Mobile Scenarios: Supporting Collaborative Learning Among Mobile Workers

1. Introduction Both practitioners and researchers have increasingly emphasized the importance of competence development, training and education in contemporary organizations. Changing organizational demands have made work dependent on distribution and mobility, this has altered the possibilities for workers daily dialogue with colleagues. The context for this research is organizations of distributed and mobile workers and specifically those where knowledge is considered to be the most valuable asset. The term mobile worker is used to describe a person who is in some way physically mobile in their work. Workers in these organizations are naturally less likely to engage in unplanned meetings with colleagues than workers who are co-located. Unplanned meetings create the basis for informal sharing and creation of knowledge. In distributed organizations these issues are often neglected or, at best, formalized and planned. When becoming more distributed and mobile, organizations need new ways to cope with the competence development needs of the workers. The argument raised in this chapter is that, due to these changes, conventional competence development needs to be supplemented by new approaches supported with distributed information technology solutions. As a contribution to this discussion this chapter shows how successful stationary educational approaches can serve as the basis for the distributed and mobile competence development. This is manifested in the design, development and evaluation of the Mobile Scenario Prototype (MoSP). In this chapter we use the term participant to describe a learner in a group using a scenario (Multimedia Scenario or Mobile Scenario). Research on mobility approaches the term from a variety of angels. Kleinrock (1996) takes the perspective of the mobile technology. Luff & Heath (1998) describes the mobile use of artifacts as well as the mobility of persons. Dahlbom & Ljungberg (1998) describe the mobile use of technology. Belotti & Bly (1996) take the mobility of persons as starting point in their research. In this chapter the mobility of people, i.e. the mobile worker is the unit of analysis. The overall research approach is experimental on organizational, pedagogical as well as technological levels. The previous research presented should give a mindset for understanding mobile work and the demands that mobility puts upon technology. However, it gives much less support when looking at the actual design of mobile technologies, the transfer of pedagogical models for mobile learners and the understanding of the impact that these might have when used in organizations.