Digital Age Consciousness, ‘Online Learning' and the Global School

2019

...while the internet has opened doors previously kept under tight lock and key in the televisual age, the habit of rushing through them, following our deep habits of fantasy, has led us to miss what else the internet and the underlying architecture of digital technology allow and even more fundamentally encourage: namely, the archival retention and categorization of all the information that has been made available. So attuned are we to the televisual way of being that we hardly even know where to begin in answering the question of how to live digitally.

2013

CEPS Journal, 2019

• The metaphor of digitalisation in education emerged during a period when phenomena such as budget cuts and privatisation, layoffs and out-sourcing of labour marked the ethos of the twenty-first century. During this time, digitalisation was constructed as an ultimate purpose and an all-encompassing matter in education. As a result, these narratives add new configurations to the metaphor of digitalisation on an ongoing basis. Such configurations attribute a mythical fullness to the concept, in the sense that digitalisation goes beyond the limits of a property that needs be developed so that society can successfully deal with contemporary challenges and advancements. In this way, digitalisation emerges as a new hegemony in education, with narratives that are more and less directly referential. Less direct references add the element of allusion to the metaphor of digitalisation, in the sense that references can be more implicit/ covert or even concealed/hidden. Moreover, as they combine with abstract terms and concepts, they make the boundaries of the technological and educational domains blurry and render education discourse vague. In order to examine the narratives of digitalisation and how they influence education discourse, this study aims to discuss and analyse relevant policy documents in relation to research and studies on the integration of digital technologies in classroom settings and the hybrid (or blended) learning environments that open up. For this purpose, the study uses thematic analysis and discourse analysis in order to trace allusions and references and discuss how emergent meanings relate to current and future needs in education generated by digitalisation itself.

Education is on the brink of being transformed through learning technologies; however, it has been on that brink for some decades now. The argument I want to advance in this lecture is that never before has there been such a clear link between the needs and requirements of education, and the capability of technology to meet them. It is time we moved education beyond the brink of being transformed, to let it become what it wants to be.

This article investigates the ways in which digital technologies now commonly available and in use can be used to support learning in educational organisations and settings (and change the nature of provision in some instances). A transformation in the attitude and behaviour of teachers, it is argued, is required if the possibilities and opportunities offered by digital technologies are to be maximised now and into the future. In reaching this conclusion the paper examines a number of barriers to change and explores relevant theories of learning that should lead to the situation whereby teachers cannot imagine a world without maximal use of the digital devices that are now available to all learners for whom they have a responsibility.

Postdigital Science and Education

This paper examines what the term 'postdigital' might mean for education through the discussion of human-technology relationships. It begins with a summary of two general interpretations of the postdigital: firstly, to understand the 'post' as meaning simply 'posterior to' the digital, suggesting a different stage in the perception and use of technology; and secondly, to consider the 'post' as signalling a critical appraisal of the assumptions embedded in the general understanding of the digital. Subsequently, the paper outlines three critical perspectives on the digital with specific relevance for educational concerns. The first examines the economic rationales underpinning digital technology, focusing on the idea of the platform and the assumed benefits of sharing. The second discusses the role of the digital in educational policy and the compound effects of the metrification of institutional quality. The third section explores the digital as 'material', and the increasing attention paid to issues of labour and the exploitation of natural resources required to produce digital technologies. These perspectives suggest an understanding of the postdigital in terms of profound and far-reaching socio-technical relations, which have significant consequences for thinking about the purpose, focus, and governance of education in contemporary times.

2016

The report provides a substantial but necessarily selective survey of research related to children’s lives in the digital age within and beyond school. It begins by drawing on studies of everyday uses of digital technologies, including those by children, to identify challenges and opportunities facing primary education. Next it explores how research is shaping possible responses to these challenges and opportunities. Arguing that technology use, in schools as elsewhere, is never neutral, the review considers research from five broad traditions that represent different perspectives and priorities. It discusses how schools might work across these traditions in developing curriculum and pedagogy and in their wider role in supporting children’s emotional, social and civic lives. It proposes that such considerations should be weighed in relation to broader debates about the purpose of schooling and about how schools relate to their wider social, political, economic and commercial contexts.

Emerald, 2023

Digital technologies seem to have the potential to radically transform the learning and teaching relations at universities. A range of fundamental learning activities, such as reading, writing and communication, are being integrated into digitization processes. Moreover, in terms of the learning situation itself (courses, lectures, etc.), a series of transformations from face-to-face to virtual learning worlds are under way, supplementing or replacing traditional learning arrangements via digital platforms and structures. Today, many universities automatically establish a digital platform for every course (using, for example, the Moodle learning management system) off ered to students who attend campus to study, while courses and programs are increasingly off ered exclusively online (as, for example, in the form of MOOCs , the Massive Open Online Courses ). This movement toward the digital reorganization -or reconstitution -of learning relations is fundamentally changing the process and content of learning, as well as the students' conduct of everyday life. Since digital technologies facilitate certain learning activities and relationships while hindering or even preventing others, this movement to digitalization is not free from inconsistencies and contradictions. Digitalized learning has justifi ably fueled the hope of, for example, broader learner participation and more symmetrical learner-teacher relations. However, it also comes with the dangers of distraction, a new quality of freezing and one-sidedly fi xing learning relations, as well as a temptation to relapse into instrumental transfer and internalization models and an inscription of defensive learning. Such a situation calls for an analysis of the digitalization of higher education that helps to identify and explain its possibilities and limits; an analysis that raises fundamental questions about the ready embrace of digital technologies in higher education to date and identifi es processes of learning where digital technologies can clearly contribute as well as processes where they cannot.