On Becoming an
Ubiquitous E-learner
Caroline Haythornthwaite
Director & Professor, School of Library,
Archival and Information Studies,
University of British Columbia
Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor,
Institute of Education, University of
London (2009-10)
Ubiquitous Computing
• Ubiquitous Computing
• Context aware computing,
Awareness technologies,
Pervasive computing
• Embedded
• Invisible, seamless, natural
• Ubiquitous
• Everywhere, anytime,
anyone
• Infrastructural
• Expected, taken-for-granted
• Universal
• Available, accessible, capable
In the World and Of the World
• Internet infrastructure, Web information streams
• Websites, blogs, wikis, email, twitter, news feeds
• Wired, wireless, distributed, and cloud computing
• Wired cities and rural infrastructures
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•
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E-government
E-commerce
Online universities, degrees
Geographical information systems (GPS & GIS)
Closed circuit TVs, facial recognition
Community networking initiatives (CNI)
New Genres/Modes of Production
Web 1.0 Mode
Web 2.0 Mode
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•
•
•
•
•
•
•
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Posting
Broadcast
Presence
Identity management
Serial
production
• Copyright
• Whole is the sum of
the parts
Participating
Converse
Co-Presence
Co-construction of
Identity
• Collective production
• Copyleft
• Whole is greater than
the sum of the parts
Note that the 1.0 and 2.0 labels do not refer to technologies, but to modes of use. Social use can
fit a bulletin board to any mode, and likewise limit a social networking site to a non-2.0 mode.
Two Significant Internet Trends
• Two trends in Internet-based information and
knowledge production that set the stage for
Ubiquitous Learning
• Free/Libre Movement (Open Access)
• Collaborative Peer Production (Open Source)
Enter Learning
• Dynamic knowledge and technology base
• Perpetual / Permanently Beta
• Continuous production
• Streaming of information
• Creation of new practices in response to
new technologies
• Contributory and Participatory practices
• Crowd- and Community-sourced data,
information, discussion
• Engagement with communities of practice
• Accessing information but also people
New Rules, Roles and Responsibilities
• Transitions in teaching and learning
• ‘Sage on the Stage’ to the ‘Guide on the Side’ (King,1993)
• Collaborative learning (Bruffee, 1993; Koschmann, 1996)
• Rise of the e-learner
• Fluent with skills and competencies – the literacy (or
literacies) – of learning in the information age, the
social media age
• Learning for work, school, leisure, and pleasure
• Everyday learners, Just-in-time learners, serious leisure
learners (Stebbins), ‘salon’ or ‘coterie’ learners
New Configurations
Multi-Modal
•
Communication and conversation, across
multiple platforms
•
Reading screens, video, web sites
Multi-Actor
•
Engagement with multiple stakeholders,
from novice to expert, in crowds and
communities
Multiplex Assemblies
•
Meaning making across an assemblage of
technology and past and current practice,
e.g., in the assemblage of meaning in the
idea of ‘going for coffee’
Meaning-making
•
The narratives and stories that make
sense of our experience, form out identity
within communities of practice
Putting the “e” in Learning
• Online learning
• From correspondence to
collaborative learning
• E-learning
• Learning management systems
to ‘third spaces’ for collaborative
knowledge construction
• Networked Learning
• Emphasizing computersupported connectivity for
learning
• E-learning 2.0
• Emphasizing social learning
• Ubiquitous learning
• Emphasizing e-learning in
everyday life
What does it take to become an
e-learner?
