e-Learning Ecologies MOOC’s Updates
Is ubiquitous learning really good as it seems ?
The idea of liberating the learning process from the spatial-temporal chains of traditional teaching is apparently progressive, it seems that this will bring to a new enlightened society. As a matter of fact, the last 2 years of almost permanent ubiquitous learning did not at all bring a new enlightened society, it did not at all create a community of independent thinkers and learners. So, there must be something wrong in this assumption, ubiquitous=good. In my humble opinion this assumption does not consider one essential aspect: the reason why time and space delimitations were introduced in the traditional classroom in the first place. These were clearly meant to isolate the learner from a not learner-friendly environment, everywhere else as opposed to the classroom. Everywhere else is noisy, crowded, filled with distractions, other activities or people that can prevail and send the learning process in the background. The classroom is the opposite. Now when we come to consider the revolution of online teaching, we should be very careful: on one side obviously, we should acknowledge that the learning environment is ubiquitous and tendentially not temporarily delimited, but on the other side in we should recognize that this risks to make teaching less effective. The new task is inventing and experimenting tools that can deal with this weakness. As an example, there can be this online community of learners ubiquitous, not time delimitated, and therefore so fulfilling, but if seen from the other side (the student) he could be in the middle of a family brawl while attending the classroom and not so much concentrated as he could be. How do we deal with that? (Please consider that the problem is not necessarily solved by an asynchronous class, because the student could be in fight all the time when at home with his family, and that is not uncommon).
I share your critical look at ubiquitous learning. It's defintely a resource for learning, but it's not enough in itself to achieve all its potentials and it may not always work for everybody in any context. It needs some kind of scaffolding, be it practical or pedagogical.