What does it mean - different perspectives and currently attracting a lot of media attention?

....travelling light....seamless roaming....nomadic....space....flexible connectivity

Yrjo Engestrom has explained in many publications about the incredible research projects in his work, looking at mobility and patterns of humans, patterns of working and learning, building on previous work around cultural-historical activity theory. He describes three communities which have activity and swarming around activity like wildfires - birding, skateboarding and Red-Cross disaster relief teams. Each of these teams use mobile technologies in order to organise and communicate amongst each other. There is no need for a long term central role of authority / organiser, the communities may assume temporary roles where they receive information and communicate to the centre (just like nodes in a computer network) but the centre itself does not provide instructions for how things should be.

He has described the connection and activities between the participants of a  mobile community as mycorrizhae rather than rhizome, mycorrizhae is also organic matter and multi-directional, they have a symbiotic association between the plants and the fungus. They absorb nutrients from their environment and extend out of sight across large areas of land, generating visible parts from time to time, but can also be dormant for long periods of time.  He describes the activity of community members where they disperse and explore different areas and communicate back together amongst the community to share this 'knowledge' as similar to the behaviour of mycorrizhae - activity he calls expansive swarming and multi-directional pulsation in terms of the movements of the community and its participants.

In each of the three examples - skateboarding, birding, disaster-relief, humans are actively exploring and connecting with their environment, moving themselves within it, around it, communicating, connecting with other humans about their discoveries from the environment. The environments could be rural or urban but the patterns of movements may be similar within all three.

Howard Rheingold (2002) Smart Mobs - cell phone users become nodes and broadcasters in their network of people they communicate with, bypassing traditional broadcasting - communities become organised through cell phone communication, communities that can join together physically or virtually (often physically) and self-organise without state or government intervention.

"Technology as an enabler of learning...and of creating connections. The Internet has revealed that large fields of knowledge are given value when connected...technology in communities is essentially just a means of creating fluidity between knowledge segments...and connecting people. What is best approach in which context - holistic, contextually appropriate for your environment. Conversations - devices - cellphones an integrated aspect of how we communicate and how we share organisation of our society...persistent presence. Simple connections do not offer much value unless there is application of the connections. Take everywhere access and combine it with everywhere connections between people…and watch communities grow" 1

There is also another aspect of mobility - how the brain manages physiological movement of human body parts and how these interact within urban or rural environments. Mobile designers, city architects and others (see also urban and rural) analyse human behaviour within the environment on a personal human level too - how humans hold things, carry things, pick things up, communicate with others, move around, how they interact with technology in their environment such as ATMs, kiosks, meters, escalators etc

Refs:

1.Siemens G, Learning Ecology, Communities, and Networks Extending the classroom, (Oct 17, 2003), Available at:  http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/learning_communities.htm and Siemens G, OHIO Digital Commons For Education (2007) Available at:

http://streaming.osu.edu/oln/podcasts/ODCE2007_siemens_keynote_audio.mp3 and Siemens G, Extreme Mobility (2003)  http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2003/07/06/extreme-mobility/ 

Mobilite pages: 

mobilite:HCI

mobilite:NFC RFID

mobilite:rural

mobilite:urbain

mobilite:seamless_roaming

mobsessed 

feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/NicolaAvery/mobility