| Index REM - Research on Education and Media Vol. 1, n. 1, June 2009 Editor in Chief Pier Cesare Rivoltella Editor Laura Messina Scientific Committee
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The primary objective of this article is to present a picture of Media and Information and Communication Technologies as multidisciplinary educational tools by focusing on the epistemological research issues in this area. To this end, the article identifies the processes of social change triggered by Media and ITC and the pedagogical and cultural paradigms involved in the development of innovation in education and training.
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This contribution is a first sightseen about the results of a research developed by Catholic University of Milan and University of Padua on adolescents’ practice with digital media. The research is based on qualitative methodologies and made of focus groups with parents, teachers and youngsters. It points out almost three highlights onto which the scientific community could develop more research: the fact that media are becoming “normal” in people social life; the new role of mediation that media are assuming in the social contexts; the necessity to study more in dept issues like the cognitive profile of the so called “digital natives”, their way of building knowledge or learning.
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Technology breaks free of the domain and boundaries of techniques in order to become the principal actor of an entire civilization: this “technology” corresponds to Information and Communication Technologies based on the computer. It enters our everyday life and takes familiar shapes. It replaces media or mixes, hybridizez, with them and constitutes the habitat of human beings in the twenty-first century. Nowadays the processes of digital convergence have created a new figure of cultural content consumers, called prosumers. Prosumers’ behaviour is closely related to user-generated content, a particular form of relation between technology and culture. The creative activities of prosumers and outsiders reveal a strong increase in digital productivity, but also the tendential indifference towards the characteristics of the contents in favour of packaging. This new typology of consumers can be regarded as the symptom of a big migration and
the sign of paths revealed, up to now, in the most immediate aspects and not in their deep changes.
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The aim of the paper is to consider two kinds of possible contributions that cognitive psychology can give provide to multimedia education, namely, advancement of: knowledge and suggestions for intervention. By an overview of recent studies, actual practices are discussed in order to assess a possible connection between cognitive styles and multimedia browsing. The influence of multimedia tools on a general
skill (attention), on processing multimedia contents and on beliefs (learning conceptions) are discussed as well. As far as intervention is concerned, planning and assistance in the use of multimedia tools can be supported by the some studies whose results are illustrated. The overall picture sheds light on the need of focussing on the potentialities and the processes that multimedia tools stimulate in order to allow learner
to develop metacognitive awareness, that is, a way to achieve better learning outcomes though multimedia use.
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This article means, on one hand, to draw a mindful analysis of how technologies and methods interacted and mutually influenced in the development of e-Learning and, on the other, to develop a critical reflection on how this relationship should evolve.
The relationship between platforms and didactics will be brought in focus in the light of experiences deriving from research on degree courses in which blended models, didactic platforms and paradigms, repositories and personal paths construction were experimented: such dualities cannot but engender deep reflections on and projects in training, in its broader sense and specifically in the higher education context.
We are therefore in a phase in which, following the enthusiasm of the first meeting between technology and the process of teaching/learning, a knowing structuring of the relationship needs to be implemented, the alternative being summed up by the metaphor of a man with strong arms (technology) but a weak back (method), so that he can’t lift any weight.
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The article presents some inquires about the various job titles used in the field of e-Learning; due to its being quite young,
this field has seen many different terminologies, and very few common elements. Three strategies are then offered to guide further research: moving from formal description of involved professions, from training curricula designed to prepare e-Learning professionals, from the ways e-Learning professionals use to describe their activities in social networks. Two different directions are singled out: on one side a “professionalizing” trend, required by the industrialization (and division of labor) in the training field, which calls for e- Learning professionals; on the other side, a “socializing” trend, according to which all educators/trainers should have some basic competence in the e-Learning domain, even if they do not make an extensive use of ICT in their teaching practice.
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This article supports the thesis that there is a close connection between curricular model, the theory of school learning and the impact of the school with the media. We aim at carrying out a reconnaissance of the main curricular models, by using the methodology of the ontological analysis, which draws a classification of the curricular models proposed by the scientific esearch. This classification doesn’t matter how to use the curriculum or what the curriculum allows: it wonders what is the curriculum. We identified five classes of models, that can be summarized as follows: curriculum as cultural container, curriculum as set of rules, curriculum intended as organizational guide, curriculum designed as a criterion for selecting projects, and finally curriculum as hermeneutic scheme and functional mediator.
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The technological evolution of the last decades is characterized by the creation and the widespread use of digital languages as well as the development of the Internet. All this has entailed a radical change in the way of organizing and communicating knowledge. These changes, in turn, have introduced inevitable
consequences in the educational process, especially in the teaching/learning processes practiced in schools. It is therefore essential that media education becomes a fundamental aspect of school curricula, so as to enable students to become proficient critical, creative and effective users of productive ITC tools, as well as informed, responsible and contributing citizens.
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The primary aim of this article is to contribute to the delineation of a field of empirical research, not yet fully developed in Italy, that focuses on the evaluation of media programmes and products. Particularly the article touches three fundamental aspects: the cultural meaning of evaluation, which aspects to study, and the opportunity to promote, together with the evaluative research on programmes and products that have already been conducted, formative and participatory research aimed at evaluation of future programmes and products through collaborative processes between producers and users.
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Analyzing the media consumption implies not only the evaluation of its quantitative trends, but also the media reception processes deepening. Widely accepted is the hypothesis that considers the media consumption as an intentional act and each user as an reactive subject of his/her relationship with mass media. However, reviewing the literature in the field, it is still not well explained how such activity takes place
during the reception practices. In this article, three dimensions regarding the users activity in their relationship with media texts will be highlighted. Users activity is, first of all, selectivity. Selective are the media reception processes and, in particular, the cognitive processes involved in the fruition, such as attention, perception and memory. In addition, activity is semantic autonomy referring to the negotiated meaning production which characterizes the relationship with mass media texts: meanings emerged in this relationship are not those in the text, but those which the media users discover and resignified in and with the text itself. At the end, activity is social re-interpretation of those same meanings, when they become conversation and discussion subjects and ways and pretexts for social interactions.
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The following essay puts forward three possible readings of the relationship between media and sociocultural animation. Starting from a review of previous studies on the relationship between means of communication, environment and education, it discusses the possibility of following new paths of research involving a closer collaboration between academic research and industrial research leading to the development of models and initiatives through the shared design of technologies and social services.
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The media today delineate the multiplanar space of a sphere that allows to avoid the constraints of a total control of the conscience. In this semiosphere both an ethics of communication and an ethics of recognition can take shape.
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