The key point about ubiquitous learning that I’m getting from this course is not simply its definition - a challenge to traditional / didactic pedagogic practices, and their bounds in space and time, arising from the potentials in new technologies - but rather what it means for our practice as educators, or designers of modules / course materials etc.

While it’s certainly true that web-based technologies introduce the possibility of activities that were inconceivable beforehand, you could say that this is true of the introduction of any technology – it’s not a unique feature of computer-mediated technologies in our age. Despite James Gee’s point in one of this week’s videos that the textbook is an example of a rather negative technology, it is nevertheless a technology, and introduced new possibilities into learning and teaching that didn’t exist before. As did the Overhead Projector in its time, or the electronic calculator.

To me, what’s interesting about the way ubiquitous learning is presented in this course is that it’s one of the affordances of current technology – a possible benefit which gives new ways of approaching learning and teaching which either didn’t exist, or were less efficient, before. In the UK higher education sector at the moment there is a strong drive towards the idea of ‘Flexible Pedagogies’; universities are committing to certain principles about inclusivity and flexible access to education, enabling more students from a wider range of backgrounds, and with a wider range of needs, to participate in education than previously. Technology helps us to meet those aspirations.

This, to me, is the powerful thing about the concept of ubiquitous learning as an affordance given by technology: the ability of a student to learn anytime and anywhere as a result of cloud collaboration, Web 2.0 tools, content designed for mobile, and so on, means that more students can enjoy better educational outcomes. For ‘conventional’ students studying full-time on campus, the advantage is that they can get access to content at a time that suits them outside class through a VLE or web-hosted content, or can access materials for rapid, low-effort revision using tools like Quizlet. They can study with classmates from a wider range of backgrounds – such as in this MOOC with participants from around the world, or participate more in existing courses through collaborative editable tools like the Google suite, than a traditional didactic pedagogy would allow.

Importantly, non-conventional students, who would possibly have been denied access to education by the constraints imposed in a didactic pedagogy, can now participate in academic life more easily: Special Educational Needs students enjoy the benefits of assistive technologies; distance or part-time learners are better able to balance academic work with their other commitments, and all students are better able to access material as and when they need it to help them grasp threshold concepts.

So for me, the key message for Week 1 is that we as educators should look at ways in which we can integrate technology into our courses in order to maximise our students’ ability to engage in learning more easily, both inside and outside of the physical campus.