Mobile Education: The Pros, the Cons, and the Unanswered Questions

Written by: Jennifer Patterson Lorenzetti
Published On: May 11, 2012

"If you look at the students on campus, a third to a half of them leaving class immediately pull out their cell phone. We think, 'if we could harness that, it would be a good thing.'" This scenario, identified by Albert Ingram, associate professor of Lifespan Development and Educational Sciences at Kent State University, repeats itself on campuses across the nation, and it is often the reason that distance education administrators contemplate adding mobile learning to their distance education offerings.

However, like all distance education technologies, the move to mobile devices has pros and cons, and incorporating these devices should be a decision made to support pedagogy, not simply to use a technology because of the coolness factor or the ubiquity of the device.

As an example, in the late 1990s, the author of this piece interviewed an educational device manufacturer who was enthused about the device's ability to take computing power out of the classroom into the field. One of the key attributes of the devices was...