ABSTRACT
Mobile learning is becoming a norm in higher education landscape, yet, instructors are often at a lost on how to acquire, develop or utilize mobile learning solutions to enhance teaching and learning. One source of hesitation lies in the difficulty in the development of educational mobile apps tailored to their specific teaching needs. These apps cannot be designed and developed by the instructors alone, and requires corporation of subject experts, instructional designers, visual designers and computer programmers. What kind of leadership is needed to ensure the functioning of such a multi-disciplinary team? Traditional leader-centred leadership model is increasingly being questioned by scholars for its effectiveness, while collaborative and distributed leadership is emerging in leadership literature and practice. In recent years, a form of collaborative leadership called Community of Practice (CoP) becomes popular in the field of education. CoPs in Hong Kong higher education sector are not uncommon, with themes ranging from English language skills development, service learning, to student assessment. However, there currently lacks a CoP in Hong Kong that addresses the development of educational mobile apps in higher education. We discuss a research that explores the feasibility of setting up a CoP in educational mobile apps development in the context of Hong Kong higher education. The negotiation of meaning is a core activity in the development of CoP (Wenger, 1998). As CoP is a highly self-initiated social process, sensemaking is an important element to form and sustain a CoP. Therefore, we discuss how the proposed research design will utilize the theoretical framework of sensemaking theory (Weick, 1979). The audience of interest will be higher education leadership and administrators who are seeking to better facilitate mobile learning development in higher education.
KEYWORDS
Community of practice, mobile learning, sensemaking