The views expressed in this book are those of the authors, but not necessarily those of the publisher. This means that the mediation of the media becomes our normal way of dealing with the world.
Growing Up Wireless: Peer Culture and Family Education Models in the Age of Mobile Communication
According to the authors, in the so-called information age it is necessary to develop both of these literacy skills. In fact, most of the technological skills are involved in information (as we show in Chapters 11 and 12 of this book), and on the contrary, it seems really impossible to develop information skills without technological skills.
Children and Computers: What They Know, What They Do
The result of the mutual mediation is an integrated solution of Technology and Information Skills; this could be seen as the precondition for imagining the space and role of what is called in this book: Digital Literacy. On the contrary, only by creating opportunities for dialogue, on the one hand we will promote greater awareness and understanding of the role of the new technologies in the early years, while on the other hand we help to build a foundation for designing of a way "to mediate" the introduction of technologies in early childhood.
Media Appropriation and Perspectives on Education
The way in which children explore and use computers (individually, with other children or with adults) is closely related to the ideas and beliefs of adults and to their educational models and representations. Papert, 1996) among children, teachers and parents to promote a new digital literacy and fluency in schools.
Learning with New Media at the University
New digital technologies can become a catalyst for exchange and sharing among adults caring for young children and a starting point for promoting a new way to overcome the "digital generation gap".
From Representations to Utilization
Rethinking Cognition, Representations and Processes in 3D Online Social Learning Environments
Investigating Information in the Multiscreen Society: An Ecologic Perspective
From Media Education to Digital Literacy: A Paradigm Change
Developing an Online Media Literacy Tool for Girls
Dream Schools: The Architecture of New Literacies
Digital Production and Media Education
What do Teachers Need to Know?
Globalisation and New Technology: The Challenge for Teachers to Become “Translators” and
The Future of Digital Society and the New Values of Media
Chapter XVIII. Digital Literacy and Cultural Mediations to the Digital Divide
The authors' approach is based on Paulo Freire's dialogue pedagogy. For this, it is necessary to develop an educational approach that can include: culture - understood as an expansion and possibility for different cultural repertoires; criticism - understood as the ability to analyze, reflect and evaluate; creation - understood as the creative ability to express, communicate and construct knowledge; and citizenship – this is probably a synthesis of the previous three concepts.
Most of the authors of chapters included in this book also served as referees for chapters written by other authors. In closing, I would like to thank all the authors—dear friends and respected colleagues—for their insights and excellent contributions to this book.
Knowledge, Culture, and Society in the
Information Age
Abstract
Introduction
The connection becomes a cultural macro-indicator; the spread of the net participates in a progressive movement from the local to the planetary dimension: moreover, in economic development and in political and social macrophenomena (the disappearance of the idea of nation, migration movements, cultural melting pot), globalization consists mainly in helping with the circulation of symbolic meanings, and this depends on the telematics-based connection. This emphasis on symbolic goods produces the growth of a new category of "symbolic workers" (Neveu, 1994) who base their professional identity on the production-diffusion of symbolic goods (i.e. trainers, PRs, consulting projectionists, marketing experts, etc. ).
The Informational Society as a Social Construction
The idea of the information society has emerged in the last decade in a context of great transformations and problems. The idea of the net, of a network community, is also the focus of the second category of discourses, the provisional discourses promoted by the futurists.
Speed, Virtuality, Networking
The result of the analysis of specialists, of marketing stipulations, of international scenarios shared within the imaginary television, is represented by the perception that the information society represents something "indisputable", that thanks to it we are entering a new period for economics and history , that nothing can be as before. Whether the NASDAQ grows, to what extent, depends on the strength of IT companies or on the confidence that emanates from specific reviews and the ideas of opinion leaders.
Speed
This is one of the most diffuse forms of the inability to totalize knowledge that characterizes the information society, as noted by Levy (1997). From the "difficult" knowledge characteristic of the pre-electronic era, in which sharing and appropriating knowledge was a long-term task, we are moving to "light" knowledge that is used in a very short time.
Virtuality
The delocalization, which refers to the loss of power possessed by localization aspects in defining situations. It clearly reminds us that the Plotinian ecstasy, the escape from the sensible to the intelligible.
