This is going to be a relatively practice-oriented post as I am inspired by the discussion of Ubiquitous Learning and am seeking to relate it to my own practice as a teacher, and to use ideas from it for my future practice.

As a high school Humanities teacher, and one who believes that all learning is essentially socially constructed in the sense put forward by Vygotsky (http://www.instructionaldesign.org/theories/social-development.html), I spend a great deal of time mixing work with educational technolgies and face-to-face group work (and the odd lecture). I support Dr Cope's claims about the benefits of today's cloud computing as it allows me to do this kind of collaborative work in the classroom where students are creating knowledge together and at the same time creating common artifacts of that knowledge then and there or at some other time and place (thus linking to the Ubiquitous Learning affordance). I  I am intrigued about research that would shed light on whether students of different ages (middle school , high school, university. etc.) would require differing mixes of actual face-to-face collaboration and comptuer-afforded collaboration for that collaboration, and ultimately the construction of knowledge, to be effective.

As any number of my students at any given time may be involved in large gaming communities where they are mentors and are mentored, or where they collaborate with unknown individuals to achieve tasks, this would suggest that at least some high school aged students can work without the face-to-face aspect in some areas. However, I am also very much aware that many of my students require a personal connection to a learning task to be established before they are in a place where their learning will be effective, and I see that the classroom is often the place where the social conditions for learning are thus created.

What I would like to experiment more with is creating the kinds of tasks that generate in students awareness of what they don't know and what they therefore need to learn in order to be able to complete the task (in a sense, this would be like PBL). I am imaging them taking advantage of the collective learning afforded by online educational "tutorials" either of the Khan Academy kind or the kind of knowledge base that has been generated by people that is available via open platforms such as Youtube or Wikipedia. When I need to learn how to do something, I search for a video on Youtube that will show me how to do this, or I go to Wikipedia to search for a biography or account of an event. In other words, I draw on collective knowledge in order to progress my own learning.

Gamers will do a similar thing when they are practicing a skills they need to advance to another level in their game: they become aware of the skill they do not currently master, have an incentive to gain that skill and are given the opportunity to practie it until they have (via immediate feedback).

How do we create these situations in our classrooms that combine all these features? And then how do we build assessment models that will track all the steps a student has done in order to arrive at an outcome/create an artifact of knowledge?