Workshop on Ethical Issues in Mobile Learning

This discussion based workshop was intended to address the ethical concerns that should first be considered when a teacher or a researcher designs or investigates any learning opportunity that involves their access to personal information such as that stored on a personal handheld device, or that can be captured through the tools available on such devices. 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. The workshop, organized at the behest of the International Association of Mobile Learning will go behind the school teacher's role ‘in
loco parentis' and the research associations' published codes of conduct to address questions such as what do privacy and informed consent now mean to participants, whether in their virtual life or in the real world and how should teachers and researchers respect it. Issues such as the ease with which photographs can be captured, transferred, transformed and published and who owns them where will also be debated.
The workshop, started with introductory presentations from its programme committee of three leading academics in the field. These were intended to raise workshop participants’ awareness of ethical issues regularly arising in mobile learning research and teaching and to stimulate discussion.
All participants then worked towards the creation of resource materials for teachers and researchers to use to inform themselves about ethical issues relevant to employing or studying mobile learning activities. It was decided that these should take the form of exemplar scenarios with associated questions for consideration. Once created, these will be made freely available from the IAmLearn website http://www.iamlearn.org/.