Enculturating self-directed learners through a facilitated seamless learning process framework

Abstract

The proliferation of mobile technology has opened up or enhanced opportunities for more personalised, self-directed learning experiences beyond the four walls of classrooms. This paper reports an attempt to rise above the past five years’ studies on one-to-one mobile seamless learning by foregrounding the notions of facilitated and self-directed seamless learning to distinguish between externally and self-initiated learning activities. The paper argues that in order to nurture genuine self-directed seamless learners, practitioners ought to develop and enact systematic and cyclic facilitated seamless learning processes to enculturate the students. A domain-independent facilitated seamless learning (FSL) process framework is proposed to guide the design of a new seamless learning environment as well as to analyse existing designs. To demonstrate the versatility of the framework, two case studies are presented – one pertaining to the domain of the Chinese language and another to science learning. Through post-study reflections on the underpinning concepts on seamless learning and empirical findings, the author proposes additional guidelines for more effective applications of the framework. It is hoped that the guidelines can serve to inform the design of mobile seamless learning environments in future.

Keywords:

• mobile seamless learning (MSL)
• learning process framework
• 1:1 technology-enhanced learning
• mobile assisted language learning (MALL)
• mobilised science learning

Acknowledgement

The ‘Move, Idioms!’ project was funded by the Office of Educational Research, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (grant ID: OER 14/09 WLH). The SEAMLESS Project was funded by the National Research Foundation, Singapore (grant ID: NRF2007-IDM005-MOE-008 LCK). I would like to thank Professor Chee-Kit Looi and Ms Yancy Toh for their valuable comments on the paper.