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:
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.
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.
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.
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III European Conference on Information Technology in Education and Society: A Critical Insight (2012)
Punya Mishra Creative Teaching with Technology: Introducing the TPACK Framework.
In technology and education, what do teachers need to know? First of all, that the Internet might be a much more important revolution to education than the wheel to transportation or steam engine to the industry… but let us be humble about predictions. Because it is all about how we frame technology.
Against techno-centrism: It is a huge revolution: the thing is that only two generations have past since we had computers, and a single generation has past since Internet/e-mail came up, and non since web 2.0 tools.
There are no such thing like instructional technology: there is technology that is applied, amongst other uses, to education. And there are also technologies not intended for educational purposes that are actually used in education, because users redefine technologies. This is especially happening in the field of ICTs: only repurposing makes a technology an educational technology.
The reverse is also true: technology also changes how we teach. But technology is not the target of teaching, but content. If you’re not going to change pedagogy then technology use will not lead to better learning. Teaching is about “something”, not about technology. Disciplines teach us to see: knowledge, purposes, methods, forms.
Technology also changes what we teach. Content from disciplines has changed due to technology.
Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) attempts to identify the nature of knowledge required by teachers for technology integration in their teaching, while addressing the complex, multifaceted and situated nature of teacher knowledge. At the heart of the TPACK framework, is the complex interplay of three primary forms of knowledge: Content (CK), Pedagogy (PK), and Technology (TK). As must be clear, the TPACK framework builds on Shulman’s idea of Pedagogical Content Knowledge.
Creativity is crucial, especially when relevant information is scarce… which usually is.
The Seven Trans-Disciplinary Habits of Mind which extend the TPACK (PDF): Perceiving, patterning, abstracting, embodied thinking, modelling, playing, synthesising.
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III European Conference on Information Technology in Education and Society: A Critical Insight (2012)
Betty Collis Digital Learners: Will they surprise us?
At the level of the processes of learning, there already is taking place a revolution on how digital learners are facing their learning. They may also be doing things differently, or in different places, or with different tools, or with different people… just may. But what are the results of this revolution?
New learners are using multiple tools, analogue/traditional and digital altogether, mixing physical and virtual environments.
The tasks that are being performed in new environments are not that new: communicating, asking, discussing, sharing; capturing, labelling, storing; finding, adapting, expanding, creating; listening, watching, reading, annotating, writing. But these tasks are being performed with crucial differences: range, functionalities, fluidity, depth, etc. And learners are making most of these decisions by themselves, not because they were told to by their instructors.
So, we can state that digital learners are following new processes by applying old and new sets of tools, both of them used in different ways. But what about the results of their learning?
It just happens that the results we get from students are highly dependable from the way we assess their performance. If we want different results emerging from different learning processes, we do need to also change the ways with which we assess learning. Indeed, the new different assessment should go in the line of not providing the “right answer” to a given question coming from some learning material, but engaging the student to contribute with more material, with more relevant questions on the topic.
In fact, as technology becomes more and more social, learning is more about learning together, about building a learning community. Thus, assessment necessarily needs to target the creation of a learning community and how much and how well a student contributes to it.
And, as a part of the building of a learning community, an arrangement has to be made to create an “authentic audience” for the projects beyond the instructor and classmates, to get feedback from the representatives of the external audience and make results available.
Keys of expanded learning (previously not possible without technology):
Knowledge, insight to be demonstrated is specified but in the demonstration the learner has scope to surprise with results.
Learners make use of the skills they already have in the process of learning
The product fo the learning contributes tgo the learning of others.
The instructor leads a scaffolding process: guides, gives feedback, steers, and refers regularly to assessment rubrics so “surprised” does not mean the learner feels lost in terms of expectations.
Innovative uses of ICTs in teaching and learning processes
Jeff Miller (The University of British Columbia) Beyond the Learning Management System: Integrating Social Media in a Master’s of Educational Technology Program.
30 students follow the Master of Educational Technology at UBC. The idea behind the project was open new spaces by means of social media.
Affordances/constraints:
Who is “in charge”?
Who has the ability and authority to write/speak?
What design tools are available to teachers/students?
Who decides on the structure/content of materials and activities?
What is private and what is public?
How do we track engagement out of an LMS?
At the end of the course, all the scholarship is public.
In another course (ETEC540), part of the course is sitting on WebCT, but another part of it is out on the open at the UBC Wiki for ETEC540. Blogs were also used, but it came out that blogs are much less creative than wikis. And normally, the outcome of materials made by the students is bigger than the original material that the teacher put initially on the course’s website.
One of the biggest design challenges is how to create a community in each and every space, how to engage the members of that community, foster creation and not passive “consumption” of (learning) material, etc.
A good practice is to use leading edge technology, but not bleeding edge one; negotiating public and private learning spaces; developing sustainable development and delivery models; negotiating new roles.
Alfredo Álvarez Álvarez, María Dolores Porto Requejo (Universidad de Alcalá). Collaborative environments 2.0 in the learning of languages in the university.
