A Mobile Learning Community of Practice: Facilitating Conceptual Shifts in Pedagogy

University lecturers are usually experts within a specific context domain of knowledge, however they are seldom expert teachers or educational technology wizards. Facilitating professional development for lecturers to engage with innovation in teaching and learning utilizing new technologies is no simple process. However, we have found that structuring lecturer professional development around a sustained community of practice can result in a journey of conceptual and pedagogical transformation [1]. The increasing ubiquity of mobile devices and social media provides a platform for enabling pedagogical change. Thus we established a MOBile Community Of Practice (MOBCOP) of lecturers interested in researching the potential of mobile social media in education interested in exploring the concept of the pedagogy-andragogy-heutagogy continuum [2], and how mobile learning can be utilized as a catalyst [3] to move towards student-directed heutagogy. We argue that the MOPCOP framework is potentially applicable to a variety of higher education contexts.