Tug-o-where

Practising mobilities of learning (t)here

Abstract

This paper explores ‘mobilities’ as a research framework for learning not so much in terms of what has to be done to enhance learning using mobile technologies. Instead it focuses on our ways of knowing and learning by ‘being mobile’. It suggests a practice perspective for learning by ‘setting in motion’ not just technologies, but also bodies and spaces. It seeks to understand what is being done - the re-configurations of bodies, spaces and technologies through the increasingly dialectic links between absence and presence, proximity and distance, and individualism and community. More importantly, such relations are merged in the consumption of mobile devices, producing ambivalent realities of absent presence, public privacy and isolated connectivity, which would commonly be considered oxymorons. To move educational research, this paper turns to the mobilities paradigm for a practice perspective to circulate bodies and spaces in motion and articulate other possible metaphors for framing learning in this mobile age.