Ubiquitous Learning

by Bill Cope (Editor), Mary Kalantzis (Editor), Simon J. Appleford (Contribution by), Patrick Berry (Contribution by), Jack Brighton (Contribution by)

Overview

This collection seeks to define the emerging field of "ubiquitous learning," an educational paradigm made possible in part by the omnipresence of digital media, supporting new modes of knowledge creation, communication, and access. As new media empower practically anyone to produce and disseminate knowledge, learning can now occur at any time and any place. The essays in this volume present key concepts, contextual factors, and current practices in this new field.

Contributors are Simon J. Appleford, Patrick Berry, Jack Brighton, Bertram C. Bruce, Amber Buck, Nicholas C. Burbules, Orville Vernon Burton, Timothy Cash, Bill Cope, Alan Craig, Lisa Bouillion Diaz, Elizabeth M. Delacruz, Steve Downey, Guy Garnett, Steven E. Gump, Gail E. Hawisher, Caroline Haythornthwaite, Cory Holding, Wenhao David Huang, Eric Jakobsson, Tristan E. Johnson, Mary Kalantzis, Samuel Kamin, Karrie G. Karahalios, Joycelyn Landrum-Brown, Hannah Lee, Faye L. Lesht, Maria Lovett, Cheryl McFadden, Robert E. McGrath, James D. Myers, Christa Olson, James Onderdonk, Michael A. Peters, Evangeline S. Pianfetti, Paul Prior, Fazal Rizvi, Mei-Li Shih, Janine Solberg, Joseph Squier, Kona Taylor, Sharon Tettegah, Michael Twidale, Edee Norman Wiziecki, and Hanna Zhong.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780252034961
Publisher:	University of Illinois Press
Publication date:	01/12/2010
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Bill Cope is a research professor in educational policy studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is coeditor of The Future of the Book in the Digital Age.Mary Kalantzis is the dean of the College of Education and professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is coauthor of Cultures of Schooling: Pedagogies for Cultural Difference and Social Access.

Read an Excerpt

UBIQUITOUS LEARNING

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UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Copyright © 2009 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-03496-1

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Chapter One

Ubiquitous Learning An Agenda for Educational Transformation

BILL COPE AND MARY KALANTZIS

Ubiquitous Computing

At first glance, it is the machines that make ubiquitous learning different from heritage classroom and book-oriented approaches to learning. These appearances, however, can deceive. Old learning can be done on new machines. Using new machines is not necessarily a sign that ubiquitous learning has arrived. And some features of ubiquitous learning are not new—as Chip Bruce highlights so clearly in his chapter, they have a proud place in the history of educational innovation, which stretches back well before the current wave of machines.

But to focus on the machines for the moment, there is an obvious link between ubiquitous learning and ubiquitous computing. The term "ubiquitous computing" describes the pervasive presence of computers in our lives. Personal computers and laptops have become an integral part of our learning, work, and community lives, to the point where, if you do not have access to a computer with reasonable bandwidth you can be regarded as disadvantaged, located as a "have not" on the wrong side of the digital divide. Meanwhile, many other devices are becoming more computerlike (in fact, more and more of them are computers or have computer power built in): mobile phones, televisions, global positioning systems, digital music players, personal digital assistants, video cameras, still cameras, and game consoles, to name a few. These devices are everywhere. They are getting cheaper. They are becoming smaller and more portable. They are increasingly networked. This is why we find them in many places in our lives and at many times in our days. The pervasive presence of these machines is the most tangible and practical way in which computing has become ubiquitous.

Does ubiquitous computing lay the groundwork for ubiquitous learning? Yes, it does. Does it require us to make a paradigm shift in our education paradigms? Certainly. However, our definition of ubiquitous learning in the first paragraph of our introduction was more conditional than this. We said: "Ubiquitous learning is a new educational paradigm made possible in part by the affordances of digital media." The qualifications in this statement are crucial. "Made possible" means that there is no directly deterministic relationship between technology and social change. Digital technologies arrive, and almost immediately, old pedagogical practices of didactic teaching, content delivery for student ingestion, and testing for the right answers are mapped onto them and called a "learning management system." Something changes when this happens, but disappointingly, it is not much. And another qualifier: "affordance" means you can do some things easily now, and you are more inclined to do these things than you were before simply because they are easier. You could previously have engaged in collaborative and inquiry learning in a traditional classroom and heritage institutional structures, but it was not easy. Computers make it easier. So, the new things that ubiquitous computing makes easier may not in themselves be completely new—modes of communication, forms of social relationship, or ways of learning. However, just because the new technology makes them easier to do, they become more obviously worth doing than they were in the past. Desirable social practices that at times went against the grain because of their idealistic impracticality become viable. The technology becomes an invitation to do things better, often in ways that some people have been saying for a long time they should be done.

