Ubiquitous Learning

19. Biology: Using a Ubiquitous Knowledge Environment to Integrate Teaching, Learning, and Research in Biology and Chemistry

19 Biology Using a Ubiquitous Knowledge Environment to Integrate Teaching, Learning, and Research in Biology and Chemistry eric jakobsson An evolutionary Context for Ubiquitous learning Many people wear emblems signifying a belief or set of beliefs, such as a flag lapel pin or a cross on a necklace. For most of my life I have not done so. Like many academics, I felt that things were too complex to be captured in a symbol that encompassed the essence of how I viewed life. Lately however, I have taken to wearing a pin that looks like the one in figure 19.1. The fish with limbs, of course, expresses the relatedness, through the evolutionary process, of organisms that live in water and on land. The crescent wrench in the forelimb captures beautifully the fact that evolution as it plays out in life on earth functions much like a backyard mechanic, keeping an old car on the road. Evolution does not optimize. Rather it makes do, using the parts and tools that have accumulated over the years and reconfiguring and reshaping those parts to adapt to change. Biological evolution has shown an overall trend toward increasing complexity at the level of both the genome (Adami, Ofira, and Collier 2000) and the gene and gene product (Fong et al. 2007). Woese (2000) summarizes the directions of evolution as “horizontal” (horizontal gene transfer at the genome level, domain recombination at the gene level) and “vertical” (variation from generation to generation). Horizontal processes drive innovation, while vertical processes drive evolution toward complexity. Acquisition of the ability to learn—and the corollary enormous plasticity of behavior—is consistent with the trend to complexity and is perhaps the most biology · 217 distinctive evolutionary adaptation of Homo sapiens. This incredibly exaggerated ability of human beings to learn presumably stems from a successful initial evolutionary adaptation by our hunter-gatherer hominid ancestors to the savannah environment of eastern Africa (Diamond 2006), followed by an autocatalytic (“virtual cycle” positive feedback) growth in intelligence driven by competition among conspecifics (Flinn, Geary, and Ward 2004). The development of powerful technologies for information transmission and storage are having a similar autocatalytic effect on the rate of human social evolution (Wright 2007). Innovation in communication technology drives social evolution, which in turn drives innovation in communication technology, all tending to make human interactions more complex. Humans have always had ubiquitous learning, in the sense that all of our experiences modify our synaptic connections in ways that modify our future behavior, which is the neuroscientist’s definition of “learning” (Fanselow and Poulos 2005). However, we now have the capability for ubiquitous learning in the sense that is the topic of this book, which means specifically being able to disseminate and access the fruits of research and scholarship anywhere at any time, in a form that people of any level of prior knowledge can utilize. information technology in Biology In biology, Web-based access to information and computational tools has become central to research. A survey in 2007 reported 968 publically accessible molecular biology databases on the Web, 110 more than the year before (Galperin 2007). Furthermore, the size of the databases is growing rapidly. The comprehensive nucleotide sequence database GenBank has approximately doubled in size every eighteen months since its inception (Benson et al. 2007). As the tools of computational biology have become accessible to experimentalists as well as computational specialists, they have also become available for education. Within education, these tools not only provide elucidation of biological principles but Figure 19.1. “Evolve” fish. (Courtesy of Ian Wrigley.) 218 . jakobsson also enable students to engage in new explorations, since the sum total of accumulated data on biological systems is in many respects unexplored territory. In spite of the potential of these approaches, most education in biology is still in traditional form, owing to some combination of institutional inertia and a lack of computational orientation of previous generations of students, who are today’s faculty. However, the new campus of the University of California at Merced (opened 2005), given the chance to start a new university biology curriculum from scratch, is putting computation at the center of undergraduate biology education. Other campuses, not having the luxury/challenge of starting a brand new curriculum, are facing a different challenge—namely, changing course to account for the new role of computation and Web-based access to information and computational tools in biological research, teaching, and...