Nice to see you again, Week 2!

Ah - this is a juicy one for me. The theme of Week Two was 'Established and Emerging Trends in Online Learning' and what I will choose to pick up on here are the thoughts on Seamless and Ubiquitous Learning (SL and UL from now on) (reminder to find my post here if you haven't read that yet).

Visual representation of SL

I made some comments on whether I had experienced seamless or ubiquitous in that, and said that I had, but not so much in the IMASEC context. After comments from my peers and continuing experiences, I must change that and say that I definitely have! The questions is whether it is useful or beneficial to my learning. I critiqued UL in that post, from the perspective of stress and mental well-being; how good is it really to have learning immersed all the time, everywhere, especially when it is through technology? Secondly, I want to here add a point that was made another student on my course, Loren Scott - what happens when the cognitive aspect is taken out of learning, which seems to be a key tenet to UL. He lifts the quote:

"The ultimate aim of ubiquitous learning research is to find ways to immerse the learner in the environment in such a way that the learning would simply happen, automatically and in such small amounts, that it would not even be noticeable" (Kinshuk and Graf, S. (2012). Ubiquitous Learning. In Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning (pp. 3361-3363). Springer)

I remain convinced that this is a real point of contention, and agree with Loren on that this surely cannot be a positive thing. What happens with critical learning? Reflection? Critical reflection? What behaviour can be created or sustained when we do not notice our learning?

Furthermore, I want to add that since I wrote the post, I have been subjected to a fair amount of, if not ubiquitous then at least seamless learning and I am now in experience dealing with the stresses of it, and having to learn how to navigate that. Interestingly enough, what I'm having to do is put measures in place to make the learning less seamless; turn off notifications, limit the amount of platforms I'm on, etc. Which I believe says something interesting about at least my own reaction to that which in this part of the literature is outlined as sought after. It would be really interesting to read some studies of students' reactions to SL and UL. Will see if I can find any and upload as an Academic Review.

#Revisit #Week2