However, to take the argument one step further, could we educators take the lead in the development of appropriate technologies rather than recycle hand-me-down technologies that were originally designed for another purpose? Here's an apocryphal technology story about the connections between technology and social relationships. PLATO, the world's first computer learning environment, was invented here at the University of Illinois in 1960 and went through extensive research and development processes that resulted in a number of iterations over the next two decades. PLATO can be credited as the beginnings, not just of e-learning, but the computing world we know today. It only took the form it did in order to meet specifically educational needs. In this sense, education, not technology, was the driver. Some remarkable inventions came out of this educational laboratory. In the 1960s, the plasma screen was invented because learners needed a visual interface, not computer punch cards, for ease of interaction in the learning context. The touch screen was also invented, so students could interact with the questions and information on the screen. In the 1970s, a pioneer messaging system was created so that teachers and learners could communicate with each other. This was perhaps the world's first online community, and the beginnings of communications technologies that soon became message boards, e-mail, online chat, and instant messaging. The first multiplayer online games were created for PLATO. The capacity to connect peripheral devices was also developed, and one of the first was an early music synthesizer used in music education and research, which also had the capacity to play computer-recorded music. Now that these technologies have become cheap and accessible, we find ourselves using their descendants every day of our lives. But it is salutary to know that they were invented in a moment of educational exploration, to support the endeavor of learning. Education led. The technology followed. To make progress with ubiquitous learning, this has to happen again.

Technologies are the product of social needs. When they work for us, their social benefits sometimes prove to be more revolutionary than their technical specifications. Before we get back to the educational story, consider the following social effects of what has, since the days of PLATO, become ubiquitous computing.

SITUATED COMPUTING

Ubiquitous computing situates information processing, communications, and recording and playback devices everywhere in our lives. We make meanings through these devices (to others as well as making sense of things for ourselves). We represent ourselves through digitized media, recording more and more of our lives, deliberately, impulsively, or incidentally. We do this in many media—image, text, and sound—because one of the key features of the world of computing is to reduce image, sound, and word to the same stuff, the stuff of zeros and ones.

INTERACTIVE COMPUTING

Ubiquitous computing is interactive. In one common combination, a person connects with the machine, and the machine answers on the basis of its programmed functions. The machine is "smart" only insofar as the programmer has supplied abstract variables and second-guessed in anticipation the range of user responses, but only in general terms. This is how, somewhat intelligently, the machine returns to the user whatever data it has been given the chance to record, sometimes in combinations that neither the person who entered the data nor the programmer quite anticipated. In an different interactive scenario, one person connects to another through the machine. Until recently, this happened through different, monomodal, and relatively separate analog media. Now the media are (literally, technically) converging around digitization—so we can connect synchronously or asynchronously via recording, using a remarkable range of permutations of text, sound, and image. Not only can we connect in more ways, we can do it more easily and more cheaply. Mike Twidale in his chapter highlights this inherently sociable character of ubiquitous computing.

PARTICIPATORY COMPUTING

Ubiquitous computing spawns ubiquitous media, which spawn participatory culture. Here are a few of the signs of our times: The centrally designed voice of experts, the print encyclopedia, is supplanted by the tens of thousands of unnamed authors, a "general public" that has contributed to Wikipedia and that updates and extends it daily. Competing with the traditional newspaper, blogs provide information and commentary on the events of the day—anyone can set one up; any reader can talk back. And competing with broadcast television, anyone can post a video to YouTube. In his chapter, Jack Brighton calls these new, digital media "ubimedia." Unlike the old media, they are cheap, accessible, and easy enough for anyone to master. This is the stuff of computer-enabled participatory culture, in which the distinctions between writer and readers, and creators and audiences, are rapidly becoming blurred (Jenkins 2006).

