An analysis of teacher-defined activities with mobile technologies: predecessor and successor tool use in the classroom

Abstract

In this paper, different perspectives on the role of the teacher in a classroom equipped with personal digital assistants (PDAs) are presented. We report on four classroom studies conducted in two countries, Norway and the USA. The overall aim is to understand the use of new tools in different contexts. The key question that we explore concerns the teachers’ pedagogical use of the new tool and why certain tools are adopted and others are not. In one case, the activities simulated the affordances and constraints of the tools used prior to the PDA. In the other case, the activities harnessed the affordances and constraints offered by the successor tool, the PDA. We raise the question as to why these tools were used in two different ways. We analyse our findings in terms of sociocultural theory and concepts of human–computer interaction. Finally, we summarize our results and discuss some educational implications.

Keywords:

• affordances and constraints
• mobile technologies
• predecessor tools
• successor tools
• teacher-defined activities
• technology-mediated learning

Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the Kompetansefondet and the University of Agder, Norway. We thank Professor Elliot Soloway, who gave the first author access to classrooms in the USA. We are also grateful to the editor and anonymous reviewers for their critical and constructive comments.

Notes

By mobile technologies, we refer to technologies that are handheld, such as personal digital assistants (PDAs) and smartphones as well as internet tablets or pads (often referred to by their brand names).

This paper is theoretically placed within a broader sociocultural framework and not an activity-theoretical orientation, and we use the terms activity and actions interchangeably. Action describes the process of acting, as in mediated action, while activity describes the type of action. A task set by the teacher (teacher-defined activity) can be writing a story, where the action is mediated by the PDA.

Names of schools, teachers and students are pseudonyms for anonymity purposes.

Palm Archive and Application Manager, website http://paam.goknow.com/index.php?code=2.

Note on transcription conventions:

The names of all children in the transcriptions have been changed, as have the names of the schools. Transcripts are punctuated to make them as readable as possible. The following conventions have been used:

For a description of the Palm IIIc, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_IIIc and Figure 1.

Transfer of data using the PDA's infrared port.

FreeWrite ^™ is a complete word-processing program. In addition to the basic word processor features, advanced features such as auto-capitalization, spell checking and revision help make writing easier for any user, while PicChat enabled simulataneous transfer of data through an infrared port. http://goknow.com/Products/FreeWrite/.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPAQ.