Ubiquitous learning leads to creativity and concentration. It gives the student the possibility to relate things outside the classroom and bring them back into their participations. It demands an effort to do so through concentration and synthesis.

In a beautiful speech to the students of Liceo Voltaire in July 1902, Henri Bergson proposed the concept of “creative power of effort” :

“Every true progress of intelligence, every increase of its capacity and penetration, represents and effort in which will drives the spirit to a superior level of concentration”1

Difficulty for art students to speak during a class (traditional mode) can be huge. They have relatively short time to both think and speak, and in most of the cases they feel fear as a consequence of the expectation to speak with a refined and eloquent way: consider the ego of artists in a classroom.

As an art teacher, I had the opportunity to work twice with a student who has a disability in her speech (I think the word in english is stutterer) .

The first time she took a class at the school of arts. Her performance was very low as she never did any participation. Things changed a year later when she took another course, this time in a Learning management system. Although the period of the course was 30% shorter than the face-to face one, ,she was one of the most active students!

The first thing that came to my mind was: how much knowledge we were loosing from her!

What I saw in this student was her creativity and the effort she made to share her emotions and learning with her peers. It was very notorious how the words were enriched by multiple things before they were written, a rhizomatic ubiquitous learning!

Creativity is undoubtedly affected by time out of school, for instance with leisure and rest. As an analogy, a poem is usually inside your mind during a while , when it grows like a plant, just before it is written over the paper.

References

1 Bergson, H: La Inteligencia, compilado por Matías Battistón, Buenos Aires: Interzona Editora, 2016 pp. 69-70