Toward Third Generation Threaded Discussions for mobile learning: Opportunities and challenges for ubiquitous collaborative environments

The mobile communication revolution has led to pervasive "connectedness" - as evidenced by the explosive growth of instant messaging in the home, and more recently, the enterprise and, together with the convergence of mobile computing, provides a basis for extending collaborative environments toward truly ubiquitous "immersion." Leveraging the true anytime/anywhere access afforded by mobile computing, it becomes possible to develop applications that not only are capable of responding to users whenever/wherever, on demand, but that also may actively "seek out" and engage users when the need arises. Thus, immersive environments need no longer be thought of strictly in terms of physical immersion with clearly discernable "enter" and "exit" events, but rather they may be extended, through mobile-enabled computing, toward ubiquity in terms of both time and space. Based on Media Synchronicity Theory, potential benefits are envisioned, particularly in the case of collaborative learning environments, from shortened response cycles and increased real time interaction opportunities. At the same time, a number of challenging issues must be addressed in designing such an environment to ensure user acceptance and to maximize realization of the potential. Third Generation (3G) Threaded Discussion has been conceptualized as an environment, well suited to mobile learning (m-learning) that could leverage mobile-enabled ubiquity to achieve a degree of extended immersion and thereby accrue the associated collaboration benefits. Exploring this conceptualization serves to help surface both the opportunities and the challenges associated with such environments and to identify promising design approaches, such as the use of intelligent agents.