Virtuous Learning: Ubiquity, Openness,

CreativityPresentation at Ubiquitous Learning, An

International Conference17-19 November, University of Illinois, Illini Center,

ChicagoMichael A. Peters

University of Illinois

Virtuous Learning• Virtuous does not mean only ‘virtual’• Virtuous also means more than ‘VLE’ or ‘VLC’• In the Meno Socrates wrestles with the question

of virtue [aretê] as ability or skill to arrive at the gloomy conclusion that virtue is unteachable although not unknowable

• Virtue epistemology (Sosa, 1980; Code 1987) is person- rather than belief-based and rests on ‘responsibility’ that springs from membership in a community defined by social practices of enquiry which entails moral and intellectual obligations

• Virtuous learning which relies on ubiquity, openness and creativity encourages social and epistemic learning virtues

‘Commons-based Peer Production and Virtue’

• COMMONS-BASED peer production is a socio-economic system of production that is emerging in the digitally networked environment. Facilitated by the technical infrastructure of the Internet, the hallmark of this socio-technical system is collaboration among large groups of individuals, sometimes in the order of tens or even hundreds of thousands, who cooperate effectively to provide information, knowledge or cultural goods without relying on either market pricing or managerial hierarchies to coordinate their common enterprise. While there are many practical reasons to try to understand a novel system of production that has produced some of the finest software, the fastest supercomputer and some of the best web-based directories and news sites, here we focus on the ethical, rather than the functional dimension. What does it mean in ethical terms that many individuals can find themselves cooperating productively with strangers and acquaintances on a scope never before seen?‘Commons-based Peer Production and Virtue’ – Y. Benkler & H. NissenbaumThe Journal of Political Philosophy: Volume 14, Number 4, 2006, pp. 394–419

A Context for Positive Character Formation

• We suggest that the emergence of peer production offers an opportunity for more people to engage in practices that permit them to exhibit and experience virtuous behavior. We posit: (a) that a society that provides opportunities for virtuous behavior is one that is more conducive to virtuous individuals; and (b) that the practice of effective virtuous behavior may lead to more people adopting virtues as their own, or as attributes of what they see as their self-definition. The central thesis of this paper is that socio-technical systems of commons-basedpeer production offer not only a remarkable medium of production for various kinds of information goods but serve as a context for positive character formation.

Ubiquity• Web-centricity• Portable data• File-sharing• Pervasive computing• Easy navigation• Software-as-a-Service • Think Locally, Work Globally• Ubiquity is the term applied to the non-spatial

omnipresence of the body of Christ set forth by Luther in the eucharistic controversy (joke).

Main characteristics of ubiquitous learning

• Permanency: Learners can never lose their work unless it is purposefully deleted & learning processes are recorded continuously

• Accessibility: Learners have access to their documents, data, or videos from anywhere - the learning involved is self-directed.

• Immediacy: Learners can access information immediately anywhere with greater problem solving ability.

• Interactivity: Learners can interact with experts, teachers, or peers in the form of synchronies or asynchronous communication.

• Situated learning: The learning is embedded in daily life & tied to relevant actions.

• Adaptability: Learners can get the right information at the right place in the right way.

• Personalization: Learners can customize their site.• Pervasiveness: UL depends on UC, available everywhere• Social awareness: Promotes social awareness through social media.• Peer-to-peer collaboration: Encourages participation & collaboration.• Interoperability: There is easy movement among devices.

Source: Adapted from Chen et al., 2002; Curtis et al., 2002; Yang, S. J. H., Okamoto, T., & Tseng, S.-S. (2008)

Any time, any where• The authors pay particular attention to what new

technologies afford for learning, and how their widespread dissemination and use affects media literacy and relationships in who learns what from whom and where. Key among the affordances of the new media are transformations in the production process, with new media creating a need for multimodal literacy both in understanding and producing new texts. Significant changes also occur in the roles of reader and user, consumer and producer, learner and teacher. The reach of new media beyond classroom walls and beyond formal learning contexts challenge the boundaries of education, transforming learning from a managed activity to an ubiquitous – anywhere, anytime, with anyone – and continuous part of daily life. New ways in which meaning is created, stored, delivered and accessed are appearing daily, each influencing what it means to participate in learning.

Different types of learning(Lyytinen et. al., 2002)

Ubiquitous learning• Ubiquitous = pervasive, omnipresent, ever present,

everywhere• Learning = educational, instructive, didactic,

pedagogical• Environment = surroundings, setting, situation,

atmosphere• E-Learning is passé. U-learning is the new wave

globally in higher education. Ubiquitous learning encompasses e-learning and emphasizes learning anytime, anywhere and anyway in both formal and informal lifelong learning environments.

• Vicki Jones and Jun H. Jo (2004) Ubiquitous learning environment: An adaptive teaching system using ubiquitous technology

Three waves of computer-human interaction

• First computing wave tied many people to a single mainframe computer. Users of such computers had highly specialized skills that were not representative of average citizens.

• The second wave connected individuals to desktop and laptop computers, thus providing a one-to-one computer-to-human ratio.

• The third wave is the era of ubiquitous computing, whereby many computers interact with one person, or many computers interact with many people.

