Values of Mobile Technology in Education

Mobile technology shows promise in supporting and improving education and its delivery. Coupled with the use of mobile devices and software/hardware solutions that make it possible to access educational content, students can be exposed to new educational experience. Applications of mobile technology in education can provide many benefits including greater flexibility, more available education resources, as well as greater convenience, accessibility and responsiveness. As a new phenomenon that will be widely used and adopted in the years to come, the values of mobile technology in education should be better understood and researched. This research outlines our empirical study to examine the values of mobile education from the students’ and instructors’ perspectives. We will employ the Value-Focused Thinking approach to interview subjects and identify their values in mobile education. The result of this research will be presented in the form of a means-ends objective network that captures the values of mobile education and depicts the relationships between these values. The means-ends objective network can provide a conceptual foundation for future studies; it can also benefit the practitioners by providing guidelines for implementation of mobile technology in education.