web 2.0 technologies in and outside of classrooms” (Greenhow,

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Robelia & Hughes, 2010, p. 255), and this argument could well be expanded to include the use ofmobile devices. But I want to stand even further back, by looking first at everyday mobilepractices, bracketing, at least for the moment, the thorny issues associated with mobile learning(see Pachler, Bachmair & Cook, 2010), in order to grapple with some fundamental issues aboutpopular uses of technology and online social networking.

First of all, a little about everyday mobile practices and what I mean by that phrase. Here my focusis on how portable devices, and particularly those with some level of connectivity, are being usedin people’s day-to-day lives—in informal spaces and in those boundary spaces that are onlyloosely controlled by institutions, employers and so on. This focus is informed by two propositions.The first, borrowed from postphenomenology (Verbeek, 2005), argues that people and the mate-rial things they use are inextricably bound together. Looking at them in isolation does not reallywork. This is the point that Ihde (1993, p. 34) makes when he suggests that, “Were technologiesmerely objects totally divorced from human praxis, they would be so much ‘junk’ lying about.Once taken into praxis one can speak not of technologies ‘in themselves’, but as the activerelational pair, human-technology.”

In other words, although we might profit from examining the semiotic affordances of a smart-phone (Adami & Kress, 2010), the key negotiations that take place are through interactionsbetween people and technology. From this perspective, as Pachler et al, (2010) suggest, the thingsin use, the incorporation of these devices into social life, become a central concern. The relation-ship between users and mobiles does not take place in a social vacuum; it is situated in a largercontext, constituted by both discourses and practices (Caron & Caronia, 2007; Caronia, 2005).

Practitioner Notes

What is already known about this topic

• There is growing interest in the use of mobiles in educational settings.• Practitioners are beginning to look at the advantages and disadvantages of mobile

learning.• Increased ownership of smartphones and other mobile devices amongst the youth

population is well documented.

What this paper adds

• Social practice theory offers a useful perspective for looking at the use of mobiles indifferent contexts.

• Comparisons and contrasts between the uses of mobile technology in everyday life andin school settings can help in evaluating its potential.

• A consideration of ownership and access, and how this may reproduce social inequali-ties, are important to innovations in technology and education.

Implications for practice and/or policy

• There is a need to move beyond debates about prohibiting or encouraging the use ofmobiles to look at more specific examples of their advantages (and disadvantages).

• Policy and implementation should be informed by a finer-grained analysis of mobilepractices in everyday and educational settings.

• Mobile devices are highly desirable consumer items. Schools and other educationalestablishments have a responsibility to adopt a critical approach to ownership and use.

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The second proposition, which is closely related to the first, is that the concept of social practice isa helpful way of thinking about the role that technology plays in our lives. Here I draw, inparticular, on Schatzki’s (2002) social practice theory. For Schatzki, practices are “organizednexuses of activity” that involve bodily “doings,” “sayings” and “relatings.” These doings, sayingsand relatings take place in, and constitute, the human interactions that comprise social order(Schatzki, 2001, p. 56), as the following commentary explains:

A practice is a coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity in whichcharacteristic arrangements of activities (doings) are comprehensible in terms of characteristic arrange-ments of relevant ideas in discourses (sayings), and when the people and objects involved are distributed incharacteristic arrangements of relationships (relatings), and when this complex of sayings, doings andrelatings “hangs together.” (Kemmis & Heikkinen, 2011, p. 5)

In an alternative formulation, Reckwitz helpfully defines practices as “forms of bodily activities,forms of mental activities, ‘things’ and their use” (Reckwitz, 2002, p. 5). According to bothsources, practices are rather like routines, in that they are carried and transmitted by humanactors, but they are also susceptible to innovation and change, and will exhibit the characteristicsof both synchronic and diachronic variation. Whilst recognising that routinisation offers “onto-logical security” (Giddens, 1984, p. 23, 50), contemporary practice theory also allows for theemergence of new routines. This helps us to account for the ways in which new technologiesbecome integrated into existing social practices, in turn developing them, as they are taken up andabsorbed into daily life. For example, institutional uses of email built on, extended and transformedthe exchange of memos and letters. On the other hand, the social practices of mobile phoneconversations developed from early telephony—but have, in a relatively short space of time,evolved into something rather different. In these sorts of ways, technologies can become part ofthe “material arrangements” that mesh with practices (Schatzki, 2005, p. 47). The practicetheory position, then, offers an explanation of how practices may evolve, as new possibilitiesarise.

