Ubiquitous Learning Institute

Ubiquitous learning is ideas without barriers, inspiration without limits, innovation without boundaries.

Why the Ubiquitous Learning Institute?

• Changing our understanding of all the contexts in which learning takes place.
• Seamlessly integrating education into the flow of everyday life.
• Exploring how new technologies and constant interconnectivity are transforming when, where, and how learning happens.

Why Illinois?

The University of Illinois has a rich tradition of technological innovation that has fueled developments from the MRI to the LED and the plasma screen, to Mosaic, Netscape, and YouTube. We have transformed the landscape of science and technology while literally changing the world.

On a campus with top-ranked programs in education, engineering, computer science, business, and library science, the capacity for innovation and technological revolution is unsurpassed. The Ubiquitous Learning Institute is building partnerships by bringing these disciplines together to have impacts at the local level and around the globe.

What Impact?

The Ubiquitous Learning Institute is building the foundation of interdisciplinary scholarship and policy formation to understand how we learn and how we teach in this new landscape of technology. Activities range from empirical research on the where and how of learning, to theoretical models that challenge our traditional values and assumptions of what it means to teach and to learn.

The institute:

• brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to collaborate on the invention of new forms of teaching and learning using ubiquitous technologies;
• creates and disseminates new knowledge about the design, development, and utilization of technology-based tools and practices for enhancing teaching, learning, and performance;
• equips students and teachers with the skills and knowledge to utilize technology-based tools and practices to improve learning and performance;
• and enhances educational performance by providing expertise and assistance through consulting activities, research and development, program evaluation, and training services.

A Breakthrough Partnership

The proposed institute— a partnership among the College of Education, GSLIS, Computer Science, and other units at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign— will take an innovative approach to research on and development of teaching-learning paradigms suited to new learning ecologies, and will explore the implications of these paradigms for formal schooling, for online communities, for evolving definitions of public knowledge, and for global interconnectedness.