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Abstract: With the shortage of sufficient computer laboratories in previously disadvantaged Universities, mobile phones provide a platform that, if exploited correctly, could benefit both students and educators. This research paper focuses on the use of mobile phones as a platform to pursue collaborative research work amongst a group of third year undergraduate Information Systems students. The students used an application called WhatsApp to have group conversations about their research project. The text messages from these conversations were analysed using Conversation Analysis (Ten Have, 2007). The study shows how a group of students use Whatsapp to facilitate their work outside the classroom. The students primarily had conversations about meetings, discussed their project and also had conversations that were not related to their project. What was clear from the study was that there were significant differences between verbal conversations and conversations using mobile application. The findings also indicate significant collaboration and learning taking place outside the classroom without the influence of the lecturer, and calls for further research in order to understand the role of the lecturer in a m-learning environment.
Keywords: m-learning, whatsapp, conversation analysis, collaborative learning
1. Introduction
The use of mobile phones as a platform for mobile learning presents both students and lecturers with an opportunity for innovative pedagogy (Sharples, Taylor, & Vavoula, 2007). Mobile learning (m-learning) is less restrictive than other forms of technology-enabled learning, as students are able to participate in lessons and access material outside of class hours without having to be in the classroom or at the University (Laurillard, 2007).
Most students either have a mobile phone, or has access to one (Beger & Sinha, 2012), and at this campus, students spend a significant amount of time with social networking on their smartphones, with limited use of phone calls or sms's (Uys et al., 2012). With the use of mobile phones, students have a higher level of access to online resources than through fixed infrastructure, and have more flexibility in its usage, as they can communicate with their lecturers and other students in real time.
Whereas mobile phones provide the technology for m-learning, it is the smartphone applications and specifically the social networking and social media applications that provide the platform for students to interact with and learn...