• Collaborative practices
• Learning communities, coconstruction of knowledge
• Embracing ‘perpetual beta’
• Expansive learning, Community
of Practice
• E-retrieval
• Online information literate
• Accessing resources and people
• Participatory practices
• Contributory as well as retrieval
• Crowd and community based
New Fluencies for (e-)Learning
• Socio-technical
• Fluency with balancing the social and the technical in
design, co-construction and application to learning
• Collaboration
• Active engagement in collaborative learning, expert
learning, knowledge co-construction, entrepreneurial
and self-directed learning
• Emergent
• Gaining facility and comfort with continuously
emergent processes, with change and new application
of knowledge; with co-creation and negotiation of
practice
(1) Socio-technical Fluency
• A sociotechnical approach
• Aims to improve outcomes by
aligning social practices and
technological support
• A social informatics approach
• Adds consideration of the
embedding context, including
institutional, community, and
societal practices
• Two major ICT Transformations
• Face-to-face to Computermediated communication
• Technologies to technologies-inuse
Face-to-Face to
Computer-Mediated Communication
• Affordances
• Anonymous, asynchronous,
distributed
• Single or multi-media
interfaces
• Email, bulletin boards, blogs, wikis,
twitter; Portals, VLEs, collaboratories
• Different media ‘logics’ &
genres
• Serial (email, discussion list, twitter)
or Composite (wikis)
• Historical record: bulletin boards
• Genre: message, essay, comment:
email, blog, blog comment/tweet
• Cross-media/cross-modality
communication
• Relationships and conversations
maintained online and offline, via
multiple CMC
• Merging of speech and text
+ persistent record
• ‘Persistent conversation’
(Herring and Erickson)
• Temporally disjunct
conversations (asynch, but also
out of sequence)
• Cross-fertilization of genres
• e.g., mobile texting in emails
Sociotechnical Transformations
• Technology to technology-in-use
• Technological determinism meant supremacy in design
• Sociotechnical means joint alignment of social and
technical
• ‘Design in the service of learning’ (Barab, Kling & Gray)
• Co-evolutionary means two-way interaction between
existing and innovative technologies and social practices
• Fixed texts, hardware, equipment to mutable and
emergent group-defined use
• Creative commons, mutable web sources, information literacy,
resource evaluation, peer review (academic vs crowd voting)
• Open source, assemblages, mash-ups, agile computing
Situative Perspective
• “The defining characteristic of a situative approach is
that instead of focusing on individual learners, the
main focus of analysis is on activity systems: complex
social organizations containing learners, teachers,
curriculum materials, software tools, and the
physical environment.” (Greeno, 2006, p. 79)
Activity System (Engeström )
Mediating Artifacts:
Tools and Signs
Object
Sense
Meaning
Subject
Rules
Community
Outcome
Division of labor
Important point: This is an active system,
continuously in tension between the elements,
with the outcome continuously emergent
(2) Collaborative Fluency
• Participatory culture
• Contributory behaviour
• Negotiated group, crowd
and community practice
• Personal and Communal
• A new aesthetic
Collaborative Transformations
• Delivery to production
and co-construction
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Teacher as Facilitator
Collaborative learning
Expert learning
Entrepreneurial
Participatory culture
Learning with and across
communities
• Entrepreneurial learning
(personal)
• Learner at centre of their
own learning network
• Community-centred
(communal)
• Virtual communities,
communities of interest,
communities of inquiry
Personal Ubiquity
•
Personal : self-directed, owner-operated,
personalized
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Event-driven : on demand, and just in time
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Mobile : phones, laptops, GPS
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Self-contained : information on laptop, cell
phones, etc.
•
Portable : multi-device compatible (XML),
data deposit/capture separate from
retrieval, on demand access (wired and
wireless)
•
Extended personal : computing as
extension of the personal (Kurzweil) –
senses, memory, reach across distance
•
Networked : to people, resources; selfdirected, egocentric social networks
Steve Mann, wearable computers
Personal Ubiquitous Learning
• Personalized
• Self-directed learning
• Personalized information space,
learner-centered ecologies (Luckin)
• Learning for career, home, sport,
games, ‘serious leisure’ (Stebbins)
• Individually and informally situated and
‘accredited’
• Presentation of self
• Home pages, blogs, tweets; handles,
user names, ids, photos
• Contributions to crowd-sourced sites
and to community sites
Egocentric views of individual
learning spaces
•Personal identity within a
community of practice
•Managing as an individual learner
juggling social worlds
Managing Attention / Negotiating Boundaries
• Managing attention in
multiple spaces and places
• Negotiating the sense of
self in different social
worlds
• New roles:
• Community star, member,
lurker; ‘information tourist’,
surfer
• Positions:
• Expert, novice; wizard, newbie
• Identities
• One’s own path, depth of
involvement, and level of
conformity within the world
• Negotiating boundaries