From Networking to Globalization
The process of economic unification of the world and, by extension, of al that refers to the planet. Transnationalization (better than multinationalization), is considered as a process of polycentric business reorganization.
Knowledge Society
A thesis that has long dominated the darkness (probably resisted until today) is the idea of cultural imperialism, which suggests a progressive cultural colonization of the world, from the Marshall Plan onwards, according to the American model, since the USA has always been the main controller of the media and communication industry . Without delving into the analytical criticism of this hypothesis, we can nevertheless demonstrate its main theoretical weakness, which consists of a fanciful interpretation of the process of appropriation through which an individual assimilates cultural models promoted by the media.
Towards a New Image of Knowledge
Therefore, the real knowledge value of the Internet lies not in documents, but in contacts. The real value of the Internet is not associated with the number of individual contacts, but with the fact that these individual contacts are nowadays part of a multiplicity of groups.
Intelligence as Business Capital
The knowledge management and the fact that the capital of a company consists in it is based on this fundamental topic. Content management: This function is usually maintained by personal and group agendas of the single user and the access to shared folders.
The Learning Economy
In addition, digital learning also provides a companion narrative to the myth of the information society. If we return to the reciprocity of the new economy and e-learning (the new economy “drives” e-learning which, when supported, feeds the new economy, promoting it) we easily understand the economic and social origin of the myth and it. accompanying narrative: the myth feeds the economy, through the issue of the need for continuous updating creates a market—the market of Longlife Education—destined to extend indefinitely, helps the employment of new professional figures.
Communicating in the Information Society
New Tools for New Practices
The term digital divide refers to “the disparities that exist in Internet access based on income, age, education, race/ethnicity, and. It is enough to think of the enormous changes brought about by the invention of writing and the alphabet, which also made it possible for people separated both spatially and temporally to communicate (Danesi, 2006); again, the invention and spread of letterpress printing gave rise to the first assembly line, which “embedded the word itself deep into the manufacturing process and [made] it into a kind of commodity” (Ong, 2002, p. 118).
Background
This chapter aims to provide a conceptual framework for understanding the latest digital communication tools and the practices they encourage, emphasizing the communication opportunities these technologies provide and the limitations they impose. The first section outlines the framework, presents the main tools and devices that enable digital communication and the characteristics of the institutions they rely on, and provides a four-layer taxonomy for understanding new digital communication tools.
Devices and Tools
It will then examine how they change as a result of the spread of new ICTs. In other words, rather than aiming to provide users with information, "Web 2.0 tools enable user participation on the Web and manage to recruit a large number of users as authors of new content", thereby erasing "the clear distinction between information providers and consumers" (Kolbitsch & Maurer, 2006, p. 187).
Features of Electronic Communication
Moreover, electronic texts as a whole are inaccessible, since it is possible to consult only part of an electronic text at a time, namely the part that appears on the monitor. Electronic texts are persistent: Persistence is a basic feature of CMC, due to the nature of the medium used.
A Four-Layer Taxonomy
The wireless telegraph, radio, television, and cell phones are technologies that eliminated the need for any physical connection (besides the obvious hardware to send and receive signals). Today we can read cuneiform documents because they only need eyes and light to access them, but we cannot access a CD-ROM or a file on a hard disk or the Internet without the proper hardware and software. .
Two Examples: The Practices of Providing and Searching Information in the Knowledge Society
The Internet, from this point of view, allows for almost instantaneous two-way and multi-way communication, on a global level, capable of transmitting elements belonging to all kinds of semiotic codes. Each technology of the word sets a number of conditions for its performance: speaking requires the air (the simplest condition to be fulfilled); writing requires light, whether natural or artificial; the telegraph, radio and TV require electricity and suitable apparatus.
The News Market
We focus here on two of them: the issue of trust and the role of journalists themselves. Analogously, on the Internet everything can be accessed by the same software (browser), in a seemingly flat and fuzzy network.
Internet Search Engines
According to him, pages are given a page rank depending on the number of backlinks they have (links that refer to the page from other websites), and the page rank of the websites from which the backlinks come. In this section, a brief introduction to search engines has shown how they must consider not only the content of web pages, as can be understood through the source code of their web pages, but also their context, whether the ecological system. of the Web itself, or the current navigation practices of Web browsers.
