The Ethics of Mobile Learning: Troubling and Complex

Posted by admin on Jan 19, 2012

Editor's Note: The following is a guest post by John Traxler, Professor of Mobile Learning and Director of the Learning Lab at the University of Wolverhampton, England.  
 

This article is about the ethics of using mobile technologies to deliver, enhance and support learning in developing regions of the world. The people exploring the possibilities of using mobile technologies in these ways are clearly good, nice people who are determined to do good, nice things. So, this should really be a short article.

However, earlier examples of education and technology deployment in developing countries suggest that this may not be as easy and clean as we are led to believe. Recent personal experiences suggest the using mobile tech to enhance learning is a complex and troubling topic, with a strongly counter-intuitive dimension where ethical concerns permeate both the means and the ends.

The ethics of mobile learning in developing regions is an increasingly significant topic since we may be moving away from short-term small-scale projects -- perhaps funded as corporate social responsibility or developmental research --  towards more viable, sustained and substantial interventions. This is even more true as corporations, agencies, and ministries see the phone as a credible, scalable delivery mechanism.

Growing Awareness of Mobile Learning

In October 2010, for example, the UNESCO chair in e-learning in Barcelona sponsored an international seminar that focussed on mobiles, learning and development; at about the same time the GSMA Development Fund published its mLearning: A Platform for Educational Opportunities at the Base of the Pyramid intended to give the network operators ideas about the possible business models. In February 2011, the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona sponsored its first awards for learning and attracted an impressive field from organisations working in development and in August 2011, USAID convened an m4Ed4Dev symposium in Washington DC as a prelude to the foundation of an mEducation Alliance. In November 2011, the WISE conference in Qatar debates mobiles, education and the hard-to-reach and UNESCO hold their first Mobile Learning Week in Paris.

In short, there is a growing awareness of the possibilities of learning with mobile devices. 

At the same time, educational interventions in developing regions deploying mobile technologies are at the intersection of two different sets of ethical concerns: The ethics concering working in developing regions, and the ethics of using mobile technologies. It is possible to examine these separately. They do however converge, as we will see.

The Norms of Learning in a Society

There are norms within any society that uniquely characterise it. These norms define a society along these continuums, for example: Risk-taking vs risk-avoidance; individualism vs collectivism; hierarchy vs equality; or control vs consensus. Any society, community or culture is also uniquely characterised by a specific balance between the formal, the established and the institutional on the one hand, and the informal, the indigenous, the local, the vernacular on the other hand, and perhaps the counter-cultural, the subversive and the disruptive too, amongst peer groups, communities, families, kinship groups and elders.

Within in the latter as well as in the former, there will recognised ways of knowing and coming to know, of learning and teaching, of what to learn, who to learn it from, how to prove you have learnt it, and how to use what you have learned.

That is, there are standards and expectations about learning.

This is true of communities from nations to villages, explaining differences in ethics across different communities. By ethics I mean the shared sense of what is approved, acceptable, or appropriate in terms of interaction, relationship, manners, humour, posture, language, discourse, fashion, and behaviour in any community.

Of course, individuals often belong to more than one community and probably aspire to be accepted by several others. Many countries and regions are characterised by a multiplicity of religions existing side-by-side. These religions form part of the foundation of communities' ideas about ethics and morality but differ each from the other.

The Gap Between the Researcher and Her 'Subjects'

In educational or development interventions, there is usually a significant distance or difference between the researchers and what we might call, the subjects (there is no neutral terminology: respondents, co-researchers, stakeholders are all terms that betray particular ideological perspectives); there is certainly a significant difference between teachers and learners in education, and between local staff and international staff in development.

It may be a difference in geographical or cultural origin; it will probably be a difference in socio-economic class, perhaps in ethnicity, religious affiliation, and in education. From the perspective of these outside interventions, there is much that might be not worth mentioning or taken for granted, and thus many areas where harm might be inadvertently perpetrated.

The Ethics of Digitally-Connected Communities

Let me move from the ethics based within real communities to those within online communities.

We see, in seeking to develop sustaining and appropriate e-learning in developing regions, the focus for pragmatism and for innovation shifting away from static, centralised, institutional digital technologies and shifting towards popular, personal digital technologies. These include Web 2.0 technologies like blogs, wikis, mash-ups, podcasts, RSS feeds, user-generated content; mobile connected personal devices epitomised by the smartphone, accessing the mobile web; social/professional networks like Facebook or LinkedIn; microblogging sites like Twitter and Mxit; cloud-based data and communications services like Gmail, Drop-box, Flickr, YouTube, GoogleGroups, Wikipedia, Evernote; voice-over-IP epitomised by Skype; retailing services such as iTunes, Amazon, Android Market.

These are broad categories but what is common is the increased level of ownership, personalisation, agency, control, familiarity and confidence that they give to individual users and informal groups, unmediated by organisations and institutions (albeit often still controlled by large multinational corporations and funded by ever-more sophisticated and targeted advertising).  The balance of take-up and engagement amongst the various categories depends on local conditions such as connectivity, tariff regimes and network coverage, hardware costs, availability and accessibility, as well as cultural and political factors.

They all, however, create more and more places and modes that people can inhabit, where communities can form, where opinions, identities, ideas, images and information can be produced, stored, shared, evaluated, transmitted, consumed and discussed.

Each community, no matter how informal or ephemeral, will have expectations about language, manners, humour, posture, taste, fashion, etiquette, gesture and behaviour; about what is admirable, acceptable, and appropriate and what is not. In essence, each community will have its own ethics. Directly or indirectly, these ethics that each community defines for itself define also what constitute harm, exclusion, embarrassment, hurt, oppression, and shame for that community.

The Fallacy of "Knowing Best"

My point is - in (educational) interventions in communities in developing regions and in (educational) interventions in communities in cyberspace, there is the very real risk that educators and their institutions, and their funders will assume that they know best; that perhaps ends justify means; that progress, development, technology, and education are necessarily good things, that their own ethics apply in every other community, however distant and different that community may be.

Curiously, when commentators tell us that Facebook or Twitter is the nth biggest country in the world, they are inadvertently making the point that links these various conceptions of country or community. Yes, Facebook and Twitter are different countries, and “they do things differently there.” Similarly, when commentators talk about the cyberspace, blogosphere, the twitterati and phonespace full of digital natives, they identify (however ironically or tentatively) on-line countries within which many smaller communities exist that are populated by individuals with various affiliations and ever-more complex digital identities.

We come to the question of how outsiders can act in ways that are ethically acceptable to communities outside their own.  Furthermore, outsiders probably cannot hope to operate sustainably and credibly unless they act in ways that are aligned and acceptable to these communities. Howver, there can be no universal prescription for educational interventions using mobile technologies.

Photo Courtesy of Flickr user Meanest Indian

 

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd><p><br> <b><i><blockquote>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

More information about formatting options