Rethinking Learning for a Digital Age

How Learners are Shaping their Own Experiences

Rhona Sharpe, Helen Beetham, Sara de Freitas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136973871
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Rethinking Learning for a Digital Age addresses the complex and diverse experiences of learners in a world embedded with digital technologies. The text combines first-hand accounts from learners with extensive research and analysis, including a developmental model for effective e-learning, and a wide range of strategies that digitally-connected learners are using to fit learning into their lives. A companion to Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age (2007), this book focuses on how learners' experiences of learning are changing and raises important challenges to the educational status quo.

Rethinking Learning for a Digital Age:

• 
  
  

• moves beyond stereotypes of the "net generation" to explore the diversity of e-learning experiences today
• analyses learners' experiences holistically, across the many technologies and learning opportunities they encounter
• reveals digital-age learners as creative actors and networkers in their own right, who make strategic choices about their use of digital applications and learning approaches.

Today's learners are active participants in their learning experiences and are shaping their own educational environments. Professors, learning practitioners, researchers, and policy-makers will find Rethinking Learning for a Digital Age invaluable for understanding the learning experience, and shaping their own responses.

Part I
New Contexts for Learning

1
The Influence of Pervasive and Integrative Tools on Learners’ Experiences and Expectations of Study

SARA DE FREITAS AND GRÁINNE CONOLE

Editors’ Introduction

This chapter focuses its discussion on the learner’s experience through a discussion around differing positions of how the use of social software and other innovative technologies are influencing the learner directly. Drawing on a range of studies and case studies, the authors note a move towards multimodal learning and that this move is well supported through the new tools. Notably the capabilities of these are leading to new and diverse models and metaphors for learning that are set to influence learning in future years. The chapter brings together an overview of this trend and introduces some case studies from practice to illustrate the significant shifts in learning that are outlined in the move towards greater uptake of social software and immersive learning tools.

Introduction: The Future for Learners’ Experiences

The opening paragraphs of any recent policy documents are a testimony to the recognized importance of e-learning in education. As the case studies in this book also attest, e-learning models and theories, simulations, computer modelling and social software are now an integral part of most learners’ experience and environment. Similarly, institutions now recognize the strategic importance of ICT and have central policies in place to ensure that there is a technical infrastructure available to support all aspects of the learner’s lifecycle, from recruitment through to assessment.

Research in recent years, focusing specifically on learner use of ICT, has given us a rich picture of how learners of all ages are appropriating new tools within their own context, mixing different applications for finding and managing information and for communicating with others. With respect to this trend, a recent report on the impact of ICT in the US, commissioned by the National Science Foundation, begins with a scenario of a learner of the near future:

Imagine a high school student in the year 2015. She has grown up in a world where learning is as accessible through technologies at home as it is in the classroom, and digital content is as real to her as paper, lab equipment, or textbooks. At school, she and her classmates engage in creative problem-solving activities by manipulating simulations in a virtual laboratory or by downloading and analyzing visualizations of real-time data from remote sensors. Away from the classroom, she has seamless access to school materials and homework assignments using inexpensive mobile technologies. She continues to collaborate with her classmates in virtual environments that allow not only social interaction with each other but also rich connections with a wealth of supplementary content …

(Borgman et al. 2008: 7)

Other policy documents echo this vision of the future that promotes a seamless interchange with ubiquitous and ambient technologies (e.g. Becta 2008; European Commission 2008). The overall picture is of a rich personalized learning environment mediated through a plethora of tools and integrated applications. The suggestion is that this provides unique opportunities for authentic, rich learning experiences and that learners are developing new digital literacy skills that will enable them to work effectively in a constantly, changing social context. Skills such as curiosity, play, inventiveness and imagination appear to be becoming more important than traditional competences such as knowledge recall, organization and domain expertise. Skills mediated by enriched experiences seem to be the order of the day, and a shift away from more text-based approaches to more rich representationally-based social interchanges rings the changes. This chapter surveys the main trends with respect to social software and other innovative tools such as virtual worlds and games and considers new models and metaphors for bridging between pedagogies and tools, considering virtual worlds and digital spaces as new metaphors for exploration of learning concepts and user generated content.

To illustrate this transition, it is worth considering in a little more detail the ways in which ICT and Internet technologies have had an increasing impact in education. Pea and Wallis (cited in Borgman et al. 2008: 13) for example, suggest there are five main phases of general technological advancement. Each phase can also be considered in terms of the mediational context for learning. The first wave is simple face-to-face communication, harking back to the origins of human communication and learning such as Socratic dialogue. The second wave is the introduction of symbolic representation (written language, mathematic representations and graphics), which act as mediating artefacts between people, each providing different lenses on the intended meaning and what is and isn’t foregrounded in the interaction (see for example Daniels et al. 2007 for a recent edited collection on this). The third wave is the introduction of communicative tools such as the telephone, radio and television. Again these tools offer different lenses on intended mediation and have different associated affordances (sound, visualization, asynchronicity vs. synchronicity). The fourth wave is associated with networked computers and the Internet and the fifth is what they refer to as cyberinfrastructure including participatory technologies (which in essence equate to what others refer to as Web 2.0 technologies). Waves three to five see a progressive and dramatic increase in the types of tools available, the different ways in which users can interact and communicate and the ways in which information can be displayed, visualized, manipulated and distributed. Pea and Wallis conclude: ‘We can now interact at a distance, accessing complex and useful resources in ways unimaginable in early eras’ (Pea and Wallis, in Borgman et al. 2008: 13).

