Digital society’s changes and challenges, and their implications for education
Rocío Rueda (Universidad Pedagógica Nacional).
Rethinnking digital society from expanded cultura and educational local experiences.
The Information Society implies new forms of capitalism, especially at the informational and cognitive levels. There are different changes taking place in a common context:
- Reflexive modernization, liquid modernity (Beck, Giddens, Lash, Bauman).
- Collective action and new social movements (Laclau & Mouffe, Escobar, Melucci).
- Informal politics in social processes (deSouza, Lechner).
- Economic and cultural globalization (glocalization) (Castells, Canclini, Barbero).
- Cultural and generational leap (Mead).
Theoretical framework:
- Foucault’s Postestructuralism
- Science and technology social studies (Langdon Winner, Latour, Callon)
- Feminist studies (Haraway, WAjcman)
- Studies of communication-education and culture, expanded educatoin (Freire, Barbero)
- Politics of happening, minor politics (Hardt & Negri, Lazzarato, Bifo, Virno)
Methodology: multisituated ethnography to analyze different initiatives/movements in Colombia: NASA-ACIN, Vamos Mujer, La Cápsula, Niuton, Mefisto, Chicas Linux.
Two type of technosocial settings: most of the times, politics determines technology; but some other times, technologies are used as political devices.
Expanded educational practices take place in hybrid times and spaces; the student becomes producer; the community becomes the driver of action, engagement and change. Technologies are not determinant, but determined by social uses. Expanded education practices foster sharing thus challenging the concept of private property, authority, authorship.
Micheál Ó. Dúill (Logios.Org)
Turing Teaching: Primary transition.
Some specific characteristics make humans human: we believe that language is unique to us, but it just happens that Neanderthals spoke as well as us. But they did not had technology or written language. If technology is simple (low entropy) and biology (us) is complex (high entropy), how is it that a high entropy system can produce a low entropy system, thus breaking the 2nd law of thermodynamics? The reason mgiht be that access to low entropy information is possessed by the genes and expressed in the phenotype.
The mechanism of technicity is based on the association of the executive sphere (lateral convexity, cognitive) with the sensori-motor sphere. External impulses are recognized by our low entropy information embedded in genes.
P-Concepts: derived from perceptual experience, mediated by language, Vigotskian socio-linguistic thought. P-Conceptually: square and diamond.
T-Concepts: derived property-of-mater information, mediated by cognition, scientific reality check. T-Conceptually: both quadrilateral.
3 modes of education:
- Neanderthal instruction (P): directly shows concepts.
- Grammar schooling (P & T): uses an external storage of information (e.g. book).
- Turing teaching (T): animation of externally stored information, it is the Turing machine made concrete, teaching tuned to the developing brain. The problem is that there is no curriculum and no teaching method.
John Moravec (University of Minnesota).
Technology and education in post-disciplinary society: Preliminary insights from the Knowmad Society project.
After Aprendizaje Invisible (Cobo & Moravec, 2011), there was a need to explore what was happening at work, especially at the level of nomadic knowledge workers or knowmads in the Society 3.0. Workers are increasingly less tied to their corporation, and increasingly do not identify work with jobs.
We cannot disentangle technology from learning and working and living… so what is learning in a knowmad society? Now, pedagogy is not about teaching, but about creating the conditions to learn.
We have to stop using technology to obscure education, but to improve the human experience, to disclose learning spaces, to foster relationships that are creative.
Knowmadic people work towards the creation of added value.
Alicia Beatriz Acin (Escuela Ciencias de la Educación, FFyH, UNC); Madrid, T.B. (Instituto de Formación Docente C. Leguizamón).
Distance education programme for adults: between traditional education and technological innovation.
Created in 2000 in Córdoba (Argentina) targeted to 21 y.o. learners with professional activities, extended to unemployed and youngsters. The syllabus is split in “modules” which have a 1-to-1 relationship with written modules. The programme breaks the trend towards homologation and recovers some principles in use in previous times, like giving credit to informal training.
The programme is based on e-learning methodologies where the module is the main tool and teachers are tutors or guides throughout the learning path.
Results: high degrees of autonomy, technology appropriation by students, contents as compendiums rather than cognitive mediators or tools. If students took a more active part in the design of the tool, their experience would be much better and their educational process would be highly improved.
Josefina Santibañez (Universidad de La Rioja); Ramírez García, A. (Universidad de Córdoba); Renés, P. (Universidad de Cantabria).
Media literacy in 65 y.o. adults in La Rioja in the context of Spain.
The goal of the project was anlyzing the level of media literacy amongst 65 y.o. adults in La Rioja (Spain) and then compare it with their peers in Spain.
Independent variables: gender, education level, training in audiovisual communication, professional experience related to media, age.
Dependent variables: aesthetic dimension (being able to evaluate formal innovation), linguistic dimension (being able to evaluate media codes and languages), ideological dimension (being able to analyse the values represented by a message), reception and audience dimension (ability to evaluate the process of message reception), production and programming dimension (ability to evaluate productive routines), technological dimension.
Conclusions show that elderly people have a deep lack of media competence.
Discussion
Janaina Minelli de Oliveira: is there a tension between self-interest and common interest? If we foster self-interest or self-realization, are we going against common interest? John Moravec: one thing is personal knowledge, which is about what can one do, and another one is how or where to apply that knowledge. I think those are two different spheres and not necessarily competing ones.
