Mid Sweden University

The chapter aims at discussing challenges for design based on a context-dependent and complex understanding of mobile learning. The chapter elaborates on contextual aspects of learning and how these are related to mobility in terms of various issues involving physical space (locations), conceptual space (content), social space (social groups), technology, and learning dispersed over time. From these aspects, mobile learning is emphasised as a complex social process, including learning mediated by personal, wireless, and mobile devices through communication between human beings that participate in multiple contexts. Four challenges are discussed based on this complex understanding of mobile learning. Three of these challenges include the relationship between learning and educational settings. The first challenge relates to learning as a phenomenon occurring in the intersection of various physical locations and social groups. The second concerns the impact that personal, mobile, and wireless Internet-connected technology has on the monopoly of knowledge. The third concerns the boundaries between formal and informal learning. To reach a coherent conceptualisation useful in designing for mobile learning the chapter links these challenges to pragmatist and sociocultural ideas about the relation between human beings and the surrounding context. These three challenges are embraced by a fourth challenge: the conceptualisation of mobile learning and how it relates to concepts and principles for design. To meet these challenges designing for mobile learning benefit from the deployment of concepts built from a transactional worldview. Such worldview suggests the use of intersectional concepts that embrace several conceptual aspects of mobility in designing for learning.