Ubiquitous Learning

17. History: The Role of Technology in the Democratization of Learning

17 history The Role of Technology in the Democratization of Learning orville vernon burton, james onderdonk, and simon j. appleford The twenty-first century is witnessing a blurring of traditional divisions between the domains of learning, teaching, and research. This change has been spurred, to a large extent, by advances in information technology, which have had far-reaching implications for hardware, software, new pedagogy, access , accessibility, and the collection, application, and distribution of data. The collaborative promise of new technologies and the so-called Semantic Web are uniquely positioned to liberate information, making it available to all citizens and creating a culture of what is coming to be known as ubiquitous learning. Underpinning this emerging culture are the huge challenges and the enormous potential posed by the availability of information, which is impelling a major step forward in the evolution of education—namely, how knowledge is weighed and imparted to succeeding generations. Web-sourced information varies enormously in its character and reliability, from pornography and unapologetically racist blogs to archives of rare materials and course resources made freely available online by such giants of higher education as MIT and Yale. The emergence of the online collectivized databases known as learning commons and the ongoing, fascinating struggle of Wikipedia to create a credible and continually updated “people’s” reference speak to the nature of learning as a universal, self-organizing process. The consonant demand, huge and growing, for information online poses exceptional opportunities for institutions of higher education to emerge as leaders in promoting the public good by providing vetted, detailed, state-of-the-art information from research and scholarship across a range of disciplines and in 198 . burton, onderdonk & appleford an array of formats and media. With such powerful tools for transmission of knowledge and values at hand, the humanities and the arts are positioned to help develop and nurture the informed citizenry essential to democracy in ways that pure computer science could never do. the emergence of Ubiquitous learning At the close of the agrarian age, it became obvious to a broad spectrum of the public that the American educational system, which had served that age well, was inadequate for a dawning industrial era that demanded a well-trained workforce. Led by states with large rural populations, educational systems were transformed to meet this demand—the chief enduring result being mandated, universal secondary education. Unfortunately, America’s schools have evolved into an excellent example of an autocratic rather than a democratic organization, where a rule-bound culture is vetted by standardized testing that unreflectively—and all too often punitively—enforces its requirements. Today, with a new world information order evolving, the educational structures of the industrial age are proving inadequate and inappropriate for the demands of the information age. Data— that is, information—are the rich raw materials for this age, much as iron ore and coal were to an earlier one. The transformation of that data into knowledge, experience, and responsible action is a primary function of the learning processes and must be encouraged. It is imperative that the academy lead a sophisticated and complex response to the promise of information technology. Ubiquitous learning is forcing education to come to terms with a reality that has long been known in the sciences but has been less acknowledged in the humanities—the mercurial nature of information. The abundant, quick, and changeable character of learning in today’s data-intensive world demands capture and management through information technology. Information is, moreover, as at no other time in the history of civilization, available in an astonishing array of formats, from raw data and text right through to high-quality imagery and streaming audio and video. These realities have profound implications for much broader approaches to scholarship, teaching, and learning. The social critic John Ralston Saul (1994, 116) observed, “Highly sophisticated elites are the easiest and least original thing a society can produce. The most difficult and the most valuable is a well-educated populace.” The ubiquitous learning empowered by technology must not widen the gap between those who have access to new information and tools and those who do not. Technology has the potential to become a tool increasingly wielded by the elite, and our goal must be to ensure the democratization of knowledge and education. It is of particular importance that colleges and universities—and especially the land history · 199 grant colleges, those public institutions labeled “Democracy’s...