Written by: John Traxler
Abstract: There are now many accounts of mLearning projects and pilots, and perhaps solutions, for International Development. This paper does not add to these but questions the ways in which researchers and policymakers talk, think and reason about them. The issues being addressed here are not research issues but are the relationships, in the field of learning for international development, of these accounts to the wider contexts in which this research takes place. Rather than assuming that evidence, sampling, evaluation and hypotheses, for example, are of internal, academic or methodological interest, this paper tries to explore their wider context, itself not methodologically straightforward. These are however important issues because learning with mobiles in international development has started to move from practitioners, activists and researchers to agencies, corporations and policymakers. This is a transformation methodologically, ethically, culturally and pedagogically as new drivers, constraints and goals come into play.
Keywords: Digital literacy, technology, practice, teaching, Mexico, secondary school, socio cultural theory.