Lifelong and Lifewide Learning

I want to take a step back before diving into the concept of Ubiquitous Learning and take a closer look at “laws of learning” and technology.

In The Gears of my Childhood, http://worrydream.com/refs/Papert%20-%20Mindstorms%201st%20ed.pdf Seymour Papert states “What an individual can learn, and how he learns it, depends on what models he has available. These questions raise, recursively, the question of how he learned these models. Thus the “laws of learning” must be about how intellectual structures grow out of one another and about how, in the process, they acquire both logical and emotional form.” Papert sees the computer as the "Proteus of machines,” the universal enabler, an instrument flexible enough so that “many children can create something” which assimilates new models of knowledge into their individual styles of learning. However, kindling the spark of “love” for learning and inquiry as the driving force in creating a “genesis of knowledge” is the dominant message of Papert’s essay and the universal message to and for educators.

For Ray Kurzweil “Technology goes beyond mere tool making; it is a process of creating ever more powerful technology using the tools from the previous round of innovation.” As a generation of students prepares for their future, they must be prepared for a fluid and lifetime assimilation of new technology and models of national and international coexistence. However, Luke Rhinehart aka George Cockcroft, a psychiatrist, university professor, and writer of the cult novel The Dice Man https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7520434M/The_Dice_Man wrote:

"Man must become comfortable in flowing from one role to another, one set of values to another, one life to another. Men must be free from boundaries, patterns, and consistencies in order to be free to think, feel and create in new ways. Men have admired Prometheus and Mars too long; our God must become Proteus."

A closer look at our students and their brains

Current research supports that a profound reorganization of human brain function takes place during adolescence: the amount of deep sleep and the rate of brain metabolism fall sharply; the latency of specific event-related potentials declines; the capacity to recover function after brain injury diminishes; and adult problem-solving “power” appears.

Studies focused on the reduction in cortical synaptic density give a new meaning to "pruning" (Adolescent Neurodevelopment). Such synaptic “pruning” may be analogous to the programmed elimination of neural elements in very early development. In her article "Teen Brains Clear Out Childhood Thoughts" http://www.mrsclemens.com/uploads/4/6/5/8/4658148/teen_brains_readings.pdf Clara Moskowitz writes that children's brain waves reduce while sleeping between ages 11 and 17. Scientists think this change reflects a trimming-down process going on inside teenagers' brains during these years, where extraneous mental connections made during childhood are lost. "When a child is born, their brain is not fully-formed, and over the first few years there's a great proliferation of connections between cells," says physiologist Ian Campbell of the University of California, Davis. "Over adolescence, there is a pruning back of these connections. The brain decides which connections are important to keep, and which can be let go."

This synaptic pruning continues into adolescence and multitasking is changing the neural networks as pruning process is based on activity and stimulation. Feinstein (Feinstein, S. G. (2009). Secrets of the teenage brain: Research-based strategies for reaching and teaching today’s adolescents (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press) states:

“If they aren’t reading, doing science, or solving problems, the synapses for those activities will be pruned and lost forever” (p. 11).

In my personal opinion, learner-centered classrooms for a purpose-driven education and a mix of explicit skill instruction and collaborative projects are necessary for today's adolescents to deep-dive into content-rich, complex learning environments which should include the use of ubiquitous learning environments. These new learning environments need to incorporate authentic learning tasks based on complex real-life experiences as the driving force for learning. Authentic assignments help students to integrate the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary for efficient task performance. Learning to coordinate qualitatively different constituent skills enables knowledge transfer and transformation their daily life or work settings. Currently, in many public education systems, ubiquitous learning incorporation is seen as a hindrance sidelining the“didactic” learning approach. Activities folding in media could include WhatsApp, blogging, vlogging, e-portfolios, Tweets (without the use of last names), Scoop & Pin, Time It, Point & Shoot, and DYI projects.

Changing the paradigms of learning transcends the constraints of classrooms and uses those higher learning skills in Blooms Digital Taxonomy. 

http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/file/view/bloom%27s%20Digital%20taxonomy%20v3.01.pdf/65720266/bloom%27s%20Digital%20taxonomy%20v3.01.pdf