Academic Mobile Research and Social Change

Being an ongoing academic, the nexus of the world of academic and mobile development for social change and mhealth applications is certainly intriguing. Heather Cole Lewis spoke at a recent mobile technology unconference which occurred in Washington DC and discussed some of the following issues:

In what way can the efforts of academia be most immediately useful?

Should academics focus on developing more apps or focus on framework and theory development?

Should their focus be more on monitoring and evaluation?

Should outcomes be based on social capital or more concrete benefits such as economic or health outcomes?

Who exactly do we mean by academia and researchers?

Related to these fundamental questions where those that related to process. For example:

Is the traditional peer-review journal method too slow for mobiles for social change? Mobile technology is being utilized in the field rapidly-how can the successes and failures in the field be integrated into the evidence based research so that research findings are useful?

Likewise, how can the findings of evidence-based research be woven into practice in the field, and scaled up to create larger programs?

Will uses for mobile technology continue to develop without academic critique, until a few years down the line when people push mobile technology to the side and dismiss it as a failure because there are no standardized tools for measurement, or laws for human protection, etc?

The discussion also moved to the important issue of feedback loops and information transparency. If you are in related field to academic mobile research (mobile technology for development, social enterprise, rural technology research, mHealth, or ITC) , its quite a good read–and covers the issues in much more depth than I can here.