José María Rodríguez

Emerging technology today departs from my previous vision of improving the human condition. Through AI/Machine Learning, we are constantly hearing that technology is becoming more human and becoming more capable of judgements that we once thought were our domain. In education though, the opposite is happening: educational technology is not becoming more human; it is making the human a technology. Instead of improving teaching and learning, today’s technology re-writes teaching and learning to function according to a very narrow spectrum of single, de-contextualized skills.

At first glance, it is the machines that make ubiquitous learning different from heritage classroom and book-oriented approaches to learning. These appearances, however, can deceive. Old learning can be done on new machines. Using new machines is not necessarily a sign that ubiquitous learning has arrived. And some features of ubiquitous learning are not new—as Chip Bruce highlights so clearly in his chapter, they have a proud place in the history of educational innovation, which stretches back well before the current wave of machines.