In developing the idea of “site ontologies,” Schatzki (2005) also provides us with an account ofhow practices help to constitute organisations, such as schools. Here, he suggests that “a mesh ofpractices and material arrangements” (Ibid. 474) provide an established institutional order thatis governed by chains of action and commonalities of purpose. But, importantly, the constituentpractices are not static—they evolve as “circumstances change, opportunities and problems arise,personnel changes, new ideas arise” and so on (Ibid. 476). However, Schatzki also suggests thatmost organisational change is piece-meal and gradual, with modifications in some practicesbeing accompanied by continuities in others. Radical change, such as that anticipated by sometechnologists (such as Leadbetter, 2009), is only likely to occur when “conscious intervention(from the inside or outside) reworks goals, alters rules, and redesigns projects” (Ibid. 476). Inother words, organisational practices tend to be inherently more conservative than everydaypractices, precisely because of the way they are enmeshed in chains of action and commonalitiesof purpose.

In contrast, what I call everyday mobile practices can be seen in the observable ways that peopleinteract with, or incorporate, portable digital devices into existing, or emerging, sets of actions—the “doings,” “sayings” and “relatings” that constitute informal social practice. Whether or notwe believe that the devices themselves are overpriced toys, fashion accessories, the next genera-tion in convergence technology or a basic necessity for twenty-first century living depends to alarge part on how we conceive of their place in these ecologies of practice. In fact, the devices weuse have a key role to play in many of our social interactions, they have a material significance,but at the same time they are objects of desire in a consumer culture that places high value onnew, and ever newer, technologies.

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Selling and using mobilesIf we think of what Ihde (1993) calls the “active relational pair”—human-technology—the waysin which mobiles have become absorbed into social networking practices is an obvious startingpoint. The mobile phone—with Facebook, Twitter and YouTube—is heavily marketed by a rangeof providers. As an example, consider the way in which the new Blackberry Curve is promoted bythe phone network Orange. Figure 1 shows the cover of the October 2011 issue of Orange’s“Explore” magazine. The background image is a dense mesh of intersecting fibres. Their fieryyellows, oranges and reds criss-cross to form an image that calls to mind familiar diagrammaticrepresentations of social networks. The device itself—the Blackberry Curve—appears to glow, asa live hub, in the centre of these interconnections. Orange promises that you will be “alwaysconnected to your social networks,” and you can be sure that the social networking icons ofFacebook and Blackberry Messenger are displayed on the screen. They are, and what is more,the icons are tagged with the white star on a red circle that indicates that several new messageshave arrived and await our attention and response. In this way, communicative interaction isconstructed as compelling and immediate.

In these and many other similar ways, social networking—or at least a particular, mediatedversion of it—is sold to us by the makers of smartphones, as well as by the powerful companiesthat exert their control over our communication and connectivity. I have argued elsewhere(Merchant, 2011) that the boundary between online and offline social networking is becomingincreasingly porous. With 3G mobiles, phones can be both the symbol and the hub of an indi-vidual’s portable and dispersed connections. Gergen’s idea of an invisible web (of networks) in the“floating world” is a powerful image for this:

“We may imagine here that dwelling about us at all times are small communities that are unseen andunidentifiable. However, as we stroll the thoroughfare or sip coffee in a café their presence is made constantlyknown to us. Each mobile phone [. . .] is a sign of a significant nucleus, stretching in all directions, amor-phous and protean.” (Gergen, 2003, p. 105)

This view places the mobile device at the very centre, and helps us to imagine the connectivity ofthe “networked individual” (Wellman, 2002). But, if this sounds a little techno-centric, a practicetheory perspective brings us back to a consideration of how the technology is embedded in, andcontinuous with, everyday social spaces. It turns out that most mobile social networking prac-

Figure 1: Orange promotes social networking



tices are more concerned with thickening existing social ties than forging new ones (Ellison,Steinfield & Lampe, 2007). And, as Sheller (2004, p. 48) observes, they enable their users to holdmultiple connections and identities in play at any one time. In this way, social networks havebecome more densely layered with the advance of new communicative tools (Merchant, 2011).

