OnLIFE Education Paradigm: Wearables and Immersion as a Connective-Embodied Experience

Abstract

Contemporary digital transformation has established new ways of being, existing, and learning in a hyperconnected world, marked by the dissolution of boundaries between the physical and the digital, the human and the technological. In this scenario, OnLIFE Education emerges as a paradigm that understands learning as an inventive, ecosystemic, and connective process in which body, environment, and digital technologies are inseparably co-engendered. Despite this paradigmatic shift, the concept of immersion remains, in most educational and technological approaches, anchored in representational logics associated with entering and/or remaining in virtual or digital environments, sustained by the separation between the physical and the digital. The aim of this article is to problematize the concept of immersion in OnLIFE Education, displacing it from a spatially simulation-centered understanding toward conceiving it as a process of ”agencement as coupling” among body, environment, technologies, and informational ecosystems. From this perspective, wearable technologies are understood as co-engendering interfaces. Methodologically, the article presents an empirical excerpt from a doctoral investigation that adopts the cartographic research-intervention method, qualitative and interventive in nature, through which the tracking of inventive processes emerged in the development and experience of a wearable glove prototype in the context of dance. The results indicate that the experience with the wearable reveals immersion as a continuous process of agencements among body, dance, data, and digital technologies, contributing to its conceptual reconfiguration within the OnLIFE Education Paradigm.