tl;dr:  Stuff happens in threes, simultaneously. This post explores the three times three of synchronicity

Does this happen to you online, these weird synchronicities of three?

First, I got a notification that there was a new Android app for WordPress.  I need to live more in the mobile world my students live in especially now that phones are so extensible, so powerful, so engaged in the distributed net. I need to live where they live.

Second, I ran across this very interesting article by Inge de Waard about something called “WMUTE design (Wireless, Mobile, and Ubiquitous Technologies in Education).” More on this in a bit, suffice to say it is a a dense dig to find the rough diamonds. At least it is proving such for me.

Third, my friend Maha was tweeting about what to do next online and I see that she is also beginning to post online via mobile.

The thread that runs so true and through? Mobile connection as system, mobile systems as learning spaces, mobile systems as living spaces? “Mobile” seems to be the Grand Attractor?

So I went outside.  It’s what I always do when I am drowned by the profusion of the net. I am driven to move into a larger, slower, deeper and more profoundly simultaneous system.  Nature or Gaia or the Mother or the Father.  Name matters not.  I just step into a vision in a rain barrel

or the fuse of life that through a brown garden burns

or in a squall of birds flying over in the blue pall of a November morning.

The animated gif and the still photo and the video above are connected through my mobile device and through the blog and with the three seemingly synchronous digital events above into this seamless (or what seem to be seamless) being, this post.

I pull a book off the shelf.

Davis and Sumara. They are a reminder of my abortive attempt at a doctorate, but I remember something vague about simultaneity that I read there.

The word simultaneity refers to events or phenomena that exist or operate at the same time. It is used here as a contrast to the modern and Western habit of thinking in terms of discontinuities around such matters as theory and practice, knowers and knowledge, self and other, mind and body, art and science, and child and curriculum.

Davis, Brent, and Dennis J. Sumara. Complexity and Education: Inquiries Into Learning, Teaching, and Research. Psychology Press, 2006. Print.

There are some pretty awesome charts in the Davis and Sumara book that I didn’t wanted to reproduce here.  Instead I have grabbed some from another source that makes the same point. The three graphs point out the growing cognitive complexity of TV crime shows.

Old school TV discontinuity, plot as strictly chronological.

Simultaneous and multiple narratives, fuzzy borders.

Multiple threads layered one atop the other, truly synchronous.

Inside and outside. Atop and below. Helixes of stories in simultaneous and seamless connection. Online and off. Is there a new story being born here? What is my point? Life imitates nature?  Nature mimics life?  I think it is time to return to de Waard and her article about WMUTE design (Wireless, Mobile, and Ubiquitous Technologies in Education).  The term of art she uses is ‘seamlessness’.  Mobile learning is giving us the chance, all of us, to live a new way of learning.

Seamless learning is still a new area, and the challenges are multiple. As this discipline merges the technological and human challenges faced by the emerging new technologies of the last decade (mobile learning, social media, MOOCs, etc.), it is becoming clear that the ultimate learning environment will have to provide a smooth learner experience, with options to both consume and create content. It is a bit of unexplored territory.

Hyperbolic understatement much?

I have been thinking of all that has happened in the last year in my own “not so very” seamless learning experiences.  It has been a simultaneous and synchronicitous layering of MOOC’s and makings and social media. Now I am working toward the mobile part. I sense that it is the ‘click’ piece,

Maha is wondering, “What next?”  It is an ultimate question we should all ask as we move through whatever season in whatever hemisphere in whatever country we live in. Perhaps the answer is already moving from one bit of informal learning toward another, from MOOCs to makes to mobilities.  Omne trium perfectum.  All threes complete. 

As a lit teacher  I cannot help but feel the emotional tercets of a Theodore Roethke villanelle, drawing toward the powerful, seamless conclusion: