William Cope
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Heather A Ochmane-Learning Ecologies MOOC’s Updates
Ubiquitous Learning (Admin Update 3)
Ubiquitous Learning—so that learning extends beyond the walls of the classroom and the cells of the timetable. Learning that breaks out of these spatial and temporal confinements, should be as good as, or even better than, the best traditional classroom learning. It should also produce habits of mind appropriate to our times, producing lifelong learners, able to learn and to share knowledge throughout their lives, in all contexts, and grounded in those contexts.
- Video 1a: Learning in Space and Time
- Video 1b: Personal and Interpersonal Computing
- Video 1c: Transparency or Surveillance?
- Ubiquitous Learning in Scholar
All Levels of Participation: Make a comment below this update about the ways in which ubiquitous learning technologies can change the nature of learning. Respond to others' comments with @name.
Additional Introductory and Advanced Participation: Make an update introducing a ubiquitous learning concept on the community page (not your personal page - because only peers will see that!). Define the concept and provide at least one example of the concept in practice. Be sure to add links or other references, and images or other media to illustrate your point. If possible, select a concept that nobody has addressed yet so we get a well-balanced view of ubiquitous learning. Also, comment on at least three or four updates by other participants. Ubiquitous learning concepts might include:
- Ubiquitous computing
- Cloud computing
- Web 2.0
- The flipped classroom
- Blended learning
- Over-the-shoulder learning
- Virtual schools
- The internet of things
- Mobile learning
- Social media learning
- Networked learning
- Informal learning
- Lifelong and lifewide learning
- Work and community-based learning
- Learning management systems
- ePortfolios
- Collaborative workspaces
- MOOCs
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Suggest a ubiquitous learning concept in need of definition!
@joh lyons, I was interested to read your comment as others that focuses on the student with ubiquitous learning.
One of the mantras of online delivery is that it's a time and location to fit in with the lives of our learners. This ubiquitous learning is also a benefit for staff, who with portfolio careers, can 'fit in' academia alongside other activities in their career and personal life.
Has anyone else considered the benefits for the academic?
@Julio. Hello, I like this topic. The Ubiquitous Learning is one fantastic concept. I think that this is in relationship with the reticular knowledge. Also it is can call: Rhizomatic learning (such as Paulo Batista call this). The idea of the network is very powerful. I think that this topic changed the analysis unit of the social sciences.
I'm trying to say that the community concept was changed for the social network. And this is very meaningful in the knowledge society analysis, and of course, in the education.
I agree with Sophia. The ubiquitous learning is going more further away that the classroom. This happen in the family, in the neighborhood, in the local place. And from here, it is self interrelationship in the build of the global contexts.
@sara @matthew
Dean Shareski's session
https://sas.elluminate.com/drtbl? sid=2008350&suid=D.ABE38D0D1C050C4146590D0A2C9934
Talks about the joy of learning. My comments about rigour is a direct lift from this session:)
@matthew @midhun Well I'm enjoying this conversation! In the classroom context we’ve probably all worked hard to accommodate different learning styles and I read some interesting comment (Bank, CJ and Graham CR (Eds), 2006 Handbook of Blended Learning: Global Perspectives, Local Designs, p. 73) that suggested it doesn’t cross over into the online learning space. Maybe what happens in the online learning space is that a different set of preferences come to the fore? In future perhaps we’ll have to develop parallel streams within our courses to accommodate people who don’t like gaming as well as those who do (which raises a whole different set of questions about how you’d assess them!). I haven’t read any research in this area and would be interested to know what’s out there.
@Soraya: I totally agree. Being a student of English as a Foreing Language some 14 years ago I enjoyed and benefited the most from collaborative learning, even though back than it was in a physical form - working in groups, in pairs etc. I think, that e-learning technologies help teachers to be more efficient too - they prepare assessements and content once and they can focus more on work with students, helping them with progress. Good luck with your teaching :)
A few months ago, I attended an on-line course of Kabbalah. I was looking forward to each Tuesday evening to join the class and study alongside 200 guys from all over the world. We listened to video, we chatted in real time with each other and our teachers, we followed up with comments, observations and questions on facebook page. It was fantastic, rich learning. I liked it and therefore after 4 weeks of free course, I signed to a paid one. This experience made me aware of other than time and space restrictions:
1. you need strong internet connection
2. you need quality software for on-line classes
3. you need strong organization to inform students about changes in time
My other e-learning experience was similar in observations, even though it was a serious study for my MBA. The school used a very good international software, the subjects and ready materials were nicely organized, the homework were stated clearly and there was no way for cheating (not that I wanted to!), because the time to respond was limited and the system would shut down after a time out. I also liked the transparency of assessment, I could immediately see how I did and if I wouldnt be happy, I could retake the exam after 24 hours. This experience confirms exactly what was said in a video :)
@sara i chose the word fun for its more positive connotation. I did mean engaging. But i am slightly alarmed at what you said - but I'm not that interested in whether the learning I design OR undertake is fun. That seems like you are regressing back to the behaviorist track - Skinner's model of negative reinforcement. This approach is good for student and classroom management rather than to learning content. This approach can be applied to classroom yes but it can also be applied to prisons and psychiatric hospitals.
