This document discusses the concept of virtuous learning in the context of ubiquitous, open, and creative learning environments. It defines virtuous learning as relying on ubiquity, openness, and creativity to encourage social and epistemic learning virtues. It discusses how commons-based peer production can provide a context for positive character formation by allowing people to engage in virtuous behaviors through collaboration. Finally, it examines how new technologies are blurring boundaries of education and shifting the balance of agency toward more open, collaborative, and personalized learning.

1. Virtuous Learning: Ubiquity,
Openness, Creativity
Presentation at Ubiquitous Learning, An International
Conference
17-19 November, University of Illinois, Illini Center, Chicago
Michael A. Peters
University of Illinois

2. 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

3. ‘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. Nissenbaum
The Journal of Political Philosophy: Volume 14, Number 4, 2006, pp. 394–419

4. 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.

5. 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).

6. 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)

7. 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.

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

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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."

12. 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.

13. 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.”

14. 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

15. 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)

16. 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)

17. Openness
• Technopolitical economy of openness
- Politics of Openness
- Technologies of Openness
- Economics of Openness
• Open Cultures/Open Education
• Towards an Ontology of Openness

18. Web 2.0 Technologies
• New architectures
of participation and
collaboration
• Social media-social
networking
• Wiki-collaborations
• Wisdom of the
crowd
• Web as platform

19. 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

20. Growing Interconnectedness

21. 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)

22. 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)

23. 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

24. 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

25. 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

26. 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)

27. 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

28. 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.’

29. 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

30. 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.

31. 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).

32. 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.

33. 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
.
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.