The Focus Problem in Mobile Learning

Mobile learning has a lot of potential for supporting learning in situations such as in a museum, at a tourist sight or when exploring biological phenomena at a riverside. There learners can interact with their environment and still make use of the advantages of computational power. However, we have found many of such projects hindered by placing the technology too much in the focus of the learner. Instead of interacting with the environment, we found the learners interacting with the device, heads down and ignoring the environment. We found the issue of focus to be a massive problem, one which needs a completely new metaphor for the design of an educational and technical setting. Until now, the mobile devices have been interpreted as small desktops, always in the foreground of the learners' focus. Instead, we propose a different approach, deduced from the usage of mobile phones. Mobile applications need to be designed explicitly to free the learners' focus and push the application to the background. The good news is that the actual changes to be made in existing systems are not as fundamental as one may think