Although the general association of mobiles with social networking is important to acknowledge,we need a more fine-grained analysis to better understand emerging mobile practices. What arethe “sayings,” “doings” and “relatings” that might describe these practices, and how does port-able technology become part of the fabric of everyday life? A more detailed analysis of this areais required. Such an analysis would need to look at the specifics of how devices are worn and held,where they are placed and shown, how they are referred to and, of course, how and in what waysthey are used in acts of representation and communication. We might imagine how suchaccounts, informed by practice theory, would follow practitioners across a variety of socio-technical settings (online, mobile or co-present) and across different timescales (see Postill, 2010).

Simply on the basis of observation and experience, though, it is apparent that mobiles are regu-larly used for a range of purpose. They are used in maintaining lightweight contact with friendsand family members—those short inconsequential interactions that maintain social connections(Ito, 2004); casual entertainment (watching and sharing short movies, photo albums and play-lists); arranging both formal and informal meetings, navigation and micro-coordination—suchas negotiating and renegotiating the time and place of informal meetings (Ling & Yttri, 2002);capturing objects and events (usually as still images); and accessing web-based information asneed arises and “just in time.” Emerging research into everyday practices provides some evidenceof the spread of such practices (Caronia, 2005; Carroll, Howard, Peck & Murphy, 2002; Ito,Okabe & Matsuda, 2005; Tamminen, Oulasvirta, Toiskallio & Kankainen, 2004; Thulin & Vil-helmson, 2007; Wilska, 2003). The list, of course, is by no means exhaustive, but it points theway to a better understanding of how the mobile phone is “subtly insinuating itself into thecapillaries of everyday life” (Gergen, 2003, p. 103). Looking at this list through the eyes of aneducator, as we shall see, may help to identify some matches and mismatches between everydaypractices and educational practices as they are currently defined and enacted.

But first of all, as it has already been acknowledged that mobile devices are key products in theglobal market place and that they are part of the desire–acquire–dispose circuit that underpinsour consumer-oriented economy (Bauman, 2005), it is worth considering the local patterning ofmobile use and ownership amongst the young. Survey data can provide us with some usefulinsights into this. It is beyond the scope of this paper to look at international comparisons, so I willconcentrate on the key messages that emerge from the recent Ofcom survey in the UK (Ofcom,2011). Those interested in comparisons might, for instance, consult the Pew Internet Studies forthe USA (Lenhart, Ling & Campbell, 2010), or EU Kids Online for the European picture (Living-stone, Haddon, Gorzig & Olaffson 2011). Broadly speaking, though, it is safe to assume thatmobile practices, whilst similar across these regions, are always shaped by local circumstances.

According to the Ofcom survey, 47% of UK teenagers (12- to 15-year-olds) now own a smart-phone, and this is a clearly a big growth area in the mobile phone market. Furthermore, teenagersreport that their use of mobiles is taking over from their use of older media. Sixty-five per cent ofthose with smartphones reported that they use their phone for social networking. In addition tothis, the data suggest high levels of mobile texting, music and gaming amongst teens (Ofcom,2011). These headline statistics alone point to a rise in the availability and use of mobiles in theyouth population, and certainly support claims that teenagers may be passionately engaged inmobile practices (indeed some of those surveyed describe this engagement in terms of addiction).But what a survey like this can not, of course, capture, are the practices and aspirations of the53% who do not have smartphones, yet we may guess that patterns of ownership are likely to



map on to particular social groups and, as with earlier technologies, socio-economic status mayplay a significant part in access (see Facer & Furlong, 2001, for example). Whilst we might predictdifferences between countries, there are also important differences within countries, and uneven-ness of ownership and access may well reflect other inequities. Despite all this, it can still beargued that mobile computing is a significant trend, and is certainly one that has begun toimpinge on the discourses of technology and education.

Mobiles in schoolsIn many formal educational contexts, mobile use is heavily restricted, more often than not, simplybanned. Mobiles, like other technologies, can easily disturb what I have called the “fragileecology” of classroom life (Merchant, 2009). Partly this is because new digital practices can havea destabilising effect, in that they begin to open up the possibilities for different kinds of learningrelationship, different kinds of interaction and different genres and communicative purposes.From a practice perspective, the world of the classroom is a social site composed of “a bundle ofpractices and material arrangements” (Schatzki, 2005, p. 474). It is a social site patterned byestablished relationships, mediated by sets of accepted school practices and instructional rou-tines. This bundle of practices is, of course, powerfully shaped by curriculum discourses (Crook,2012). Practice theory implies that organisational change is a complex undertaking and thatroutines and continuities are part of the fabric of institutional life.

