Classical one to many media in didactic pedagogy materializes through a teachers lecture and the textbook in use, all within the confined areas of class room walls and a set time table. Ubiquitous learning manages to overcome these confined areas of learning, supported by technology. Cloud¹ and internet technology offer simultaneous and distance free ways of hosting and collaborating on content (anywhere) and in a permanent record that can be revisited by students and teachers without a set timetable (anytime). Also the roles of teachers and student roles change, as the typical one to many didactic pedagogy is replaced by the flipped classroom where the student has more empowerment to fast pace learning segments by e.g. playing videos faster or engaging virtually in collaborative workspaces through postings in discussion forums entering a dialog with student peers and a rather observing and guiding teacher without relying on classical Initiate-Respond-Evaluate (I-R-E) ² model where the teacher is leading the class with questions and one student being the proxy, responding for all and the teacher evaluates to moderate (anyhow).

Yet despite the advantages of technology driven ubiquitous learning provides there are challenges. As a learning and development professional working a corporate environment, I am facing a constant struggle to drive adoption of eLearning my students have the tendency to rather travel and meet in person instead of spending time sitting on their desks to engage in virtual forms of learning. In my view ubiquitous learning is just the facility that supports learning without doing much to drive learning itself and prone to failure if human behavior patterns are ignored. Kalantzis and Cope state, “educational technologies can be used as a medium for didactic pedagogy” and explain further that “technologies do not produce the change; they only offer affordances” (Kalantzis and Cope, 2016, p. 17) ³. Here corporate learning and development experts with continue to fail already at the stage of getting students to adopt technology aided learning, if a pure business mindset of build a learning management system and provide elearnings and students will come is applied only. Rather a deeper understanding of what is driving change in human behaviors can help to put the right mechanisms into place in support of acceptance and adoption of eLearning and Learning Management Systems. Cp. “To the extent that there is change, it is fundamentally social, in our everyday communicative relationships” (Kalantzis and Cope, 2016) ³.

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References:

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing

2 https://knilt.arcc.albany.edu/Why_the_IRE_Model_of_Questioning_is_Ineffective

3 Forthcoming in Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis (eds), e-Learning Ecologies, Routledge NY, 2016