• Building boundaries between
worlds for separated identities
• Recognizing synergies between
worlds for single sense of self
Personal but Shared
• Shared : with a self-directing
community
• Non-profit, for profit, hybrid
• Informational, hobby, serious leisure
sharing
• Creative commons : forward, modify,
reuse
• Altruistic : addressing personal needs
and those of others
• E.g., Sites that aggregate resources
• Proxy : learning for others, using
ubiquitous resources for others
• E.g., Use at work is tied to use at
home and for others at home
• Social : conversation, social and
informational support, contribution
Personal but Shared
• Co-Presence : being there with
others, with avatars
(Karahalios, 2009, ChitChatClub)
A New Aesthetic
• Novel : imaginitive, inventive
• Playful : games, games-based, gameskills based, serendipitous
• Uncanny: ghostlike mirror of ourselves
• Immersive: sensory envelopment
World of Warcraft
The Cave, NCSA
Communal and Networked View
• Learning as a relation that connects people
• Learning as production as well as consumption
• Learning as an outcome of relations
• social capital, sociotechnical capital
• Learning in networked
spaces
• Third places (Oldenburg)
• Affinity spaces (Gee)
• Learning communities
• Crowd and community spaces
How to be a distributed/online/
collaborative group
• How to be a group that
knows how to be a
distributed group
(knowledgeability)
• How to learn and work
with group knowledge
• Knowing
who knows who
(cognitive social
structure),
who knows what
(transactive memory),
who knows who knows
what
Network Practice and
Outcomes
Collaborating
on class work
(at least
2/week over
the semester)
B2
D9
D3
 B10 
D12
B4
 D5 
 Network Star, & Broker
• Social Capital
• Fluency with practices is
held in the network
• Continuously emergent
practices, structures,
relations and roles
A7
C13
C15
A11
A14
A6
C8
• Emerging from continuous
negotiation of practice
A professional development
network for a school
(de Laat, 2010)
Communities becoming Ubiquitous
Learning Environments
• Adoption of a number of new practices
• Social and technical use, on multiple platforms that ‘blend’
to meet the needs of the group
• Responsiveness to emergent practices
from embedding culture
• e.g., legality, privacy, literacy, knowledge
• Picking practices from a continuously
evolving state of knowledge and technology
• “Building an airplane in the air” (Bruce, 2010)
Cultural Learning
• “A participatory culture is a
culture with relatively low
barriers to artistic expression
and civic engagement, strong
support for creating and
sharing one’s creations, and
some type of informal
mentorship whereby what is
known by the most
experienced is passed along to
novices. A participatory culture
is also one in which members
believe their contributions
matter, and feel some degree
of social connection with one
another (at the least they care
what other people think about
what they have created).”
(Jenkins, 2006, p.3)
(3) Emergent Fluency
• Practicing nimble and
agile response for
emergence of practices
from the configuration of
interacting elements
• Meaning making from
social and technical
assemblies
• Expansive learning
(Engeström)
• Continuous development
of identity (Wenger)
Data Intensive
•
Data intensive: collection, visualization,
interpretation
•
Parallel : simultaneous, multiple
observation, collection, processing
•
Contributory : intentional or
unintentional, crowd-based or
community based
Visualization of an F3 Tornado Within a Simulated
Supercell Thunderstorm (NCSA: Patterson & Cox)
Visualization of journal connections based on
“clickstream” data. Bollen et al (2009)
Learning Analytics
Network
Evolution
Network
Dissolution
Becoming a (21st century)(e-)Learner
• Challenge of knowledge acquisition in an age of
rapid transformation, requires
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•
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Continuous learning
Self- and/or group-directed learning
Learning under equivocality
Learning to be nimble and agile
Learning to be something not yet defined
• Continuous adoption of new knowledge practices
• Mutability of tools, technologies, authorities and
means of production
Becoming a (21st century)(e-)Learner
• Learning reconceived through a change in
emphasis
• From fixed form with a known outcome to emergent
form with an unknown outcome
• From novice, trainee learner to collaborative, expert
learner
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Knowledge-building communities (Scardamalia & Bereiter)
Participatory culture (Jenkins)
Expansive learning (Engestrom)
Identity learning (Wenger)
Informal, open content, open group, perpetual beta
Inquiry-based learning (Bruce)
Technology as a theory to be tested
• “A tool is in this sense a theory, a proposal, a
recommended method or course of action. It is
only a proposal and not a solution per se because
it must be tested against the problematic material
for the sake of which it has been created or
selected.”
• (Hickman, 1992. John Dewey’s pragmatic
technology. p. 21)
Further Reading
• Cope, B & Kalantzis, M. (Eds.) (2009). Ubiquitous
Learning. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois
Press.
• Andrews, R. & Haythornthwaite, C. (Eds.) (2007).
Handbook of E-learning Research. London: Sage.
• Haythornthwaite, C. & Andrews, R. (2011).
E-learning Theory and Practice. London: Sage.
• For more on ‘becoming an e-learner’, see chapter 9 in
this book