Working against the dominant perception that mobile practices are disruptive in formal educa-tional settings can be seen as a key challenge, particularly when professional scepticism combineswith moral panic. For example, in 2009, when Notre Dame High School in Sheffield adopted apolicy of allowing mobile use in classrooms, reports of the initiative were quickly seized upon bythe national press, with claims that parents and unions criticised the move. The Daily Mailwrapped up its coverage of the story with a quotation from a little-known research report:“technology obsession hinders spelling skills, implicitly encourages plagiarism, and disruptsclassroom learning” (Daily Mail, 14/10/09). It seems from this, then, that mobiles sit at the morecontentious end of the continuum of opinion about technology in education. Despite this, theschool in question continues to promote the use of mobiles for a variety of purposes including:making visual notes; producing portfolio content; searching for information; accessing materialon the virtual learning environment (VLE); and for scheduling homework, hand-in and examdates (Haigh, 2011).

A rather different trajectory has shaped practice at Campsmount Technology College, also in theSouth Yorkshire region of England. This school, located in a former mining village near Doncas-ter, was burnt down in December 2009. The fire was thought to be the result of an electrical fault.All school records were obliterated—there were no longer any student contact numbers andaddresses, no coursework, no VLE—no servers. The fire raged through the early hours of a wintrySunday morning, but by the following Monday, the school’s newly created Facebook group had1500 members, and the head teacher’s press release on YouTube had attracted 3000 views. AWordpress blog, Twitter feed and Facebook group were quickly set up by staff who saw that socialmedia could reach and mobilise the community, the parents and the students in ways thattraditional media could not. The school was reinvented, almost overnight, with classes in youthcentres, the town hall, vacant premises on an industrial estate and in a former primary school.Timetables and travel arrangements were made available on Google docs, sixth-formers wereback “at work” within a day and the rest of the students only lost 1 week. Although the reinven-tion of the school was built on the strength of the community, this was galvanized by the creativeuse of new media (ap Hari, 2010).

Here we are presented with a rather different conception of what “mobile” might mean. Althoughsome students and staff were using portable devices at the time, the nature of the events that



unfolded had less to do with the technology itself, and more to do with the fluid movement of arelatively large number of individuals. This fluidity was made manageable through the possibili-ties of navigation and micro-coordination that are characteristic of everyday social media prac-tices (Ling & Yttri, 2002). Although more concerned with the logistics of creating a schoolwithout a fixed location, the Campsmount experience introduces a different set of considerations.This is an instance in which the use of technology is not tethered to a particular site, and mobilitydescribes the coordinated movement of learners and teachers. In some ways, the experience iscloser to everyday practice than it is to any emerging conceptions of mobile learning (Pachleret al, 2010; Sharples, Taylor & Vavoula, 2005).

Out of the ashes of the former infrastructure at Campsmount, a newer vision of technology hasarisen, and it is one that is cloud-based, wireless and portable. Only time will tell if this vision willtransform the learning and the attainment of students, because when all is said and done, thestudents follow the same curriculum and sit the same examinations as students elsewhere, andthe school and its staff are subject to the same mechanisms of accountability that keep theeducation system as a whole in check. Yet, if we believe that our future will be “mediated andstitched together by the mobile web” (Parry, 2011, p. 16), what Campsmount school learnedthrough difficult circumstances may have lessons for all of us.

We may, then, be tempted to agree with Parry that teachers need to show students:

“. . . how to use these technologies effectively to ensure they end up on the right side of the digital divide: theside that knows how to use social media. . .” (Parry, 2011, p. 2)

In developing a rationale for what he calls “mobile literacy,” Parry identifies three areas of focus.These are (1) understanding information access, 2) understanding hyperconnectivity and (3)understanding the new sense of space. The first is about encouraging students to use mobiledevices to search for (and presumably evaluate) information—and to appreciate the differencesand similarities between this and desktop searches. The second, hyperconnectivity, relates spe-cifically to developing new types of learning relationships, and is about using social media toconnect learners with those outside the immediate classroom context in advantageous ways(selective use of Twitter is offered as an example). The third and final of focus—the new sense ofspace—is about developing an appreciation of how mobiles can be used to mediate one’s experi-ence of the material/physical world through so-called augmented reality applications and thewhole gamut of data-enriched geolocation.