It is important to note that each phase builds on, rather than replaces, the previous phase, but also that the introduction of each new approach to technological usage requires a reorientation and adaption of practice to incorporate it. For example, recent alternatives to email for communication, such as Short Message Service (SMS), chat and microblogging services such as Twitter, have not replaced email but have altered the ways in which individuals communicate.

We argue that there has been a shift in the use of tools, which emphasizes the more participatory and communicative capabilities of new technological applications, such as social software tools. For example, compare typical tool functionality pre-2005 with tools today. Each shows a shift from individual to more collective use. For example, Google Documents (Google Docs) for manipulating text compared to Word, and Slideshare for sharing and presenting as opposed to PowerPoint. Whereas pre-2005 the majority of communication occurred in email, chat and forums, learners now have a much richer and more complex set of communicative tools, including social networking tools such as Facebook and Ning, SMS and microblogging services such as Twitter, and audio/video conferencing. What is powerful about these new technologies is the way in which they can be integrated across platforms and between services, so that a message can be sent once, but distributed in a variety of different ways. The nature of content, both in terms of production and distribution, then has shifted with greater control for the individual as producer and as user.

Seely Brown and Adler (2008) argue that this trend supports people with common interests, for example allowing them to meet, share ideas and collaborate in innovative ways. They argue that the so-called ‘Web 2.0’ tools such as social networking sites, blogs, wikis and virtual communities have produced a new form of participatory medium that is ideally suited for multimodal learning.

So far we have argued that there has been a co-evolution of tools and their use and a commensurate increasing impact of these tools on practice. The rhetoric around so called ‘Web 2.0’ hints at the suggestion that the ways in which these tools are being appropriated is more than just a gradual shift to new tools and progressively enhanced technological mediation, and that in fact there are fundamental changes in practice occurring as a result of tool-user co-evolution. So whereas initial use of the Web (Web 1.0) was essentially fairly static, with hyperlinked information pages displaying information (often created by ‘subject experts’ and maintained by ‘webmasters’, and email acting as the primarily communication tool),Web 2.0 shifts towards a more active and distributed network with user generated content and a much richer interconnected network of communicative channels. Along with O’Reilly’s original definition (O’Reilly 2005), phrases such as ‘user participation’ (O’Reilly 2004), architecture of participation (O’Reilly 2004), wisdom of the crowds (Surowiecki 2004) and everything is miscellaneous (Weinberger 2007) became synonymous with this practice.

In addition to Web 2.0 tools, other technologies are beginning to change practice, for example gaming technologies, virtual worlds, haptic technologies, large-scale distributed data networks and cloud computing. The annual Horizon reports (Johnson et al. 2009) paint a picture of an ever increasingly complex, rich technologically mediated environment. At the time of writing, mobiles, cloud computing, geo-everything, the personal Web, semantic-aware objects and smart objects are the top six technologies to watch (Johnson et al. 2009). Taken together, these technologically mediated contexts for learning can be characterized as:

• ubiquitous and networked;

• context and location aware;

• representational and simulatory;

• mobile and adaptive;

• distributed and interoperable.

A retrospective look at user–tool interactions in recent years indicates that there have been a number of changes in practice. The first is a shift from information being a ‘scarce, expensive commodity’ produced by those in authority to an ‘abundance of information’. Information is no longer the provost of authoritative texts and encyclopaedia but can be produced and distributed by anyone and is available at the click of a button via Google. The notion of the nature and value of content has fundamentally changed; there is an increasing expectation that content should be free. Secondly traditional notions of authority are being challenged; many argue that the wisdom of the

Table 1.1 New Tools Mapped onto Pedagogic Usage

crowds prevails. Thirdly, content can be distributed and rendered in multiple ways: text posted in one service can be automatically made available in a range of other services; non-text-based modes (such as podcasts, videos, animations and avatars) offer rich alternative methods for getting across meaning.

The description above paints a picture of a rich and exciting technological environment to support learning, with a multitude of mechanisms for rendering content, distributing information and communicating. There seems to be a tantalizing alignment between many of the social capabilities of the tools and practices evident with new technologies and what has emerged as ‘good’ pedagogy in recent years. Table 1.1 lists some of the key characteristics and trends associated with technolog...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Tables
• Figures
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• An Introduction to Rethinking Learning for a Digital Age
• Part I New Contexts for Learning
• Part II Frameworks for Understanding Learners’ Experiences
• Part III New Learning Practices
• Index