What is the role of mobile devices in education? Mobile phone ownership has proliferated at an explosive rate over the last decade. The entrenchment of this technology in everyday life necessitates a critical examination of the roles it can play in education. A varied cross-section of case studies in mobile education was selected and analyzed with the primary aim of providing a critical landscape of mobile education and the secondary aim of extrapolating frameworks from usage patterns. Exemplar case studies were reviewed for insight into mobile education and synthesized into a framework using meta-ethnography. The framework consists of three usage categories: Accessing Learning, Enhancing Learning, and Managing Learning.

Arif Anwar is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). His research involves the use of mobile devices for education and literacy gains in developing settings. He has previously worked for BRAC Bangladesh and has been published in Prospects, UNESCO's Quarterly Review of Comparative Education.