E-Learning and Digital Media
ISSN 2042-7530

CONTENTS [click on author's name for abstract and full text]

Our Digital Age: implications for learning and its (online) institutions

CATHY N. DAVIDSON John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University, Durham, USA
DAVID THEO GOLDBERG University of California Humanities Research Institute, Irvine, USA

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/elea.2012.9.3.249

Over the past two decades, the way we learn has changed dramatically. We have new sources of information and new ways to exchange and to interact with information. But our schools and the way we teach have remained largely the same for years, even centuries. What happens to traditional educational institutions when learning also takes place on a vast range of Internet sites, from Pokemon Web pages to Wikipedia? This chapter, excerpted from our book, The Future of Thinking, does not promote change for the sake of change. Implicit in its sincere plea for transformation is an awareness that the current situation needs improvement. In advocating change for learning institutions, this chapter makes assumptions about the deep structure of learning, about cognition, about the way youth today learn about their world in informal settings, and about a mismatch between the excitement generated by informal learning and the routinization of learning common to many of our institutions of formal education. It advocates institutional change because our current formal educational institutions are not taking enough advantage of the modes of digital and participatory learning available to students today.

Paragogical Praxis

JOSEPH CORNELI Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, United Kingdom

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/elea.2012.9.3.267

This article considers the problem of peer-producing rich online learning environments, a task that appears techno-socially feasible, but is not without challenge. The author draws on the self-professedly ‘utopian’ approach developed by Baudrillard in The Mirror of Production, to establish and understand the two key dimensions of leverage (language and recycling). He then extends a recent article by Corneli and Danoff on the topic of peer learning with a set of guidelines for practitioners. His conclusion supports active peer production of learning environments, against a ‘provisionist’ strategy, but he recognizes that the paragogical agenda may be at odds with established educational systems in some respects, though perhaps in a complementary manner.

Assigning Students to Edit Wikipedia: four case studies

BRIAN W. CARVER School of Information, University of California, Berkeley, USA
ROCHELLE DAVIS Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA
ROBIN T. KELLEY Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA
JONATHAN A. OBAR Michigan State University, East Lansing, USA
LIANNA L. DAVIS Wikimedia Foundation, San Francisco, USA

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/elea.2012.9.3.273

During the 2010‑11 academic year, the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that supports Wikipedia, worked with professors at universities across the United States who were interested in using Wikipedia as a teaching tool in their classrooms through a pilot version of the Wikipedia Education Program. This article presents a case study of four professors’ experiences: two professors at Georgetown University, one professor at Michigan State University, and one professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Each describe the ways they incorporated Wikipedia into their classroom and the learning points that emerged from the experiences. Together, they offer suggestions for other professors who are interested in participating in the Wikipedia Education Program.

Undergraduate Peer Learning and Public Digital Humanities Research

BRIDGET DRAXLER Monmouth College, Illinois, USA
HAOWEI HSIEH, NICOLE DUDLEY & JON WINET University of Iowa, Iowa City, USA

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/elea.2012.9.3.284

In conjunction with Iowa City’s 2008 designation as a UNESCO City of Literature, an interdisciplinary team of University of Iowa faculty, graduate and undergraduate student researchers formed UCOL – the University of Iowa UNESCO City of Literature Mobile Application Development Team. The project brings together community partners, faculty, students and staff at the university to develop, record and produce multimedia research about local writers for ‘City of Lit’, a mobile app now available for mobile devices. During the past year, the project was incorporated into three sections of a general education literature course, giving undergraduate students experience conducting research and creating multimedia content on local authors. Students in this class worked collectively to create multimedia hypertext documents that feature traditional text, photos, graphics, and audio and video content for inclusion in the mobile app. The project encouraged interdisciplinary collaborative undergraduate research. Student reflections and presentations, along with a formal survey designed by the research team, suggest that the project provided valuable learning outcomes through its integration of literary research and analysis, New Media and technology, and local community engagement within team-based learning. The authors’ research indicates that the creation of peer-assisted scholarship positively facilitated the peer learning process, particularly with groups of three students.