Framing the use of mobiles in this way is helpful. The three areas clearly build on everydaypractices, but at the same time they suggest how these can be incorporated into the practicesassociated with formal learning. A few cautions, though, before proceeding. First of all, as with alltechnologies, it may be useful to ask the familiar question: is the fact that we can do these thingssufficient justification for actually doing them in an educational context—and what specificadvantages do we envisage? Parry argues that we are “ethically” obliged to embrace mobiletechnology so that students know “how to use social media to band together” (Parry, 2011, p. 2),yet this moral imperative argument may not, in fact, be strong enough. It might be better to lookat educational contexts in which mobile searching is useful, ways in which hyperconnectivity canhelp to build understandings, and how deeper knowledge of locations can actually be built bylearners. In short, we could turn our focus to learning and to the social practices in which it isembedded. Teachers will want to be convinced of the practicality of Parry’s suggestions, they willwant to know how they could manage the potential levels of distraction, and how they mightexercise their own necessary (and imagined) control over learners and learning. It may also beuseful to look at a wider range of possibilities for the use of mobiles in educational settings. Thereis a growing body of literature in this area, from explorations of mobile gaming (Facer et al, 2004)to the use of context-aware technology on school field trips and museum visits (Sharples, 2006).



In a useful review of European initiatives, Kukulska-Hulme, Sharples, Milrad, Arnedillo-Sánchezand Vavoula (2009) report on a variety of projects that “use mobile technologies to help connectlearning across contexts and life transitions, and to form bridges between formal and informallearning” (34).

In the second section of this paper I referred to the fact that, in everyday practice, mobiles areregularly used for a range of purposes. I conclude this current section by looking for equivalentsin educational contexts. Whilst recognising that there are a number of reasons why everydaypractices may not be readily transferable to educational contexts (see Crook, 2012), it is stillworth tracing the ways in which some practices may have the potential to cross over. In Figure 2,the practices referred to previously are listed against their possible equivalents in school settings.

The first thing that this list reveals is that everyday mobile practices tend to be driven by individualpreference and need, rather than by the requirement to perform for others—in this case therequirement to “be a student,” by recording specific events, finding out about particular thingsand so on. In other words there is a significant move from the casual or informal (everydaypractices) to the formal (educational practices). This is nowhere more obvious than in the thirdand fourth items in each list, which have very weak correspondences. In the end, what remainsbegins to look rather thin. Mobiles can be used for still and moving image capture, for websearches and for scheduling, but then again, other devices, both portable and static, perform thesame functions equally well. It could then be the case that the everyday practices associated withthe mobile phone bear only a passing resemblance to school routines—routines that are bettersuited to other portable devices such as the iPod touch, iPad or tablet PC.

Popular digital technologies and schooling revisitedMapping everyday mobile practices on to school practices helps us to show how these technolo-gies could be deployed in educational settings, but it falls short of presenting us with a coherentrationale. As we have seen, there is no doubt that mobiles are being rapidly absorbed into daily life,and the evidence currently available certainly suggests increasing uptake by the school-agepopulation—particularly in the teenage years. Yet to argue that their popularity alone makesthem an attractive option for educators is a weak argument. It is weak in that it assumesownership—remember that 53% of UK teenagers do not own a smartphone (Ofcom, 2011)—andalso familiarity (many mobile practices may be limited and repetitive). Arguments based upon thesupposed widespread use of mobiles by teenagers are clearly flawed, and at worst become yetanother iteration of the idea of youth as digital natives. Bennet and Maton (2011, p. 171) provide

Everyday practices Educational practices

• capturing objects and events

• checking web-information

• casual entertainment (short movies, photo-albums etc)

• maintaining lightweight contact

• arranging meetings, navigation and micro-co-ordination

• photographing notes, experiments, activities

• mobile desk referencing

• video records of projects or products beingtested

• video, voice, image responses to learning tasks

• organising learning (noting schedules, timelinesetc)