Web 2.0 and higher education: enables learner-centered teaching, individualized monitoring (different learning paths), autonomy in the learning process, reflection over one’s own learning (self-assessment).
Web 2.0 and language learning: need of valid experiences, lack of measuring instruments, need to reorganize traditional competences.
Social networking sites offer the possibility to interact amongst one’s peers and this stimulates the generation of knowledge. This stimulation is enhanced by the novelty of the platform.
Wikis and Social Networking Sites (Ning):
Enable “real” activities (not only for the teacher’s eyes).
Enable constant revisioning.
High level of participation.
Do not normally pose any difficulty in the use of the tool.
Higher levels of self-confidence, as one’s evolution is quickly realized.
High degrees of autonomy in the learning process.
New and crossed leaderships: students leading a given discipline (i.e. get higher marks) work together with other (usually different) students that lead the usage or appropriation of the technology.
Stimulate collaborative learning.
Open possibilities of team working.
Are perceived as personal spaces, neither working or learning spaces nor institutional spaces.
Karina Olmedo, Mariona Grané, Lucrezia Crescenzi, Rafael Suárez (Laboratori de Mitjans Interactius – Universidad de Barcelona). Integration of mobile devicees in traditional e-learning environments.
How do students value the use of ICTs and mobile devices in learning processes? How does the use of the Internet and mobile devices once they have been used for learning?
The project was carried out on a master’s course on community managing. The mobile device was an iPad.
Most of the interaction in the course took place on a forum. Interviews were used to get the evaluation of the students on their learning processes, the usage of technology during and after the course, etc.
Most of the students changed their behaviours concerning the Internet: kind of usage and, most especially, the places where they use to connect to the Internet and the amount of time connected during the day, etc.
Adelaida Martín Bosque (CEA – University of New Haven); Mar Mejías Caravaca (IES Abroad Barcelona). Twitter en la clase de ELE: desarrollando la PLN (Personal Learning Network) de los estudiantes.
Undergraduate students from the US that study Spanish for a semester in Barcelona, on an A1.1. and B2.1 level course lasting 45-60h.
First steps: create a new twitter account. On the one hand, they will be twitting in Spanish, and their followers are (usually) non-Spanish speakers. On the other hand, because of privacy issues.
Hashtags will be used to monitor the conversation on Twitter. Of course, the hashtag can be used by other people not belonging to the course but willing to join the ongoing conversation. Some directions were given on the number of tweets, how interaction should be (e.g. addressed not to the teacher, but to their peers), and some hints on who to follow on Twitter (celebrities, writers, etc. in other words, to get out of the community of the classroom).
Some examples:
Interaction with other users leads to language correcting amongst peers, or even self-correcting.
Mentions to other users and usage of several hashtags out of the course’s one.
Pros:
Establishment of a strong learning community: #dudasELE.
Overcoming the barriers of time and space.
Development and use of communicative and metacognitive strategies.
Development of the student’s digital competence.
Integration of Web 2.0 tols.
Cons:
Lack of Twitter expertise.
Interference with personal life (the solution being a new dedicated account).
Lack of trust in the tool (“Why do I have to use Twitter?”)
Present and future of PLE: conceptualization, practice and critic of Personal Learning Environments
Torres-Kompen, R. (Citilab) Personal Learning Environments, the state of the question.
What environment? What kind of learning?
Traditional learning usually means time and space constraints, a scheduled structure, lack of flexibility and a given period of time.
PLEs are systems, based on social media, or web 2.0 tools, and many see them as a unique point of access to our digital persona. Other think of PLEs as a way to manage one’s knowledge and to monitor or track our personal learning process.
PLEs are usually defined as dichotomies: object vs. concept, personal vs. personalized, PLE vs. VLE, PLE vs. iPLE (institutional/institutionalized), lifelong vs. project-related, aggregation of free tools vs. mash-up system.
There are recurrent concepts around PLEs: web 2.0, e-portfolio, long-life learning, etc.
Most of the earliest literature was about defining what the PLE was and proposing structures or architectures for practical PLE. After that firts phase
Casquero, O. (Universidad del País Vasco); Peña-López, I. (Universitat Oberta de Calalunya). Technological challenges (and strategy) of the PLE in educational institutions.
PLE (Adell & Castañeda, 2010): “the set of tools, sources of information, connections and actgivities that every person uses frequently to learn”.
PLEs have a place in higher education, and can be fostered by institutions: SAPO Campus, southhampton Learning Environment, SocialLearn, Google Apps for educatgion, VLEs “on steroids”… They all integrate external services, connect different tools, etc.
When institutions face fostering PLEs, they have to face two kind of users: the ones that already have a PLE and just have to connect to the institutional sphere, and the ones that do not have one and/or do not know how to build it. To the latter ones, the institution can provide an already-built PLE that the user will then be able to appropriate and customize: the iPLE (institutionally-powered or institutionally-enriched PLE).
