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...

Practice

IndustryResearch

A “broker”

21st century schooling Workforce skills required by employers

Project-based and enquiry

based curricula

Real-life, authentic

challenges

21st century schooling Workforce skills required by employers

Project-based and enquiry

based curricula

Real-life, authentic

challenges

Blurring

Innovation as...

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, multi-faceted and highly contested domain... is SLOW!

1912

1944

1974

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

Blurring

Ubiquity Cyclic

• 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”

innovation

More discipline

Teach Latin

PowerPoint

Neuroscience

Student voice

Motivate disaffected students

Web 2.0 at school

The cloud

21st century skills

“..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?

• Acknowledging 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 sleeves, 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!

• C.perrotta@ioe.ac.uk• Carlo.perrotta@futurelab.org.uk• @carloper

Some references • Biesta, G.J.J. (2010). Why ‘what works’ still won’t work. From evidence-

based 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