Call for Papers: The 21st World Conference on Mobile, Blended and Seamless Learning (mLearn 2022)

Smart mobile learning for education, lifelong learning and continuous professional development

BLENDED – 10 -12^th of October 2022

mLearn is the leading international conference on mobile, blended, seamless and contextual learning and annually attracts participants from more than 60 countries. mLearn 2022 provides a forum to share knowledge, research and practices, as well as debate critical issues pertaining to a mobile and connected future learning spaces. Interesting keynote speakers give an overview of and challenge our research domain by providing their perspectives and critical reflections.

mLearn 2022 will take place in a hybrid mode, with the physical location at the Open University of the Netherlands (OU), Heerlen, and is organised by the OU, the open and higher distance education institute of the Netherlands and Flanders (Belgium), in a joint venture with EADTU, the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities. There is a maximum number of participants that can attend ‘live on location’ in Heerlen. More info on the conference can be found here: http://www.iamlearn.org/mlearn/

Conference Theme

The 2022 conference theme is:

Smart mobile learning for education, lifelong learning and continuous professional development”.

Personal mobile devices have incorporated most of our daily private and professional lifes and intertwine with our activities and habits. We often carry them around wherever we go, and their functionality afford a wide range of activities, such as communicating with others, telling our stories, playing, collecting and sharing data and things that we love (e.g. music, photo’s), accessing information, navigating unknown places and contributing to a better world by e.g. crowdsourcing or measuring light pollution.  Due to their portability, they are ‘at hand’ and often part of the environments we move through, while fulfulling different social roles and associated activities. Thus, they have both altered our environment as well as our possibilities to shape, interact with and contribute to these environments ourselves. 

However, looking at the learning design opportunities they offer for altering, connecting and strengthening formal, non-formal and informal learning processes in and ‘over’ private, professional and educational environments, their full potential is not yet exploited. Often, they have been thought of mainly as ‘delivery’ tools, offering for example college schedules or micro-modules on the spot. However, their affordances to support active, contextualised and meaningful ‘in-situ’ as well as ‘cross-over’ learning between contexts are less exploited and wide-scale practical implementation in society is obviously still ‘a bridge to far’.

In this mLearn2022 conference we explore and discuss how personal mobile devices and their affordances currently do and potentially could affect personal (formal, non-formal and informal)  learning  processes in and across contexts and what these alternate perspectives mean for the learning design field.

GENERAL TRACK TOPICS: 

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Theoretical contributions extending our understanding of the interaction between people, mobile devices and their environment/context, in the function of learning and support processes (both by actors as well as technology-enhanced services)
• Mobile support for achieving (specific) types of learning outcomes, such as achieving meta-cognitive skills, practice-oriented skills (e.g. presentation, negotiation, …), application-and practice-based knowledge, …
• Mobile domain-related research, such as mobile inquiry-based learning, citizen science, language learning, STEAM education, and other domain-related perspectives
• Innovative research methods for understanding people learning with mobile devices
• Emerging pedagogies, approaches, mechanisms and instruments to support mobile learning for specific target groups, such as children, adolescents, adult lifelong learners, learners in ‘distributed’ settings, professionals learning ‘on and from the job’.
• Specific mobile formats and services to enhance formal, non-formal and informal learning and support processes, such as mobile serious games, mobile VR and AR applications, AI solutions, peer-feedback and support instruments, experiential learning support, …
• Elaborations on design theory and models for mobile and seamless learning design, blended, contextualised and hybrid learning
• Research on mobile, blended and seamless learning scenario’s as part of (post-)pandemic education
• Pilots with emerging technologies enabling mobile and contextualised learning
• Implementation and outreach strategies to increase implementation and scaling of mobile and contextualised learning
• Wearable and sensor-based educational solutions

Important dates

• Submission of full and short papers, posters and workshop proposals: 15^th of May 2022
• Notification of acceptance: 1^st of June 2022
• Submission of camera-ready papers: 1^st of July 2022
• Conference dates: 10 till 12^th of October 2022

This year all full conference papers will be published in a Special Issue of the International Journal of Mobile and Blended Learning (IJMBL). IJMBL is the official journal of the International Association for Mobile Learning. All short papers and abstracts will be published on the IAmLearn website. Authors will also invited to submit extended versions for publication in the special issue.

SUBMISSIONS

Submission options include:

• Long Papers (5,000-7,000 words) – IGI article length
• Short Papers (2,000 – 2,500 words)
• Practice Papers (Extended Abstracts 1,500-2,000 words)
• Posters (Abstract 500-1,000 words)
• Panels/Roundtables (Abstract 500-1,000 words)
• Workshop/Tutorial (Abstract 500-1,000 words)

Papers should be formatted in line with IGI Global Author’s guidelines and submitted through EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=mlearn2022

See the paper submissions section of the website for more details on how to submit, details on the review process and for templates.

 

CONFERENCE CHAIRS

Dr. Ellen Rusman (OU)
Dr. Roland Klemke (OU)
Drs. George Ubachs (EADTU)

LOCAL CONFERENCE ORGANIZATION COMMITTEE

Dr. Alessandra Antonaci (EADTU)
Dr. Emmy Vrieling (OU)
Dr. Maartje Henderikx (OU)
Dr. Olga Firssova (OU)
Ms. Marina Pongraz (OU)