Ubiquitous Learning Vs. the
Value of Boundaries
Carlo Perrotta
The “conundrum” of educational technology in
compulsory education
The technology-enhanced classroom
in 2011
Trying to innovate schools?
Source: www.pennyarcade.com
I digress...
A “broker”
Practice
Research
Industry
21st century schooling
Workforce skills required by employers
Project-based
and enquiry
based
curricula
Real-life,
authentic
challenges
Innovation as...
21st century schooling
Workforce skills required by employers
Project-based
and enquiry
based
curricula
Blurring
Real-life,
authentic
challenges
It didn’t work out
• Surely a lot of tech
• Many teachers doing interesting and
“innovative” things...
• But the fundamental features are still the same
• Technology hasn’t transformed learning
Democratic change in an institutional, multifaceted and highly contested domain... is SLOW!
1974
1944
1912
1992
2010
The closure of Becta...
signalled a deeper crisis in the British ed-tech
community
• A sense of insecurity and confusion...
• A “crisis of representation”
– (e.g. Harvey, 1990)
• A risk of fragmentation and defensiveness
How did this happen?
• Innovation and “Ubiquity” are part of the problem, as
well as part of the solution
• What are innovation processes? Many have written
about it outside of education...
• However, the more critical voices offer the best insights
– Winner, 1986; Lefebrve, 1991, Harvey, 1990
Innovation...
• Removing barriers and limits, endlessly
• A politically and economically charged process
Ubiquitous computing
Weiser, 1991
Ubiquitous learning
• ubiquity as an “ideal” innovation scenario
• A scenario in which all boundaries and barriers are
virtually absent
Innovation: a socio-economic dynamic
Technology
Cyclic
Ubiquity
Blurring
• What is the educational purpose of innovation
and ubiquity?
• A distinction:
– learning through technology (transformation)
– Learning with and about technology (how and
why technologies are used differently, in different
contexts and domains– slow, incremental,
negotiated and contested)
Educational Innovation as a
“conceptual dustbin”
21st century skills
Motivate disaffected students
Web 2.0 Teach Latin Student voice
at school
More discipline PowerPoint
The cloud
Neuroscience
innovation
“..to encourage a
greater degree of
innovation” (UK DFE
2010, p10)
The value of boundaries
• The pitfalls of “ubiquity”:
– Dilution of the educational purpose
– Blurring within a business-driven rhetoric
– Failure to acknowledge the boundaries doesn’t
remove them, only makes them invisible (Young,
2009)
So where do we start?
• Acknowledge the cultural boundaries between
areas of knowledge (Young and Muller, 2010)
• The bounded nature of human cognition: the
cognitive architecture (Mayer, 2003)
• Bounded and specific uses of ITCs (Cox &
Marshall, 2007; Perrotta, under review)
• self-regulation needs boundaries (Boekaerts &
Niemivierta, 2000)
Wrapping up...
• Do we need more critically minded research and
practice in TEL?
• Proudly wearing the values of education on our
sleeve, and ready to question the grand visions
and the techno-utopian rhetoric (see Biesta,
2010)
• a debate about the distinctions, the boundaries
and the demarcations between types and ranges
of technology use, how these fit with the types
and ranges of education we would like to see
Thanks!
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• @carloper
Some references
• Biesta, G.J.J. (2010). Why ‘what works’ still won’t work. From evidencebased education to value-based education. Studies in Philosophy and
Education 29(5), 491-503.
• Convery, A. (2009) ‘The pedagogy of the impressed: how teachers become
victims of technological vision’ Teachers and Teaching, 15, 1, 25-41
• Harvey, D.: The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of
Cultural Change. Blackwell, Malden (1990)
• Lefebrve, H. (1991). The Production of Space, Wiley Blackwell, Oxford
• Winner, L. (1986) The whale and the reactor. Chicago, the University of
Chicago Press