Gamification is fun right? I am sure you have also come across elearning courses that are fun and teach very difficult and dense concepts.I disagree with you on this bit - we rely too much on the rigour of our text books, instructional sequences and criteria based evaluation - Rigour means - the quality of being extremely thorough and careful.but it also means severity or strictness and harsh and demanding conditions and is very close to rigor mortis - Jokes apart I started my career as a Health Insurance trainer - I have worked on developing higher ed courses and i can relate to the actual issues you face when trying to apply these principles. I believe fun based (amusing, entertaining, or enjoyable) courses - teaching and learning - are better received by students - take a look at this video that discusses the Bill of Rights - By TedEd. After watching it tell me if you would you want to learn it any other way?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYEfLm5dLMQ
@Sara Bowen I agree with you comment about avoiding making the focus of learning fun. I have nothing against having fun while learning, but to make the focus of each lesson having fun and enjoying ourselves, we do risk limiting our students' intake of knowledge as it is not always possible to make certain topics fun (as pointed out by your law-teaching colleague...could totally imagine some of the people I know studying law come out with something like that btw :p )
Having said that, I think the context of what Midhun was saying was flipped classrooms were getting rid of the redundant, boring and tedious tasks that their students were subjected to, as these were not fun (you could argue that these tasks should be removed no matter what teaching pedagogy you plan on using in the future...) Perhaps flipping the classroom was allowing Midhun to rethink how the course was taught/structured and as a result update tasks and materials being used.
As e-learning does require a lot more planning and thought, this is also a strong advantage to moving to online learning. Indeed I remember reading a study that suggested that those teachers who experienced teaching their course online found it had a positive spill-over effect into their face-to-face classes. The most common change made by teachers who had taught online was to allocate more classtime for peer reviewing work.
I could be wrong, but I think Midhun was saying students would be getting more enjoyment from their learning, which could be seen as fun. I certainly find engaging in stimulating conversation and deep thought on a topic enjoyable. But this is no doubt what you also try to achieve when making classes stimulating, engaging and satisfying.
You raised a good point.
According to COPE Bill and KALANTZIS Mary, the characteristics of Ubiquitous Learning include the new sense to space and time, and the say just need a net conexion in any device, you don't need formal spaces to make the learning process. I agree with them, but in a deep way I think that you need more that a device, you need a new way to manage the information, the knowledge. You need a new structure in your mind what is not easy.
I think that Ubiquitous learning is feasible and desirable, but at the same time is a pretty stressful, because when you have all the information available anywhere and anytime there is a big presion to harness it. So, I think that is necessary to find ways to manage this affordance to improve the learning process instead avoid it!
On a slightly different subject, I've seen some discussion about e-portfolios and just-in-time learning. My institution is grappling with both of these topics at the moment, partly in response to the whole 70:20:10 model of learning (McCall, Lombarder and Eichinger's research into how managers learn in the 1960s: 70% from doing a hard job, 20% from their peers and only 10% from formal study) and partly in response to a realignment of post-school educational funding in Australia.
We want our students to be able to demonstrate what they've learned in a range of non-traditional ways so that other academic institutions AND employers can give them credit for their skills, knowledge and experience. We also want to find ways to develop our own staff without the huge expense associated with traditional company programs.
There is an obvious intersection between these commercial and pragmatic needs and the pedagogical changes of u-learning and e-learning. If cost alone means that students get their degree-level education in bits and pieces from a variety of educational providers when they need it, rather than in a 3- or 4-year chunk from a single university, how can an employer assess their skill level? How can the educational providers validate and justify their assessment methods?
I find it very interesting, if tricky! My degree was completely unrelated to any area I've ever worked in, and I've spent my professional life explaining to potential employers that I hold a 'diverse portfolio of transferable skills as demonstrated by...', with half of those skills learned through the process of academic study (e.g. finding resources, critical analysis, problem solving) and the remainder learned through the 70:20:10 process. So in some ways what's happening now is a codifying of realities that have been around for 20, 30 years - the challenge is to make the most of new affordances and maintain the flexibility that e-learning gives us.