Collaboration with Mobile Media: Shifting from 'Participation' to 'Co-creation'

While social mobile sites such as Twitter and Facebook have opened new possibilities for human interaction, these applications have barely begun to tap the wellspring of potential for collaborative learning with social media. Although many applications encourage people to be persistently aware of what friends and acquaintances do or care about, rarely do they foster a persistent sense of “doing” or “caring” together. We propose that social mobile applications that support distributed learning communities would benefit from a shift in framing, away from the popular “participation” model of mobile media to a “co-creation” model. We describe a mobile media application in development, “Mobltz”, designed to support collaboration via mobile media co-creation.