Learning As Conversation: Transforming Education in the Mobile Age Mike Sharples Centre for Educational Technology and Distance Learning University of Birmingham United Kingdom m.sharples@bham.ac.uk Introduction Every era of technology has, to some extent, formed education in its own image. That is not to argue for the technological determinism of education, but rather that there is a mutually productive convergence between main technological influences on a culture and the contemporary educational theories and practices. Thus, in the era of mass print literacy, the textbook was the medium of instruction, and a prime goal of the education system was effective transmission of the canons of scholarship. During the computer era of the past fifty years, education has been re-conceptualised around the construction of knowledge through information processing, modelling and interaction. Now, as we enter a new world of global digital communication, it is no surprise that there is a growing interest in the relations between mobile technology and learning. What we lack, however, is an innovative and enhancing educational framework for the mobile age. A framework for learning in the mobile age should recognise the essential role of communication in the process of coming to understand the world and in negotiating agreements among differing perspectives. It should also indicate the importance of context in establishing meaning, and the transformative effect of digital networks in supporting virtual communities that transcend barriers of age and culture. One starting point is to examine learning as communication. The educational theorist John Dewey claimed: Not only is social life identical with communication, but all communication (and hence all genuine social life) is educative. To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience. One shares in what another has thought and felt and in so far, meagerly or amply, has his own attitude modified. Nor is the one who communicates left unaffected. … Except in dealing with commonplaces and catch phrases one has to assimilate, imaginatively, something of another's experience in order to tell him intelligently of one's own experience. … It may fairly be said, therefore, that any social arrangement that remains vitally social, or vitally shared, is educative to those who participate in it. (Dewey, 1916)