The ideas of learning with mobiles in their current forms date back to roughly the turn of the century. Since then, there has been considerable change, not only in the technologies being developed and deployed and the education being delivered and supported but more importantly in the societies in which the technologies and education are embedded. The chapter describes learning with mobiles and mobile learning as two paradigms in the understanding of mobiles and learning. The notion of paradigms allows the authors to draw in not only the underlying axioms but also the chronological development, the geographical distribution, the evolving research agenda, the external environment, the practical and practitioner impact, and the emerging fractures and discrepancies at the periphery of each paradigm. One paradigm, the established one, was essentially a project situated among academics, universities, and countries in a handful of mobile learning “hotspots” in parts of the world’s developed regions, a project intended to enhance and extend institutional e-learning, to deliver on the promise of learning “anywhere, anytime,” and perhaps to develop and deliver learning “just-in-time, just-for-me.” This dates back to the turn of the century and is the established “mobile learning” paradigm. The other paradigm, the emergent one, more recent and less coherent, is driven by the ways in which increasingly pervasive, ubiquitous personal mobile technologies are transforming the ways in which people and communities everywhere generate, discuss, transform, discard, and store ideas, opinions, identities, images, and information and, in effect, become each other’s teachers.
An Empirical Study of Factors Driving the Adoption of Mobile Learning in Omani Higher Education