SPATIALLY AGNOSTIC COMPUTING

Ubiquitous computing creates new senses of space. Where you work, where you shop, where you learn, where you are entertained, and where you live—these all used to be defined spaces: built, institutionalized, impressively solid. Ubiquitous computing makes the boundaries between these spaces porous at least, but possibly even throws into question the long-term relevance of what were until recently regarded to be unshakable spatial, institutional, and life boundaries.

TEMPORALLY AGNOSTIC COMPUTING

Ubiquitous computing also creates new senses of time. To reframe the argument that Nick Burbules makes in his chapter, ubiquitous computing brings together the "now" and the "whenever." The start of the class, or the movie, or the working day does not need to begin at a specific time when the capacity to record easily and cheaply facilitates asynchronous communication. "Now" can be made sooner or later. Observing other people's timetables is increasingly replaced by scheduling for oneself.

COGNITIVELY INTEGRATED COMPUTING

Ubiquitous computing requires new ways of mental getting around, new logics of social navigation, new uses of the computer as an appendage to our thinking. We think by weaving our way through icons and hypertextual links. We search rather than follow instructions. We create our own reading paths rather than read things in the order in which the author thought would be good for us. New ways of thinking are emerging in which the mind uses the computer as a supplement to its own cognitive powers. Users work their way around the world of knowledge and imagination having mastered "semantic technologies" of ubiqiuitous computing: search algorithms, menus, formal schemas, user-generated tags, and folksonomies and ontologies. All of these allow you to work your way through the structured data of files and databases. In these activities, our thinking becomes computer-mediated.

INTUITIVE COMPUTING

As a matter of habit, ubiquitous computing becomes a deeply intuitive part of our life and world experience, a kind of second nature once we have mastered the devices. Adults have managed to learn their way into the world of ubiquitous computing, or at least those on the "have" side of the digital divide have done so. They have become fluent second-language speakers of the languages of ubiquitous computing. They speak it very well at times, but with an accent revealing traces of a predigital childhood. Like ducks to water, however, today's children have grown up as "digital natives." As Vanna Pianfetti says in her chapter, they speak ubiquitous computing as if it had always been a natural part of human affairs. So ubiquitous has this computing become that, for native and second-language speakers alike, it is at times hard to notice that it is even there. It's just what we do to live today.

Causes for Caution

For all the optimism about the social transformations that might be wrought as we explore the affordances of ubiquitous computing, we need to turn a cautious eye to its ever-present dangers. In a world where inequality is more common than equality, we need to build bridges across the digital divide to the "bandwidth disadvantaged," the dead zones, and the people who cannot afford to buy the latest and best devices, even though they are getting cheaper (Mitchell 1995; Virilio 1997). However, there are paradoxes in these new machines. They are often relatively cheap, with low-cost infrastructure, and thus more accessible than preceding media of knowledge, culture, representation, and communication. People who could never afford a landline are now getting mobile phones. People who did not have well-stocked libraries can now access a world of knowledge through a computer in a library or community center. And in education, the champions of ubiquitous computing are working on the problem of the digital divide in the form, for instance, of the One Laptop per Child initiative.

We also need to make sure we do more than mechanize and automate practices of the present out of conservative inertia when we have the opportunity to implement better ones or invent new ones. The machine-marked tests and the back-to-the-future learning management systems with their lockstep curriculum spring to mind. We need to do more than this, hence the notion of a transformed and transformative pedagogy in the environment of ubiquitous learning.

Moreover, we need to guard against "gray ecologies," in which we are tethered to machines, or, as Michael Peters says in his chapter, caught on one side or the other of the Cartesian dualism of mind and body. We might be able to make the machines more lifelike, better able to represent embodiment along the lines of the examples Karahalios and Tettegah describe in their chapters. However, just because the computing is ubiquitous, not all learning has to be machine-mediated and distanced from its natural and embodied sources. The machines need to be seen, not as ends in themselves, but as documentation devices for off-screen learner activity—for instance, digital photographs taken by learners engaged in nature study, video or audio recordings of oral or gestural performance, and the like. In other words, we need to guard against any reduction of the richness of person-to-person or hands-on activity. The solution for ubiquitous learning is "out there" documentation (take the documentation devices with you everywhere). In other words, the learner does not have to be confined to human-machine interaction or human-machine-human mediation, because the machine also serves as an ancillary documentary device for human-human, and human-activity learning.

And, as Caroline Haythornthwaite points out in her chapter, we need to watch out for networked individualism, outsourced learning-on-the-cheap that bypasses the teacher, and an anti-intellectual populism where the only thing that trumps the wisdom of the crowd is the wisdom of the sponsored link.

