The present handbook is the result of a two-year European Learning Partnership. The Grundtvig partnership MyMobile responded to the current trend toward individualisation in mobile and network communication. It reacted to today’s socio-cultural and technological developments, in which computers, laptops and mobile phones provide ubiquitous individual access to communication, entertainment, shopping, internet, media offerings or knowledge archives. For adult users, particularly older persons, degrees of access differ greatly: in some professional and personal contexts, practically no mobile applications are in regular use. Considering the dynamic development of the smart-phone sector and e-learning, there is an urgent need for a constructive response in adult education toward enabling specific target groups to participate in the digital world, making “mobile learning” accessible to more adults.
These technological developments create new pedagogical challenges and offer opportunities for learning at any location – particularly for those who have difficulty in learning. Teaching institutions are called upon to respond to this development. Societal individualisation is producing a demand for new and informal paths to learning, outside of formal educational structures. It is essential that these learning contexts be utilised effectively for lifelong learning. Here, mobile learning can provide new insights and options; it offers possibilities for learning in individualised contexts. Especially for target groups that are educationally disadvantaged, developing didactic methods in mobile learning can lead to more inclusive and effective paths of transfer.
This cooperation among four partner institutions in several European member states (Belgium, Germany, Italy and UK) generated a coherent and comprehensive overview of their successful approaches, which are described in this handbook. Through the mutual development of a shared understanding of “mobile learning”, assessment based on practical learning scenarios, and the dissemination of examples of best practice with the aid of this handbook, the project MyMobile supports the idea of lifelong learning as a key concept of the European information society.