Beyond the Ownership of Handheld Devices: Active Learning with Ubiquitous Learning Minds

Abstract

Whether mobile and ubiquitous learning becomes a substantial learning scenario depends on how the mobile and ubiquitous technologies facilitate new learning demand in the future. The ownership of devices and the mobility of the personally-owned devices are not the only critical issues as computational power becomes universally available. The rapidly changing world creates new challenges for learners beyond learning existing knowledge. It requires learners live and learn with an active learning mind that promotes personal autonomy, social collaboration and intelligence as well as epistemic pluralism in order to create innovation with the aid of technologies. Transformative pedagogies and environment are required to facilitate the cultivation of such learning mind. Encouraging contribution, technology adoption, social intelligence and socially promotive collaboration become the critical issues when learners are augmented with distributed learning minds through mobile and ubiquitous technologies.