Figure 2: Mapping everyday practices on to educational practices



a searching critique of this position. They trace the way in which the notion of “digital natives”(from Prensky, 2001) continues to shape the way we think about new technologies in education.They argue that it is time to move away from this limiting perspective, and urge researchers toprovide “well-founded, transparent empirical research. . . rather than unsubstantiated orunclearly evidenced claims” (Bennet & Maton, 2011, p. 182). If mobile learning, and the litera-cies involved, is to play an important role in education, it is now down to the advocates to providerobust evidence of the benefits, to sit alongside the growing number of examples of use (Nai-smith, Lonsdale, Vavoula & Sharples, 2004; Pachler et al, 2010). Furthermore, following theargument for a social practice approach, made earlier in this paper, it will also be helpful to knowabout how mobiles are used by young people, and how their everyday practices are differentiated,because if one thing is clear, they are not an homogenous population. Research that closelydocuments how mobile technologies are used, across a variety of socio-technical settings andover time, is now needed (Postill, 2010).The relationship between everyday practices and educational practices is as contentious in thearea of technology as it is elsewhere (eg, in media studies, popular culture and new literacies). Ingeneral, schools and other educational institutions have tended to appropriate a small subset ofeveryday practices, recruiting them to perform adapted routines within existing curricular struc-tures. This is as true for new technology use as it is for literacy—a field in which this phenomenonis perhaps better documented (eg, Dyson, 2008; Heath, 1983). The result of these appropriationsis that the seemingly arbitrary selections from everyday practices that are made tend to favourstudents from already advantaged sectors of society. This is perhaps unsurprising when weconsider that the enterprise of education, although often egalitarian by intent, is organised,maintained and serviced by the same dominant groups that succeed in it. Yet, as we have seen, ithas repeatedly been argued that if educators place “a stronger focus on students’ everyday useand learning with Web 2.0 technologies in and outside of classrooms” (Greenhow et al, 2010, p.255), more appropriate, inclusive and advantageous approaches are possible. This may not be asstraightforward as it seems, particularly when we consider the long and difficult history ofattempts to include everyday practices in school. But if we believe that the mobile web changes“what it means to be knowledgeable and educated in our culture” (Parry, 2011, p. 16), it may bethe time for serious reflection on the future of our formal institutions of education. Ignoring newdigital practices may reduce the capacity of educators to intervene in the uneven distribution ofresources and access.The existing literature on popular digital technologies has plenty to say about schools as institu-tions. A significant trend in this debate is to suggest that schools, as institutions, are becomingincreasingly irrelevant in the lives of young people. As social structures strongly formed bymodernist thought, they perpetuate a factory model of education, which attempts to prepare theyoung for a world that has long since disappeared. This argument is strongly made in the work ofGee (2004), who draws extensively on the contrasts between learning in school and learningthrough video-gaming. The position has been developed by Jenkins, Purushota, Clinton, Weigeland Robinson (2006), whose White Paper suggests ways in which schools should deliver thekinds of understandings and skills, or cultivate the habits of mind that will produce twenty-firstcentury citizens. Thus it is argued that a new vision of schooling is required—one that incorpo-rates the new literacies and is responsive to emerging patterns of social organisation. Yet, as wehave seen educational practices can be resistant to change and are often concerned with themaintenance of practices over time through the successful inculcation of “shared embodiedknow-how and continued performance” (Schatzki, 2005, p. 480).From the previous argument, it becomes clear that discussion about the implications of thewidespread use of mobile technology in compulsory schooling quickly begins to resemble earlydiscussions on the role of popular culture (Marsh & Millard, 2000), the relevance of everyday



literacies (Dyson, 2006) or the incorporation of Web2.0 technologies into school settings (Crook,2012; Davies & Merchant, 2009). Yet in these and other areas, significant educational develop-ments have followed from paying close attention to everyday practices. For example, the carefulanalysis of multimodality in social contexts provided by Kress (2003, 2010) has led to changes inboth classroom practice and curriculum guidance. Paying similar attention to everyday mobilepractices, to their “sayings,” “doings” and “relatings” will, I suggest, help to illuminate whereeducational practices could be reimagined, as well as to the necessary distinctiveness of theseinstitutional settings and the formal learning that takes place within them.

ConclusionMobiles are remarkable for the fact that they have been so quickly and so seamlessly absorbed intothe fabric of day-to-day life. This phenomenon could be attributable to a particular genealogy ofpractices: phones have been in circulation for several generations now and computers for ashorter length of time, but their convergence in the guise of sophisticated, portable and fashion-able devices that appeal in terms of their perceived convenience and entertainment value, posi-tions them as objects of desire that we often think we can not do without. Mobiles could be seenas state-of-the-art, well-designed technologies that work for us. Take, for example, the way inwhich Hollan and his colleagues in the field of distributed cognition conceive of ideal human-computer interfaces:

“. . . just like a blind person’s cane. . . so well-designed work materials become integrated into the waypeople think, see and control activities.” (Hollan, Hutchins & Kirsh, 2000, p. 178)

When we observe everyday practices, such as those descriptions of contemporary urban life at thestart of this piece, we may see that mobile use is approaching the state, famously described byHeidegger as “the blind man’s cane,” in which a material object becomes the extension of thehuman being. Further to this, suggestions that new techno-social mobile practices are having atransformative effect on our social life are abundant. For example, it is claimed that mobilecommunications are:

“. . . enabling a new kind of public-private, a kind of fluid social space in which communication occurswhich spans absence and presence, personal and impersonal, micro and macro, local and global” (Sheller,2004, p. 46).

