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Heather A Ochmane-Learning Ecologies MOOC’s Updates
Essential Update #1 - The Ubiquitous Learning - Web 2.0
As a girl, I learned how to cook and sew from my mother, how to knit (never very well unfortunately) from my aunts, and how to embroider from my older sister who had learnt it herself from our grandmother. As a young adult, I purchased some books to help me get better in each of these areas.
I now have a daughter who was born in 2004. For her eighth birthday, she got some polymer clay. The following day, after school, she went on the Internet and found some “how to” videos. With the help of these short videos, she was able to furnish a doll house and make a variety of small attractive objects.
I have also relied on online videos to learn how to renovate furniture, revive an old laptop computer, and edit html scripts.
I did a simple Google search on “how to video” and got about 2 940 000 000 results.
In a Forbes article published in June 2015, “Education as Entertainment: YouTube Sensations Teaching the Future” Karen Hua writes that education videos on YouTube are viewed twice as often as those found in the Animals and Pets category. She goes on with the example of Khan Academy which was at the time “one of the leading digital education platforms, delivering some 440 million free micro-lectures to 2.2 million YouTube subscribers. The videos have been viewed over 500 million times.”
Educational videos provide ubiquitous learning opportunities to anyone with Internet access. We may watch them while searching for an answer to a specific question, or just for fun because some people are simply interesting to watch.
Although not all educational videos are “how to videos”, they are all helping to create learning communities online. As John Green, in his 2012 TED talk on “The nerd's guide to learning everything online”, explained, people are not just passively absorbing information while watching an educational video as they have the opportunity to ask questions and engage in discussions with other members of the online community through posts and discussion forums.
That's an interesting (and very well personalised) perspective on this, Valerie. Your point about the use of YouTube in the Forbes article reminds me of something I heard in relation to iPads (but now sadly can't find the original article where I came across it). The author claimed that there was relatively little - if any - strong evidence for benefits of iPads in primary schools but that there did seem to be a correlation between use of an iPad and homework completion especially where YouTube videos were part of that homework. Of course, part of this is likely to be the appeal of new media in the homework activity itself, but another tentative suggestion was that the ease of accessing that homework was far greater with an iPad than, say, a PC. The computer needs to be switched on, booted, then multiple clicks to get to the right site etc., whereas with a tablet device the student could access their homework with less effort - just a few taps and swipes. So perhaps the powerful motivator here is a result of high appeal (new media) with low-effort requirement (easy ubiquitous access). I suppose part of the time element of ubiquitous learning is not merely that it breaks the boundaries of the timetable, but new technologies can make the doing of that faster and less of a chore for students.
Apologies for posting all this without a link to the article itself, so there's a risk that I'm misremembering, but I'll try to dig it out and share it.
Nicely encapsulated. Nicely said. Digital and connected technologies -- and the know-how of large and deep communities of knowers and learners using the internet -- allow us to learn in ways that had never before been so immediate, so clear, so compelling. It is indeed a new era of cooperation and active engagement across great distances and across many boundaries. Ubiquitous learning indeed.