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)

On Becoming an Ubiquitous E-

learner

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

• 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

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 ConfigurationsMulti-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 computer-

supported 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, co-

construction 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 Computer-

mediated communication• Technologies to technologies-

in-use

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 )

Outcome

Object

SenseMeaning

Rules Division of labor

Subject

Community

Mediating Artifacts: Tools and Signs

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• 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

• Event-driven : on demand, and just in time

• Mobile : phones, laptops, GPS

• 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; self-directed, 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,

game-skills 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 networkedspaces• 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

B2

D3

B4

¬ D5 ¬

C8

D9

¬ B10 ¬

D12

C13C15

A6

A7

A11

A14

¬ Network Star, & Broker

Network Practice and Outcomes

• Social Capital• Fluency with practices

is held in the network

• Continuously emergent practices, structures, relations and roles• Emerging from

continuous negotiation of practice

Collaborating on class work

(at least 2/week over

the semester)

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 practicesfrom 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 • 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• 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