Towards new social dimensions for children's music making - JamMo as a collaborative and communal M-learning environment

Abstract

Children’s collaborative music making has recently gained a lot of interest in the field of musical development and learning. Mobile learning (M-learning) is a relatively new field of educational research and so far there has been only few studies about children’s musical collaboration with mobile devices. Current knowledge of children’s social development forms a basis for communicational design of the ubiquitous learning environment. In the present study, which is a part of EU FP7 UMSIC research project, a software JamMo (Jamming mobile) will be designed for the Nokia N810 Internet tablet. In this paper, we report on the communal features of JamMo, which are specified to Jammo’s different user interfaces and groups. The design will be based on the the existing literature of children’s social cognition and the development on knowledge of others, social comparison, concept of self, language use, nonverbal communication, emotions and peer interaction and prosocial development. The requirements for social development as well as learning context are described. In the JamMo’s communal features design, we focus especially on peer relations, interaction and collaboration. The end product will be an accessible mobile learning device to be used in classroom and informal creative music learning, and tested with user groups mentioned in stand-alone, ad hoc and networked social contexts to promote social inclusion of children.