Ethical Considerations Emerging in the Study of Mobile Learning

This discussion based workshop will explore the range of ethical issues that can arise when a researcher designs or investigates any learning opportunity that involves personal digital technologies such as the use of mobile phones, Smartphones, iPods and tablets for formal or informal educational purposes. Such information often subsumes home and work or school or college contexts and may well provide more detail of the participating learner’s activities and behaviour that even they are aware of. It will go beyond the research associations’ published codes of conduct to address questions such as what do privacy, image or consent now mean to participants, whether in their virtual or real world and how should researchers respect it. Issues such as the ease with which photographs can be captured, transferred and transformed, who owns them and where they are stored will also be debated.
It will start with a brief introduction to the principles underpinning ethical codes, after which workshop participants will be presented with scenarios based on case studies taken from published research and asked to critically evaluate the methods of data collection employed. Participants will then work in small groups informed by the identified issues to develop their own scenarios to exemplify the range of questions that need to be considered by researchers investigating mobile learning. In the plenary groups will present their scenarios for feedback from the participants. Later they will be written up and made freely available from the website of the International Association of Mobile Learning to inform the wider digital research community.