Ubiquitous Learning. Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis (eds.) (2009). Urbana: University of Illinois Press. pp. 279.
Digital and social media are as pervasive today as the air we breathe. So it’s natural that every field claims these tools as their own. Journalists use them to create interactive multimedia news content, while public relations teams use them to build consensus or “buzz” for their clients.
Ubiquitous Learning examines these technologies as seen from the classroom. We tend to think of the “sage on the stage,” the rumpled professor with yellowing notes, covered with chalk dust; but the reality today is more likely the “guide on the side,” a learning facilitator actively using online collaboration tools, Internet access, and a meta channel through which students annotate the course in real time.
Ubiquitous Learning grew out of a task force convened by the College of Education at the University of Illinois. Its contributors are almost exclusively from that institution, the fabled home of PLATO, the first networked multimedia learning system; the transistor; the graphical Web browser, and YouTube.
Cope and Kalantzis frame the book with their opening chapter, “An Agenda for Educational Transformation.” They discuss ways that educational institutions can change to embrace “anytime/anywhere” learning. While some suggestions may seem obvious, it’s also worthwhile to articulate these core principles. They call for institutions to relax assumptions about when and where education takes place, for example. The concept to “shift the balance of agency” basically means accommodating new ways of learning that may not come from the podium. They also suggest that acknowledging different learning styles can strengthen the learning experience for everyone. They also call for greater use of audio, video, and other rich media to deliver messages.
Students and teachers alike need to learn skills to cope with information overload, say the authors—“conceptualizing sensibility, sophisticated forms of pattern recognition, and schematization.” This may be as simple as using a “folksonomy,” such as delicious.com to tag related online content, or using the operator “filetype:” to narrow the results of a Google search. We can offload some of our short-term memory by trusting a device or network to hold the information for us. In their example, we’re free to forget important phone numbers once they’re safely stored on our mobile device. This shifts the value of learning away from short-term recall and toward application and synthesis, “spelling doom for the closed-book exam.” Finally, teachers need to build inclusive communities of learning, embracing diversity and building on “the complementarity of learners’ differences—experience, knowledge, ways of thinking, and ways of seeing.” The book’s authors group its remaining twenty-one essays into three areas: concepts, which further explore the meaning of ubiquitous learning; contexts, or factors that influence the development of ubiquitous learning; and practices, or applications of ubiquitous learning. Jack Brighton’s essay on corporate control and participatory culture as applied to broadcasting will resonate with the mass communication scholar.
The book closes with two essays that rethink the very act of writing. “Writing (1) Writing with Video” and “Writing (2) Ubiquitous Writing and Learning: Digital Media as Tools for Reflection and Research on Literate Activity” make the case for content creation that might include sounds and images, as well as words. This literacy has been long neglected in the academy despite an explosion of video content as fostered by such sites as YouTube and Vimeo. A.C. Nielsen reports that video viewing continues to rise, with the average American watching 153 hours of television per month. This does not even take into account computer, mobile, and environmental viewing. Who is to say that text will always be the primary means of transmitting culture?
A colleague once lamented that she had earned three hours of college credit for learning to operate a linotype machine. That’s college at its worst: vocational training masquerading as higher education. And it begs the question: What should we be teaching? How can we be technology-smart while still preparing our students for life?
Today, almost all information is just one degree from Google, which has rapidly become the keeper and organizer of our collective culture. Ubiquitous Learning accepts this reality. And then it asks: How do we take advantage of this new technological environment to best serve our students?
DAVID KAMERER
Loyola University Chicago