Welcome to this course Ubiquitous Learning and Instructional Technologies. Practically what we're talking about is what's in the second half of the title, which is the phenomena of new instructional technologies. There's been this incredible range of technologies which have flourished over the last couple of decades. And the ground is still changing under our feet, as we speak, in terms of the developments that are rapidly moving on. But the first part of the title, Ubiquitous Learning, is really trying to capture an idea, which is that learning these days doesn't just happen in classrooms, it happens outside of classrooms. And a lot of what our students bring into classrooms, they've learned from elsewhere. So what is the connection between classrooms and schooling and this larger environment where learning is happening everywhere, anytime, any place? The course involves, in order of appearance, myself, and I'm talking to a lot of work that Mary Kalantzis and I have done together. Also in the course we have Cris Mayo, a professor here who's been very interested in technology and gender. We have H Chad Lane, who's interested in informal learning environments and gain-based learning in museums, and the question of, what is engagement. And we also have speaking in the course Maya Israel, a Professor here in the College of Education, who's interest is this growing area of learning computer coding in schools, an area which historically never happened. There was a subject called math and there was science, but computer coding is something which has kind of fallen through the cracks. And it's an increasingly important occupational activity for so many students. We start the course with addressing this notion of ubiquitous learning, learning anywhere, anytime. And what I do in a set of videos is contrast the old school, which was the conventional classroom with its Blackboard at the front of the room, and the students sitting in straight rows, and the teacher at the front, and the textbook. With what I call the not-so-new school, because one of the things that happens with technology is we end up reproducing a lot of that. Instead of the blackboard we have the screen, instead of the printed textbook we have the e-textbook. Instead of the teacher standing at the front of the class and talking, we have videos in the form of the flipped classroom. So a lot of what we're doing is sort of new and interestingly new, but also not so new. And the real question is, how could we do something which is quite different? And in this first set of videos, I take the example of classroom discussions in discussion boards, and I try to analyze the ways in which it's the same as the old classroom in some respects, but also radically different. And sometimes the differences are hard to detect and not entirely obvious. A very big shift of gear in the second set of videos by Cris Mayo. And what Cris highlights is the gender aspect of technology. And so what she does is she takes the example, the famed example of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and his struggles [LAUGH] with technology, and goes on to talk about the social and cultural context of online learning. And also from an identity point of view, and particularly a gender identity point of view, the issues of self representation. So when you're a learner in an environment and you're representing yourself in relation to other students, what kind of avatars do you use? How do you represent yourself? How does it align with, or not align with, your own identity as a person. And then she ends up her series of videos by asking the question about how does one develop critical representation vocabularies, where people are highly conscious and aware of the ways in which they're using technology. In the next video it's back to me. And I start to talk about this question of repositioning assessment and instruction. So we had assessment in the old school. So at the end of the semester or the end of the unit of work, you did a test, which was a way of sampling what you had in your head, the stuff that you've remembered. And what we do with the new school is we have a quiz at the end of the chapter, the e-textbook chapter, or we do an item based test. And in fact in a lot of ways nothing much has changed in terms of the pedagogical logic of learning. So we can have all these fancy technologies, but the pedagogy doesn't change. Now what I begin to talk about then is the possibilities of doing something excitingly different in those environments, the possibilities of embedded formative assessment. We've always neglected formative assessment, because it's been hard to do. I mean, how does the teacher give feedback to everybody int the class in such a way that it helps them go on and they're learning. They've got to do it frequently and it's a lot of work, and it just got neglected. But in fact in these environments, again, we can do it. And what I do is I introduce this notion of recursive feedback, where students are getting feedback all the time. And suggest that there's a new realm, which is actually called learning analytics, whereby it might even be possible to replace the old-fashioned test. Because we've got all this data being aggregated all the time about all student activity, which gives us a more complete picture of student knowledge and activity than a test ever could. We've got this theme, that's beginning to run through the videos, of learning as an active process. And Chad Lane, in his series of videos, explores in detail and in-depth the notion of active learning. And also asks the question about what is engagement, what is self-directed learning? And he takes then a very, very interesting set of examples around game design and museums, around this notion of the new learner, who's hardly engaged, self-directed, relatively autonomous in their learning. Now, what's interesting by the way, about this is that there's some profound learning happening outside of school. But its modes of pedagogical engagement are quite different, and one of the lessons that we can take back into school itself. In the next set of videos, I pick up on a number of the key questions that Chad has just raised. And for me, one of the interesting questions becomes that the architecture and the logic of the old school begins to change. It used to be 1 teacher with 20 or 30 students. But I talk about a school, a real school actually, and we show some examples of this in Wisconsin, at place called Kettle Moraine, where that logic of 1 to 30 gets replaced by a logic of 1 to 1, 1 to 10, 1 to 100, which moves backwards and forwards all the time. So that the structure of the classroom is changing in some quite dramatic kinds of ways. I also talk about the nature of learning in the old classroom. You were very much on your own. You were sitting at your desk, the teacher was at the front. You read your textbook, you did your work, there wasn't a lot of collaboration, there wasn't a lot of interaction. Now one of the ironies is that we put kids in a computer lab, or we put them on their tablets remotely, whatever it is, and there's again not much interaction. They do intelligent shooters, they work their way through programs and they answer questions. There isn't a lot of interaction. So ironically, what we're doing is reproducing a lot of what happened in those old classrooms. So I end this series of videos with this notion of social learning and building a knowledge community, where the members of the classroom are active knowledge producers not on their own, but in this structured set of relationships with their peers. Now we come to a set of videos by Maya Israel where she is also talking about active learning, but talking specifically about computer science education. So what are the kinds of teaching practices, which ideally work for learners, how do we encourage student collaboration? Again, picking up on themes that both Chad Lane and I have been working on already. But then she goes into a very, very interesting case study of coding for students with disabilities. How do we deal with the diversity of our classrooms? How do we provide learning experiences which are valid and relevant for students who might have appeared not to be able to do coding, but in fact, with the right pedagogy, can? In the last set of videos in this course what I do is I come to the question of, how do you measure outcomes? And how do these outcomes relate back to the setting of goals? And I begin with a discussion of mastery learning, an idea that was created by Benjamin Bloom 50 odd years ago. Where Benjamin Bloom said, why don't we put kids across this normal distribution curve, because what happens is a group of kids come in to a classroom and they're across the normal distribution curve. We give them all uniform instruction, exactly the same instruction, and they come out across more or less the same normal distribution curve, not much changes. And what the question Benjamin Bloom asked is how with things like group work, things like specialized instruction, can we push the curve so more students end up at the success end. And this of course leads to the whole idea of standards based education, it leads to the whole idea of, should I use some cliches, no child should be left behind. Another cliche, Every Child Succeeds, which is the name of the Obama act that replaced the No Child Left Behind Act from the George Bush regime. So the idea that every child can succeed. So the provocative question I ask is, why do we continue to insist on inequality? Why do we have to have As and Bs and Cs put across a curve, when in fact we should be working towards our mastery. Where everyone, perhaps in a different pace, perhaps via different means can achieve what's expected in the curriculum at a particular point. So I then give a couple of examples where perhaps if we give students visualizations of what they've done and what they still have to do, we might be able to use the new world, emerging world of learning analytics, to achieve what was in fact logistically difficult for Bloom in the era before we had ubiquitous learning. And before we had the kind of technologies that we have today. And I end with a little slogan, well perhaps today, because we can, we should.