Social Constructionism: a postmodern lens on the dynamics of social learning

MAURICE ALFORD Lytton High School, Gisborne, New Zealand

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/elea.2012.9.3.298

It is widely accepted in many societies that we are all individuals, with our own thoughts and minds, our own abilities, emotions and personalities, our own free will. In the western world our education systems are based on these ideas, as are our theories of education, our psychologies of behaviour, and our day-to-day communications. How else might we think of ourselves and each other? Social constructionists argue, and there is strong support from neuroscience for this, that we create our worlds and our perceptions of our worlds collaboratively. As our technologies of communication develop and become more ubiquitous, it can be helpful to consider how we might theorise their significance in the production of knowledge. What we think about who we are, and about what education is, are discursively produced. These underlying ideas, that we take for granted, have a significant impact on how we approach the use of technologies for teaching and learning, and on how we interpret the interactions that result.

An Overview of Radical Education in Action

JOHN HERON

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/elea.2012.9.3.304

This article on peer learning was originally prepared for the Committee of the Institute for the Development of Human Potential (IDHP) in 1985. It outlines the history, structure and ideology of seventeen IDHP courses with their two primary dimensions – confluent and political. A holistic conceptual model is presented for each of these dimensions, followed by a detailed analysis of what has been learned about the issues, challenges, tensions and shortfalls in their practical implementation. In the light of this analysis, the article ends with a recommended, revised and detailed prospectus for the two-year part-time course.

A Constructivist Approach to Virtual Reality for Experiential Learning

P. AIELLO, F. D’ELIA, S. DI TORE & M. SIBILIO University of Salerno, Fisciano, Italy

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/elea.2012.9.3.317

Consideration of a possible use of virtual reality technologies in school contexts requires gathering together the suggestions of many scientific domains aimed at understanding the features of these same tools that let them offer valid support to the teaching–learning processes in educational settings. Specifically, the present study is aimed at creating a theoretical framework for the didactic use of VR technologies in schools, highlighting the characteristics of these tools that are supported by a view of teaching that enhances sensorimotor activity in learning. The theoretical approach, through the study of the international scientific literature on this topic, offers interdisciplinary suggestions for realising teaching–learning practices that are supported by scientific principles and a concept of learning that is consistent with the processes that these tools may activate.

Is There Life After Facebook? The Cyber Gulag Revisited and Debate Reloaded

ANIS BAJREKTAREVIC International Law and Global Political Studies, IMC University of Applied Sciences, Krems, Austria

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/elea.2012.9.3.325

Misled by a quick triumphalism of the social media, the international news agencies have confused the two: revolt and revolution. The past episodes of unrest started as a social, not a political, public revolt. Through the pain of sobriety, the protesters are learning that neither globalisation nor the McFB way of life is a shortcut to development; that free trade is not a virtue, but an instrument; that liberalism is not a state of mind but a well-doctrinated ideology; and, finally, that the social media networks are only a communication tool, not a replacement for independent critical thinking or for the collapsed cross-generational contract. Londoners, Greeks and New Yorkers are experiencing the same thing. How does the ‘Arab Spring’ correlate with the European Euro-frost, and with American Occupy Wall Street unrest? For almost ten years now, the youth in Europe has been repeatedly sending us a powerful message about the perceived collapse of the social contract. The cross-generational contract should be neither neglected nor built on the over-consumerist, disheartened and egotistic McFB way of life. Equally alienating and dangerously inflammatory is the collision of the entering youth generation (if/when deprived of the opportunity and handed over a lame hope) – through a religious or political radicalisation. In this world spanning Kantian hopes and Hobbesian fears, thus, the final question is: Is there life after FB? If so, how can we register our future claims?

Network or Net Worth? Deconstructing the Knowledge Society

MAXINE DYER University of Canterbury, New Zealand

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/elea.2012.9.3.335

One of the major issues facing humanity in the twenty-first century is how the increasing effects of globalisation will play out in relation to existing societal and global inequalities. At the very crux of this issue are the terms ‘knowledge society’ and ‘knowledge economy’, two terms employed in a variety of different contexts, including business circles, the media, and educational policy statements. The notion of ‘society’ also appears in other related terms, such as ‘learning society’, ‘post-industrial society’, and ‘information society’. However, the exact meaning of what constitutes a ‘knowledge society’ appears open to debate and tends to shift and change depending on the context in which it is used. The word ‘society’ is also frequently interchanged with the word ‘economy’, denoting some kind of equivalence or symmetry between ‘knowledge societies’ and ‘knowledge economies’. The implication of this is that these concepts are synonymous with each other. But are they? This article argues that, rather than encompassing the same concepts and principles, the terms ‘knowledge society’ and ‘knowledge economy’ actually conceal diametrically opposed paradigms, a masquerade that poses a considerable threat to the long-held egalitarian goals of educational institutions and to the promise of a networked global ‘society’

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