Conclusion and Future Trends
As has been shown, Web 2.0 tools and services increase the possibility for Internet users to publish information on the Web, thus reducing the digital divide, not only in terms of access to digital information or services, but also in terms of the publication of digital content. Kemp (Eds.), Proceedings of the Second Life Education Workshop at the Second Life Community Convention (pp.13-18), San Francisco, Paisley, UK: The University of Paisley.
Digital Media and Socialization
In the modern state, the transition to modernity depends on three elements of modification: the social actors, the institutions and the liquid substitute of the media. Certainly one of these is communication, which is seen as a cheap resource to respond to the crisis of deflating social relations (the media's liquid substitute).
The Self in the Era of the New Media
The possession of the media in fact legitimizes the processes of participation of the individual in the dynamics of our time, especially with regard to access strategies to areas of knowledge and the symbolic sphere. As for this gap, there is a close connection with the issue of the.
An Album of Semantic Changes
Even today, the scholastic institution actually preserves the forms of influence on sociocultural conditions that are present in language and in media instruments. Intellectual space and critical comparison are also the basis of the cultural humus of media products.
The Digital Media as Expression of the Late-Modern
Multimediality and explorativity as styles of consumption and individual attitudes in front of the range of cultural and media stimuli of modern society;
Relationships and participation, which define the cultural behavior of young people and the socialization processes in the late modern context. Naturally, there is a progressive abandonment of the domestic environment in favor of the informal world of their peers.
PC and the Internet: Terrain of Desires and Risks
According to ISTAT data from 2005 on the frequency of use of the PC by age and gender, it is possible to confirm that especially men, and specifically young men, have a better, more natural and more continuous relationship with the new technology . - gies, and specifically with the PC. According to data collected by ISTAT in 2005, the use of the Internet is established among minors and it increases with age.
Conclusion
They limit themselves to providing a picture of the situation from which to probe in depth the cultural, symbolic, expressive and behavioral relationships between the media and young people. Looking at the data, in fact, shows that change is largely determined by young people.
New Episthemologies in a Changing Media
Environment
New Strategies for Knowledge Building
But one of the main challenges emerges here: how can traditional organizations respond to a world that makes acceleration, globalization and non-linearity the main conditions of the new social and cultural configurations? In this sense, it is not unlikely that education should orient itself towards the construction of spelling books open to new syllables, which will make it possible to construct the denominative words of a world that makes mobility its own characteristic. .
The Heirs of Modernity
And this will be the basis for the birth and development of systemic thought. This is probably due to the failure of the certainties created by the deterministic paradigms of classical science.
Modernity of the Heirs
The construction of the paths is actually the domain where most of the didactic virtues related to the educational processes come into play. The space of the grid grows with the use of the grid itself, in the presence of its attractive power.
Conclusion: Changes of Direction
In turn, the need for individuality and singularity moves forward in the clearing of the universalist abstractions of an ideological nature that have led to the homogenization, to the allegiance to roles and places in relation to which collective identities have been constructed. The educational institutions can perform an important task within such a characterized panorama, carriers of very problematic requests and especially correlated to the necessity of finding the "codes" that can bind the behavior of young people to bring them into unity, by ensuring their singularities (Morin, 1999a).
Acknowledgment
Endnote
Integrating Technology Literacy and Information
Literacy
The need for technological skills and knowledge in schools, the workforce and society is an obvious extension and consequence of living in the digital environment of what Alvin Toffler coined "the information age". Computers and computers have become a way of life and the primary way of doing work in today's world. However, the Deputy Director of the National Science Foundation noted in his October 24, 2002 address to participants of the Advanced Technology Education Program that this is a challenge—the skills students need for the workplace is an issue that needs to be reviewed in context become of the traditional college curriculum.
Defining the Literacies
In the past, information literacy was taught primarily in undergraduate settings, where the need for honing research skills was seen as greatest. Information literacy encompasses another domain of skills and knowledge, those involved in finding, retrieving and using information.