But this does not only mean that the institution provides or allows third parties’ services within the institution, but also that the institution opens up its own (information) system so that it can be accessed from outside. This way, information can both flow inbound and outbound.
Strategy to put up an iPLE strategy:
Creating a collective intelligence.
Letting the community provide recommendations and resources, identifying resources and users that are critical for success, visualizing onw’s own activity, etc.
An infrastructure based on nodes, connections amongst nodes, learn-streaming (automatically generating a record of one’s personal learning process).
Castañeda, L. (Universidad de Murcia); Adell, J. (Universitat Jaume I) Methodological challenges of PLE.
PLEs should generate new methodologies. To do so, we have to know how knowledge is build. And knwoledge nowadays is extremely fluid. Learning has evolved from a cognitivist approach to the edypunk DIY, the Do It Socially, the Learn It Yourself and, at last, to the Learn It Openly or Social networked learning.
PLEs are — or should be — enriched learning environments. And enriching means, above all, decentralization, fragmentation. To be able to manage the decentralization of the sources of information/learning we have to be able to be autonomous in the management of these sources.
If sources are multiple, disciplines have to give way to more multidisciplinary approaches and ways to learn.
Again, the dichotomies: flexible vs. standardized, open and fluid vs. closed, integrated and competence-based vs. compartimentalized, independent vs. alone, autonomous vs. chaotic.
It is not about putting the PLE into the methodology, but that our methodologies take into account the students’ PLEs.
Ismael Peña-López (Universitat Oberta de Calalunya) The PLE as a personal tool for the researcher and the teacher
Adell, J. (Universitat Jaume I); Castañeda, L. (Universidad de Murcia); Casquero, O. (Universidad del País Vasco); Peña-López, I. (Universitat Oberta de Calalunya); Torres-Kompen, R. (Citilab). The future of PLE.
We should get over the conceptual debate, the acronyms, the nature or the concept, etc. and switch towards a theoretical expansion, a technological development, and, especially, towards context of application.
Theoretical expansion: deal with other educational theories.
Technological development: the LMS still is the core, but the architecture and the technological environment will be “2.0”. There is an urgent need to tear down the walls of LMSs, integrating tools 2.0, e-portfolios, etc.
Contexts of application: the revolution of e-learning, the training of educators, the educators’ professional training and long-life learning, etc.
The main challenges are how to drive changes within institutions and, most especially, within methodologies, the changes of role of teachers, etc.
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III European Conference on Information Technology in Education and Society: A Critical Insight (2012)
Neil Selwyn Social media, social learning? Considering the limits of the ‘social turn’ in contemporary educational technology.
It has become very difficult to talk about the Internet without talking about social media: the default will be social.
What are the key features of social media and what is their significance to contemporary education and learning? How are social media applications currently being used in education and/or by learners? What are the limitations — if any — of these new media in the educational field? What changes does education need to perform to adapt to the new social media landscape?
Internet applications have also transformed the concept of authorship: massive amounts of people create, share, distribute, remix content all the time, most of the times unintentionally or tacitly. There is now mass socialisation and mass participation. Internet
Different (philosophical) points of view on social media
Increase informality
Increase individualism, decentralizes power.
Increases collectivism, is the group using a common shared tool.
Social media and education:
Engaging: students like social media, so why should not education be using it?
Empowering: anyone can create content, learn, etc.
Social media and educational institutions:
Implies a deep reorganisation of educational institutions, making them more fluid, flexible.
Can imply the replacement of educational institutions.
Social media as a context for learning: inquiry, collaboration, publication, literacy. But this hardly works within the boundaries of institutions. There still is a limited institutional use of social medial.
On the other hand, there are uneven levels of social media interest, access and usage amongst students. The “digital native” is a myth: there are (HJargittai & Hsieh, 2010) omnivores, devotees, samplers dabblers and non-users; or (Eynon & Mamlberg, 2011) active participators, all-rounders, normatives and peripherals. And social media is not levelling the ground, but just the contrary.
There also is a commodified nature of social media use. What you do on social media becomes a commodity: it is more important not what you did, but how many people liked it or followed it, how many people gave value to it… but you. And this affects people’s behavior.
And what happens with non-participation? Not to speak about the quality of participation: There is the usual rule of thumb of 1% people creating, 9% engaging/commenting and 90% just watching.
So, what should we do?
Are there differences in social media as a ‘learning technology’ as opposed to a ‘living technology’?
how do the creative, communal an productive practices and activities associated with social media fit with the practices and activities that are dominant in educational settings?<7p>
How could the educational community be better involved in shaping forms of social media along different, more educationally-orientated lines?
How can the educational community challenge the shaping of social media by commercial forces and other established elites?
Now that we are past the stage of hype and also the stage of disillusionment, now that we are reaching the “plateau of productivity” of these new technologies, we can reflect quietly and thoroughly about all these questions.
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III European Conference on Information Technology in Education and Society: A Critical Insight (2012)