Putting this together with the idea that ways of accessing, sharing and building knowledge arechanging and that we are witnessing the emergence of new “digital epistemologies” (Bruns,2008; Guedon, 2001; Lankshear & Knobel, 2010), points to some fundamental changes in thesocial landscape. How schools and other educational institutions relate to these changes is,however, far from simple. Based on the observations made in this paper, I want to suggest thatthere are two avenues of development that are worth exploring. The first, and the one that has themost immediate currency, is to help students at all stages to develop a critical appreciation of theuses (and abuses) of mobile technology in everyday life. The second, and the more challenging, isto consider how educational experiences might be enhanced or transformed through the use ofmobile technology.

Critical appreciation, or critical digital literacy, has been discussed in a number of related contextsin recent work (see Burnett & Merchant, 2011; Dowdall, 2009; Merchant, 2007). Adopting astandpoint which examines the taken-for-grantedness of mobile technology, which evaluates theecologies of practice associated with mobiles, as well as the inequities of access and use isimportant to understanding and participating in contemporary life and constitutes an importantstrand in this project. A critical perspective is key to interrogating the competing discourses thatsurround mobile technologies—the positive stories of participation and empowerment on the onehand and the more negative associations with consumerism, exploitation and bullying on theother. A citizen of the twenty-first century, it could be argued, needs to know how mobiles can



be used to advantage, when they are disruptive and how they are framed by the desire–acquire–dispose discourse of consumerism, and this, I suggest, is a fitting task for public education in adigital age.

The question of how education might be enhanced or transformed by mobile technology isharder to envisage at this point in time. There are early indications that some mobile devices aremore readily absorbed into school life than others—iPods and iPads are the obvious candi-dates—and this may be because their affordances sit more comfortably in the “site ontologies”of educational settings (Schatzki, 2005). But beyond this, we are left with some intriguing ques-tions. If many everyday practices involve mobile subjects in multiple connections, engaged inlightweight contact, in navigating, reporting and coordinating their movements, what bearingmight this have upon an education that has traditionally been conceived as location-based andpredominantly sedentary? When an educational setting becomes more dispersed, as in theCampsmount example, and when contexts for learning are seen as multiple and diverse, mightthese everyday practices become more relevant to formal learning? Locating information “inthe field,” in so-called augmented reality applications and using audio-visual capture as analternative mode of recording offer interesting possibilities—possibilities that we are just begin-ning to imagine and experiment with. Yet these, with the support of policy changes may, toparaphrase Schatzki (2005), lead to the reworking of educational goals and projects.

Much remains uncertain in the relationship between mobile technologies and education, but Ihave argued that practice theory provides a useful methodology for further exploration. Follow-ing the line of argument in this paper, a number of considerations emerge, and these providesome important areas for further research and development. I have argued that:

1. A more detailed analysis of mobile practices in everyday life is needed. It is suggested thatpractice theory offers some useful frameworks for exploring the day-to-day use of mobiles.

2. A better understanding of how technologies become absorbed into existing and evolvingpractices would be useful.

3. How schools accommodate and adapt everyday mobile practices so that they mesh with thestructures of formal learning is an important topic for further investigation.

Finally, I want to underline that a consideration of the social embedding of mobile technology cannot avoid the interrelated issues of cost, patterns of ownership and use. Mobile phones arepowerful symbols of social capital, and they are also a highly desirable commodity in the globalmarketplace. Particularly amongst the youth population, there are significant issues of owner-ship at stake—which students have devices that are sufficiently nimble to access the mobile web,who owns them and who pays for them, are issues that can not be avoided. In the marketisationof social networking, there are likely to be winners as well as losers. Adopting a critical approach(Burnett & Merchant, 2011) may be a fruitful way of laying bare some of the contradictions thatlie beneath the rhetoric of hyperconnectivity—the promise that we will be always connected toour social networks.

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