Designing Literacy Components
When developing a project, some basic questions should be asked: How does this project support the overall goal of the course. The suitability of the container is highly dependent on the course content and overall learning outcomes.
Specific Literacy Outcomes
The subject area greatly influences the container type of the final project, but it is not uncommon for the project to be in the form of a 25-plus page research paper. The development of the plan and material had to be supported by scientific research and published statistical data.
Growing Up Wireless
Being a Parent and Being a Child in the Age of Mobile Communication
A Phenomenological Approach to Everyday Life
The mobile phone seems to work as a developmental tool that meets the needs of the growing up process. Less investigated than the world of teenagers are the cultural and social micro-aspects involved in parents' use of the mobile phone in communication with their children.
A Theoretical Approach
A Technologically Mediated Achievement
It's Serafini-Milano”: to read the caller's identity on the display, she tells Laura, whose needs come first. A preexisting cultural definition of being a parent has clearly shaped parents' and children's use of the cell phone far beyond the management of urgency, safety, and control.
Linking Macro and Micro: Socio-Cultural Changes in Family Education
Parental authority – whatever that means – is a tool for bridging this gap, a necessary condition for children's development. Negotiation more than obedience, competence more than power, trust more than authority are the basic principles underlying parent-child interactions.
Parents’ and Children’s Incompatible Rights
They have been appropriated as unexpected and effective tools for negotiating parents' and children's often conflicting perspectives on children's developmental needs, and as ways to articulate their often incompatible rights and obligations. In other words, mobile communication devices play a role in dealing with the slightly paradoxical nature of the contemporary model of family education.
Mobile Phones as a Negotiation Tool
The dependence of children on their parents for cell phone use is even more evident when we look at managing the associated costs. In this case, the rule is the dialogic use of the cell phone, a model of interaction that legitimizes the right and duty of parents to supervise their children and the right of children to be autonomous.
Parents’ and Children’s Dialogical Use of Mobile Phones: Conclusions
The same process underlies the use of the mobile phone as a bridge between the worlds of family and peers. The mobile phone opened up a symbolic space to manage the transition from the family universe to the peer universe and to deal with the paradoxes of the developmental process, such as the typical autonomy-dependence dimension.
Endnotes
Most of the ideas and interpretations proposed in this chapter have emerged from the collaborative analysis of data. Based on such a cultural model, remote parenting can be viewed as inconsistent with the ideal typical behavior of a 'good parent'. Here's the point: Aren't these new communication technologies involved in changing the cultural models we live by?
Children and Computers
What They Know, What They Do
How can we observe the way they approach, explore, discover and use these very special cultural artifacts (computers and digital networks). Today, observing and studying the way children become interested in, explore and use computers, either individually, with other children or with an adult, is a key issue in early childhood education as it relates to that of adults.
What We Mean: The Key Words of Our Chapter
It proves to be a key tool in educational contexts (we refer primarily to ethological observation, based on principles of analytical description and a non-evaluative, non-interfering attitude on the part of the observer). He further emphasizes that there is a mutual influence between the individual characteristics of the participants and the social situation in which they are involved (1986).
Research Goals and Theoretical Background
Having among its goals an expansion of our theoretical understanding and the development of training materials, our research is based on the assumption that creating opportunities for dialogue (focus groups) can foster higher awareness and deeper understanding of the role of played by new technologies in the early years. So far, the videotapes have been discussed with teachers, and the discussion will be extended to parents in the second phase of our research (Bers, New, & Boudreau, 2004).
Description of the Research Program
This technological part of the project has been developed as part of the LCMS open source Docebo. The LCMS has been adapted to be used directly by young children and teachers to discuss and share knowledge with other schools and parents in a constructivist way.
Research Results
In Italy, in particular, the use of the mobile phone is a tool used by almost all children both to communicate with peers (mostly in a written way, SMS) and with parents (voice communication). In Italy, the use of ICT is a domestic phenomenon, the use in school is rare and only a few days a month.
Conclusions and Further Development
Developing a methodological approach which combines sound theoretical foundations of reflection on education and on "digital education and learning" with the importance of being aware of the ways in which children and adults access these tools and respond to their stimulation . Longitudinal examination and mapping of the evolution of the real and virtual learning communities we have promoted (beginner and advanced groups).