Ubiquitous Learning

We can use new technologies to learn old things in old ways. We can set up the ubiquitous computing devices in our contemporary world to do old-fashioned didactic teaching: the teacher or publisher puts content into a learning management system; the learners work through the content step by step; the learners take a test at the end and get a grade that indicates whether they have passed or failed. We can use computers to re-create traditional, transmission pedagogies that anticipate a mimetic relationship to knowledge: absorb the theories, the practice formulas, the facts, the greats, the canon, the sociomoral truths that others have deemed will be good for us. There are some differences, to be sure—the image of the solar system in the old science textbook stays still, but the planets move around the sun in the digital "learning object"—but the learners' relationships to knowledge and the processes of pedagogy have not changed in any significant way (Kalantzis 2006; Kalantzis and Cope 2008).

Following, we suggest seven changes in the educational milieu that are congruent with ubiquitous learning. Each of these proposed "moves" explores and exploits the potentials of ubiquitous computing. None, however, is a pedagogical idea or social agenda that is new to the era of ubiquitous computing. The difference today is that there is now no practical reason not to make any of these moves. The affordances are there, and if we can implement these strategies, perhaps we should. When we make more and more of these moves, we may discover a cumulative result, such that a new educational paradigm begins to emerge. As this paradigm takes shape, educators might also assume a leading role in technological innovation.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from UBIQUITOUS LEARNING Copyright © 2009 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction: The Beginnings of an Idea, Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope....................ix
1 Ubiquitous Learning: An Agenda for Educational Transformation, Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis....................3
2 Meanings of "Ubiquitous Learning," Nicholas C. Burbules....................15
3 Ubiquitous Learning, Ubiquitous Computing, and Lived Experience, Bertram C. Bruce....................21
4 Participatory Transformations, Caroline Haythornthwaite....................31
5 Ubiquitous Media and the Revival of Participatory Culture, Jack Brighton....................49
6 Notes toward a Political Economy of Ubiquitous Learning, Michael A. Peters....................62
7 From Ubiquitous Computing to Ubiquitous Learning, Michael B. Twidale....................72
8 Ubiquitous Learning: Educating Generation I, Evangeline S. Pianfetti....................93
9 Ubiquitous Learning with Geospatial Technologies: Negotiating Youth and Adult Roles, Lisa Bouillion Diaz....................100
10 Digital Divide and Higher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa, Fazal Rizvi....................109
11 Cyberenvironments: Ubiquitous Research and Learning, James D. Myers and Robert E. McGrath....................119
12 Immersive Environments for Massive, Multiperson, Online Learning, Alan B. Craig, Steve Downey, Guy Garnett, Robert E. McGrath, and James D. Myers....................131
13 Let's Get Serious about E-games: A Design Research Approach toward an Emerging Perspective, Wenhao David Huang and Tristan E. Johnson....................144
14 Access Grid Technology: An Exploration in Educators' Dialogue, Sharon Tettegah, Cheryl McFadden, Edee Norman Wiziecki, Hanna Zhong, Joycelyn Landrum-Brown, Mei-Li Shih, Kona Taylor, and Timothy Cash....................156
15 Physical Embodiment of Virtual Presence, Karrie G. Karahalios....................173
16 Administrative Implications of Ubiquitous Learning for Nonprofit Colleges and Universities, Faye L. Lesht....................189
17 History: The Role of Technology in the Democratization of Learning, Orville Vernon Burton, James Onderdonk, and Simon J. Appleford....................197
18 Computer Science: Pen-Enabled Computers for the "Ubiquitous Teacher," Samuel Kamin....................206
19 Biology: Using a Ubiquitous Knowledge Environment to Integrate Teaching, Learning, and Research in Biology and Chemistry, Eric Jakobsson....................216
20 Visual Arts: Technology Pedagogy as Cultural Citizenship, Elizabeth M. Delacruz....................230
21 Writing (1): Writing with Video, Maria Lovett and Joseph Squier....................242
22 Writing (2): Ubiquitous Writing and Learning: Digital Media as Tools for Reflection and Research on Literate Activity, Gail E. Hawisher, Paul Prior, Patrick Berry, Amber Buck, Steven E. Gump, Cory Holding, Hannah Lee, Christa Olson, and Janine Solberg....................254
About the Contributors....................265
Index....................277