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1 Ubiquitous learning An Agenda for Educational Transformation bill cope and mary kalantzis Ubiquitous Computing At first glance, it is the machines that make ubiquitous learning different from heritage classroom and book-oriented approaches to learning. These appearances , however, can deceive. Old learning can be done on new machines. Using new machines is not necessarily a sign that ubiquitous learning has arrived. And some features of ubiquitous learning are not new—as Chip Bruce highlights so clearly in his chapter, they have a proud place in the history of educational innovation , which stretches back well before the current wave of machines. But to focus on the machines for the moment, there is an obvious link between ubiquitous learning and ubiquitous computing. The term “ubiquitous computing” describes the pervasive presence of computers in our lives. Personal computers and laptops have become an integral part of our learning, work, and community lives, to the point where, if you do not have access to a computer with reasonable bandwidth you can be regarded as disadvantaged, located as a “have not” on the wrong side of the digital divide. Meanwhile, many other devices are becoming more computerlike (in fact, more and more of them are computers or have computer power built in): mobile phones, televisions, global positioning systems, digital music players, personal digital assistants, video cameras, still cameras, and game consoles, to name a few. These devices are everywhere. They are getting cheaper. They are becoming smaller and more portable. They are increasingly networked. This is why we find them in many places in our lives and at many times in our days. The pervasive presence of these machines is the most tangible and practical way in which computing has become ubiquitous. 4 . cope & kalantzis Does ubiquitous computing lay the groundwork for ubiquitous learning? Yes, it does. Does it require us to make a paradigm shift in our education paradigms? Certainly. However, our definition of ubiquitous learning in the first paragraph of our introduction was more conditional than this. We said: “Ubiquitous learning is a new educational paradigm made possible in part by the affordances of digital media.” The qualifications in this statement are crucial. “Made possible” means that there is no directly deterministic relationship between technology and social change. Digital technologies arrive, and almost immediately, old pedagogical practices of didactic teaching, content delivery for student ingestion, and testing for the right answers are mapped onto them and called a “learning management system.” Something changes when this happens, but disappointingly, it is not much. And another qualifier: “affordance” means you can do some things easily now, and you are more inclined to do these things than you were before simply because they are easier. You could previously have engaged in collaborative and inquiry learning in a traditional classroom and heritage institutional structures, but it was not easy. Computers make it easier. So, the new things that ubiquitous computing makes easier may not in themselves be completely new—modes of communication, forms of social relationship, or ways of learning. However, just because the new technology makes them easier to do, they become more obviously worth doing than they were in the past. Desirable social practices that at times went against the grain because of their idealistic impracticality become viable. The technology becomes an invitation to do things better, often in ways that some people have been saying for a long time they should be done. However, to take the argument one step further, could we educators take the lead in the development of appropriate technologies rather than recycle handme -down technologies that were originally designed for another purpose? Here’s an apocryphal technology story about the connections between technology and social relationships. PLATO, the world’s first computer learning environment, was invented here at the University of Illinois in 1960 and went through extensive research and development processes that resulted in a number of iterations over the next two decades. PLATO can be credited as the beginnings, not just of e-learning, but the computing world we know today. It only took the form it did in order to meet specifically educational needs. In this sense, education, not technology, was the driver. Some remarkable inventions came out of this educational laboratory. In the 1960s, the plasma screen was invented because learners needed a visual interface, not computer punch cards, for ease of interaction in the learning context. The touch screen was also invented, so students could interact with the questions and information on the screen...

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