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Drawing from a survey and focus group interviews, this study explores how Swedish upper secondary students reason about the usage of their personal mobile phones in school. As a contribution to the debate around the mobile phone's role in school, we present the students' own voices relative to the question of regulating mobile phone use. We use the notion of infrastructure for learning (Guribye and Lindström 2009) to analytically approach the social and technological dimensions of the students' narratives on their use of mobile phones in school practice. The students' narratives present an intricate account of students' awareness and concern of the implications of mobile phone presence in school. The students describe that the mobile phone is both a tool that facilitates their school work and a distraction that the teachers pursue. In school, the students are balancing their mobile phone usage with the teachers' arbitrary enforcement of policy. Despite this process, the mobile phone is becoming a resource in the students' infrastructure for learning. The findings from this study add to the limited body of research on the use of mobile phone in upper secondary school from a student perspective.

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In this paper I investigate the ways in which participants in mobile-phone conversations orient to each other's location, activities, and availability. By looking at data from recorded mobile-phone conversations, I use a conversation analytic approach to make initial observations on the character of mobile-phone conversations. I found that the frequent question “what are you doing?” sometimes caused a location to be given as part of the answer which shows how location, activity, and availability are strongly related. The participants thus obtained information about location, when this was considered relevant, through asking about activity. Location seemed especially relevant if it provided information about a future meeting. In some of the conversations where it seemed there was something going on where the ‘called party’ was located, the ‘caller’ reacted by initiating the conversation with a strategy which gave the called party a chance to end the conversation.

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The everyday use of smartphones with high quality built-in cameras has lead to an increase in museum visitors' use of these devices to document and share their museum experiences. In this paper, we investigate how one particular photo sharing application, Instagram, is used to communicate visitors' experiences while visiting a museum of natural history. Based on an analysis of 222 instagrams created in the museum, as well as 14 interviews with the visitors who created them, we unpack the compositional resources and concerns contributing to the creation of instagrams in this particular context. By re-categorizing and re-configuring the museum environment, instagrammers work to construct their own narratives from their visits. These findings are then used to discuss what emerging multimedia practices imply for the visitors' engagement with and documentation of museum exhibits. Drawing upon these practices, we discuss the connection between online social media dialogue and the museum site.

This paper is based on a study of the ways in which a group negotiated the use of a new mobile technology. The group was made up of ski instructors who, during a one-week ski trip, were equipped with a mobile awareness device called the Hummingbird. The group was studied using ethnomethodologically inspired qualitative methods, with the focus on the group members' different views of the Hummingbird's intended use. Negotiations of use occurred using two methods: talk and action. The users negotiated issues such as where and when to use the technology, and whether to consider the Hummingbird a work tool or a gadget for social events. Further, the empirical results clearly show how negotiations of new, mobile technology differ from stationary technology.