Source: Weiser, 1996

The History of Handheld Computers

• The "Little Professor" calculator produced by Texas Instruments and introduced in 1976.

• The TI Graphing Calculator produced by Texas Instruments and introduced in 1990.

• The Palm Pilot PDA produced by Palm, Inc. and introduced in 1996.

• The Toshiba Pocket PC e750 produced by Toshiba and introduced in March 2003.

• The Palm Tungsten C produced by Palm, Inc. and introduced in April 2003.

• The Samsung SCH-i600 Smart Phone produced by Samsung and introduced in November 2003.

• The Samsung SPH-i700 Pocket PC Phone produced by Samsung and introduced in November 2003.

Source: Ken Polsson's (2003) "Chronology of Handheld Computers."

Ubiquitous computing• Ubiquitous computing is a new information

and communication technology that utilize a large number of cooperative small nodes with computing and/or communication capabilities such as handheld terminals, smart mobile phones, sensor network nodes, contactless smart cards, RFIDs (radio frequency identification), and so on. This paper proposes the concept of ubiquitous learning that enables anyone to learn at anytime and anywhere by fully utilizing ubiquitous computing technologies.

Handheld Devices for Ubiquitous Learning: Chris

Dede • “Part of what makes handhelds so exciting is that they have, perhaps, 60% of the capability for learning at about 10% of the price. This next generation of handheld devices, in particular those that are Pocket PC-based, has the kind of raw computing power that laptops may have had 2-3 years ago, even though screen sizes are much smaller and full-sized keyboards are a peripheral add-on. This array of features means that they will be used a little differently than a laptop is used.”

Wireless Handheld Devices (WHDs)

• WHDs include but are not limited to cellphones, personal digital assistants, handheld gaming devices, and portable music players.

WHDs share five commonalities: 1) Connectability – they connect to the Internet wirelessly via

wireless fidelity, or WiFi, 2) Wearability – they are wearable and therefore always at

the fingertips of the user, 3) Instant Accessibility – they turn instantly on and off, 4) Flexibility – they can collect data by accommodating a

wide variety of peripheral extensions, and 5) Economic Viability – they have much of the computing

capability and expandable storage capacity of laptops at a fraction of the cost Source: Dieterle, 2004

Adaptivity and Personalization

• While "ubiquitous technologies in education" is a growing research area, aspects of adaptivity and personalization become more and more important. Incorporating adaptivity and personalization issues in ubiquitous learning systems allows these systems to provide learners with an environment that is not only accessible anytime and anywhere, but also accommodate to the individual preferences and needs of learners. Being aware of and considering the current context of the learners as well as that they have, for example, different prior knowledge, interests, learning styles, learning goals, and so on, leads to a more effective, convenient, and successful learning experience in the ubiquitous learning environments.

• International Workshop on Adaptivity and Personalization in Ubiquitous Learning Systems (APULS 2008)

New media & learning practices

1. To blur the traditional institutional, spatial and temporal boundaries of education.

2. To shift the balance of agency.3. To recognize learner differences and use them as a

productive resource.4. To broaden the range and mix of representational modes.5. To develop conceptualizing capacities.6. To connect one’s own thinking into the social mind of

distributed cognition.7. To build collaborative knowledge cultures.8. Schools become knowledge-producing communities where

expression becomes both multimodal and self-chosen; and pedagogy reaps the benefits of using new modes of communication and practice.

Source: Cope & Kalantzis (2008)

Openness• Technopolitical economy of openness

- Politics of Openness- Technologies of Openness- Economics of Openness

• Open Cultures/Open Education• Towards an Ontology of Openness

Web 2.0 Technologies• New architectures

of participation and collaboration

• Social media-social networking

• Wiki-collaborations

• Wisdom of the crowd

• Web as platform

Mass Individualization • Economics of file-

sharing• Mass customization• Personalization of

services• Co-production of

goods• You as co-designer• Customer integrated

into value creation process

Growing Interconnectedness

Open Cultures/Open Education

Emerging Knowledge Ecologies• MIT adopts OpenCourseWare (2001)• Budapest OA statement; NIH; ERC.• The Ithaca Report, University

Publishing In A Digital Age (2007)• Harvard mandates open archiving

(Feb 14, 2008)

Ithaka Report, 2007• changes in creation, production and

consumption of scholarly resources --‘creation of new formats made possible by digital technologies, ultimately allowing scholars to work in deeply integrated electronic research and publishing environments that will enable real-time dissemination, collaboration, dynamically-updated content, and usage of new media’ (p. 4).

• ‘alternative distribution models (institutional repositories, pre-print servers, open access journals) have also arisen with the aim to broaden access, reduce costs, and enable open sharing of content’ (p. 4)

Open 21st Century?• The present decade can be called the ‘open’ decade (open

source, open systems, open standards, open archives, open everything) just as the 1990s were called the ‘electronic’ decade (e-text, e-learning, e-commerce, e-governance). Materu, 2004.

• It is more than just a ‘decade’ that follows the electronic innovations of the 1990s; it is a change of philosophy and ethos, a set of interrelated and complex changes that transforms markets and the mode of production, ushering in a new collection of values based on openness, the ethic of participation and peer-to-peer collaboration.

