Designing Mobile Phone Interfaces for Collaborative Learning in Everyday Life

Literature points out new perspectives for collaborative learning through the use of mobile devices. This subject has being widely discussed by education and computer science researchers, showing as one of the strands for the future of (in)formal education. By using mobile devices, learning could be developed through collaborative interactions at any time or location. This represents a new possibility for people “learning while doing” their everyday activities. Moreover, the advent of mobile phones has created new opportunities that go beyond simple communication acts; their software interfaces have a primary role in enabling the collaboration among the evolved parties. We propose a novel approach which uses mobile collaborative learning for supporting everyday life tasks in general. In order to enrich the mobile collaborative learning, software applications should better explore the interfaces and multimedia resources available in current mobile devices. The mobile interfaces could support and boost situations that lead to learning, however it is essential to minimize the interaction difficulties, and maximize the learning activities itself. To achieve that, this work presents a design proposal and prototype of mobile phone interfaces for supporting mobile collaborative discussion, illustrating the ideas and the design decisions. This new approach aims to the enrichment of mobile interfaces, employing different medias and forms of interaction for the purpose of to constitute “wireless” communities of knowledge sharing about any issue or topic; thus stimulating and promoting the constitution of “communities of practice” through interaction, in which members can share common problems and/or work domain. In the proposed design, the resources of the interfaces are essentials to enable users to explain better their ideas; for that the paper presents multimedia interfaces to share images, sounds, and videos during the discussions. We also present a discussion about the impacts of this approach for informal education, and preliminary results from a qualitative analysis with real users.