Student experience and new media to leverage an Infocommunicational case study model

The use of a student’s own mobile digital device for learning purposes has been driven by extremely different perspectives. On one side some educational actors advocating the integration and strategically well-planned use of such technologies. On the other end of this spectrum some actors just completely continue to deny the use of such technologies, with students obliged to leave their mobile technologies switched off and kept away in a specific place controlled by the teacher in the classroom. This paper reports an empirical study that used student’s smartphone experience narratives, in their daily lives, to design and validate an infocommunicational services model for a learning ecosystem. This work was developed in a school cluster at the north of Portugal in a case study research setup with 141 students, 49 teachers and 46 parents. A smartphone application prototype was designed as a research instrument to simulate the model’s characteristics and used to inquire the participants and validate the proposed model. The 8 different prototype task scenarios are explained and the final list of infocommunicational services that comprise the model proposed, designed and tested within this educational community, are a main outcome of this paper. The characteristics of the model are directly related to the case study community’s wishes and needs and due to this with generalizable constraints. On the other hand, the research process reveals potential to be adapted and applied to any other educational community, ecosystem, or school cluster.