• a shift from an underlying metaphysics of production—a ‘productionist’ metaphysics—to a metaphysics of prosumption creating new forms of creativity and freedom

Open Education/Open Learning

‘the open provision of educational resources, enabled by information and communication technologies, for consultation, use and adaptation by a community of users for noncommercial purposes’

--UNESCO, 2002

Global Power/Knowledge Systems

• Openness seems also to suggest political transparency, an ethic of participation, collaboration through social media and the norms of open inquiry, indeed, even democracy itself as both the basis of both the logic of inquiry, the creation of value and the dissemination of its results

An ontology of openness• The Principle of Openness: An ontology should be open and

available to be used by all potential users without any constraint, other than (1) its origin must be acknowledged and (2) it should not to be altered and subsequently redistributed except under a new name

• The words that surround this concept are many: gap, space, unconcealed, plainly seen, in public notice or view, unenclosed, without cover, opportunity, without obfuscation, free from obstruction, access or passage, affording unrestricted access or entry, bare, exposed, revealed, vulnerable, not finished or completed, disclose, available, to spread out, expand, unfold.

• the sense of open as the act of opening to• the quality of being in a state of openness• the open in which things may emerge (ground for world)

Source: Cooksey (2005)

Creativity• You need chaos in your soul to give

birth to a dancing star.-Nietzsche

• ‘An economy where a person’s ideas, not land or capital, are the most important input and output (not IP).’-John Howkins (2001) The Creative Economy

Creativity & the Public Domain

• ‘We need to create the right conditions for creativity, enlarging the public domain, increasing access to books, culture and R&D, resisting the impulse to privatize facts and ideas, and embracing a more democratic (my word) and non-western (his word) view of creativity to flourish by fitting the IP law to the country rather than the other way around.’

Creativity & Entrepreneurship

• Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus (1997) Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action, and the Cultivation of Solidarity

• human beings are at their best when they are intensely involved in changing the taken-for-granted, everyday practices in some domain of their culture

• entrepreneurship, democratic action, and the creation of solidarity as the three major arenas in which people make history

Social Entrepreneur in the Knowledge Economy

• Within the knowledge economy with an emphasis on symbolic manipulation and extended chains of sign value, often as digital goods, the notion of the entrepreneur takes on different forms and different roles.

• The most important difference is the shift away from focusing on the lone entrepreneur to talking about entrepreneurship that takes place as team-work and other forms of collaboration embedded within networks and systems.

Berglind Ásgeirsdóttir, OECD Deputy Secretary-

General• The knowledge economy cannot simply be

characterised by higher “knowledge intensity” as for example more highly skilled people in the labour force. Increasingly countries will have to think about how education promotes effective participation in communities of knowledge; and this will include social and moral competences as well as technical ones (emphasis in the original).

Learning & The Cultivation of Norms

• it is not possible to encourage ‘creativity’ and innovation in an organizational environment which itself is rigid, heavily hierarchical, and run on top-down management lines.

• the question of organizational or institutional design is a critical and central aspect of knowledge management practices—that is, how does one design or create open institutional environments that are networked and based on norms of collaboration, reciprocity, trust, interactivity, and sharing.

• the question is a question of education, ‘participation in communities of knowledge’, that includes social and moral competencies as well as technical ones.

References• Chen, Y.S., Kao, T.C., Sheu, J.P., and Chiang, C.Y.:A Mobile Scaffolding-Aid-Based Bird -

Watching Learning System, Proceedings of IEEE International Workshop on Wireless and Mobile Technologies in Education (WMTE'02), pp.15-22, IEEE Computer Society Press, 2002.

• Code, L., 1987, Epistemic Responsibility, Hanover: University Press of New England and Brown University Press

• Curtis, M., Luchini, K., Bobrowsky, W., Quintana, C., and Soloway, E.: Handheld Use in K-12: A Descriptive Account, Proceedings of IEEE International Workshop on Wireless and Mobile Technologies in Education (WMTE'02), pp.23-30, IEEE Computer Society Press, 2002.

• Dieterle, E. (2004). Wearable computers and evaluation. The Evaluation Exchange, 10(3), 4–5.

• Lyytinen, K. & Yoo, Y. Issues and Challenges in Ubiquitous Computing Communications of the ACM, ACM, 2002, 45, 62-65.Polsson, K. (2003). Chronology of handheld computers. Retrieved October 10, 2004, from http://www.islandnet.com/~kpolsson/handheld/

• Sosa, E., 1980, "The Raft and the Pyramid: Coherence versus Foundations in the Theory of Knowledge," Midwest Studies in Philosophy, V: 3-25.

• Weiser, M. (1991). The computer for the twenty-first century. Scientific American, 265(3), 94-104.  

• Weiser, M. (1996). Ubiquitous computing movies. Retrieved November 10, 2003, from http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/UbiMovies.html

• Yang, S. J. H., Okamoto, T., & Tseng, S.-S. (2008). Context-Aware and Ubiquitous Learning (Guest Editorial). Educational Technology & Society, 11 (2), 1-2.