mLearning enthusiasm

These are indeed days of intensive work. My master’s research project has to be finished by the 8th February, last Friday I submitted a proposal to the 3rd WLE Mobile Learning Symposium: Mobile Learning Cultures across Education, Work and Leisure, and I will send a paper to mLearn 09 by 15th February.

However, the academic work is not the only area of my life in which mLearning is present. At my work, a high school, as an educational psychologist I am engaging in new ways of using mobile phones in my practices. For instance in a Guidance Programme for students aged 13 to 15 years old, and in a project with a specific class of the 8th grade that has major discipline issues.

Very soon, I will give some details on these two projects. They both make use of mobile phones in a school context.

Is SMS gender related?

mobile learner
In the practical activity proposed to students “My school in SMS” we had some interesting results. There were four students in each group, two girls and two boys. They had to perform the task in pairs that they could organize on their own. All the groups selected pairs of girls and boys, never mixed.

The SMS that girls and boys sent were quite different. To begin with, girls sent more than twice SMS than boys. Girls’ text messages were longer and more elaborated.

These results made me look for some information on gender and mobile phones.

Gender differences related to ICT are not identifiable in mobile phones usage “Recent statistical overviews show that there has been a strong growth in the use of the internet as well as mobile phones among girls, closing previous gender gaps among adolescents” (Berg et al. 2002).

Young people use of mobile phone recent research indicates that: “While both genders are rather similar in the quantitative intensity of usage, they still differ significantly in the qualitative patterns and purposes of use” (Geser, 2006).

Borae & Joohan (2005) present some information from previous research: “As for a mobile phone, the gender difference in conventional telephone use seems to have extended (Leung & Wei, 2000). In a research by Leung and Wei (2000), men tend to use mobile phone as an instrument to do business while women tend to make social calls, and men make use of it more than women do. In addition women have more attachment to their mobile phones than man do, especially to text massaging (Sun, 2004).”

Berg, V.A.L., Gansmo, H.L., Hestflått, K., Lie, M., Nordli, H., Sørensen, K.H. (2002): “Gender and ICT in Norway. An overview of Norwegian research and some relevant statistical information”, SIGIS report http://www.rcss.ed.ac.uk/sigis/public/documents/SIGIS_D02_Part1.pdf

Geser, H. (2006) Are girls (even) more addicted? Some gender patterns of cell phone usage. In: Sociology in Switzerland: Sociology of the Mobile phone. Online Publications. Zuerich, June 2006 http://socio.ch/mobile/t_geser3.pdf

Borae, J. & Joohan, K. (2005) "In a Different Voice (and Text): Gender Differences in Communication Motives and Uses of Mobile Phone" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, Sheraton New York, New York City, NY, Online. http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p13899_index.html