LEARNING WITH UNIQUE MOBILE APPS: PRINCIPLES AND IMPLICATIONS

The study presented in this paper focused on the unique affordances of mobile technologies for learning. After screening more than two hundred mobile applications for learning, sixty unique apps were selected for an inductive analysis. From the thorough examination of the selected unique apps, five categories of uniqueness with regard to learning with mobile applications have emerged, and an overarching profile to characterize such apps has been outlined. Common to all emergent categories are the experience of learning in blended spaces. This primary pedagogical principle leads to additional principles such as embodied cognition, the device as a discovery machine, open playful design, and mobile system thinking. The paper details the emergent categories, and then discusses those techno-pedagogical principles and the interrelationships between them. We conclude with drawing a profile of uniqueness, enabling utilization of such principles for deep understanding of the environment and for promoting new literacy of 'mobile system thinking'.