Adolescents and the Internet
Media Appropriation and Perspectives on Education
This complementary approach allows for comparison and a better understanding of the situation in Europe and North America. For the first time, in light of the statements of the young people who participated in the survey in nine European countries as well as in Quebec, it has been possible to establish the use of the Internet in schools.
Research Axes and Questions
Current State of Affairs in the Selected Nine European Countries
Rarely do schools focus on the fun aspect of new media and its potential role as an educational tool. The relationship between young people and communication technology varies depending on the educational steps involved, either engendering autonomy or, on the contrary, protection.
Research Questions
On how they consider the school's role and what they would like to see: Do they feel they need training. In this optic, they have the impression of being part of an open world or a limited one.
Main Tendencies from the Survey
Based on the results obtained in this quantitative phase, 240 young people (24 in each country) were selected for individual interviews based on their different levels of Internet use, age and gender. The interview was based on a grid created by the research teams and according to a questionnaire filled in by each young person.
Major Uses
The situation is completely different in Quebec, where only 4 out of 10 young people have their own mobile phone and very few of them send text messages (22%). Strikingly, 44% of young people said they download music even when it's banned.
The Gap Between Internet at Home and at School
The Polish report (Wenglorz, 2006) mentions that “the internet is changing behavior at home and young people mostly notice it. Indeed, 22% (highest: Belgium 42%; lowest: Denmark 6%) of young people say that they never use the internet at school during lessons and 30% rarely.
Safety Issues
It seems that young people are appropriating the Internet as a tool to improve their established relationships and activities. In Quebec, 9 out of 10 young people say that their parents rarely or never control what they do on the Internet.
Questions Related to Media Education
Appropriation
On the other hand, many of these young people are quite aware of internet civil rights laws and regulations, such as a person's rights to their image and royalties associated with downloading, compared to other Europeans who are often clueless about these issues. The Portuguese team (Reia Baptista, Balthazar and Mendes, 2006) points out that "Although students are usually interested in new activities and new "fashions", they always do the same thing on the Internet, following a pattern." This is undoubtedly the result of inadequate and insufficient appropriation of the Internet.
The Study’s Conclusions
But again, the knowledge of young people is often vague and does not prevent them from overlooking rules, of which they have a very vague idea. Finally, most young people see electronic media as technologies that are constantly evolving and quickly adopt new trends.
Recommendations
It is generally recommended that parents talk to their children about their Internet use. Children's use of the Internet and mobile phones challenges traditional school culture and teaching methods.
Future Trends
Are they aware of the role electronic and traditional media play in this evolution? As far as parents are concerned, our recommendations refer to attitudes to be raised as one of the main dimensions that allow media acquisition by young people.
Learning with New Media at the University
From Representations to Utilization
In this sense, among other things, new media are overlooked, many times based on the premise that they present superficial knowledge that is insufficient for the. We have followed this path because we believe that the investigation of social representations means bringing to the surface contributions by the individuals in a certain group without minimizing reciprocal and dynamic influences.
New Media: Instruments of Cohesion or Separation?
Young people are not aware of the navigation plan and the difficulty of the route. Representations of the Internet have a positive connotation for them, as some of their statements reveal: borderless communication; connects the world;.
Conflicting Mythical Representations?
On the other hand, we also believe that the strong connection young people have established between the Internet and information/research is a reminder of Ted Nelson's 1960s fantasy to create Project Xanadu, which was to bring to life the Decouverse, a global online library . with all the literature of the world in hypertext (Sousa, 2006). After careful analysis of the data provided by the research, it is striking that young people create representations of new media that are sometimes, but not always, predictable.
Rethinking Cognition, Representations, and
Social Learning Environments
In this chapter, we will review the basics of the technologies and the theoretical foundations that support the development of such environments. We will conclude by describing two examples of 3D virtual worlds used to support the teaching of university-level courses.
3D Online Learning Environments
3D online learning environments benefit from advances in technology that previous approaches to online learning lacked, thanks to the explosive growth of the computer entertainment industry. 3D online learning environments make this possible because the environment promotes equality in communication and interaction.
Knowledge is Social
