Learning and teaching in digital culture

For Justiniano Tucto, Ageleo Member of the Iberoamerican Community Outreach of the OEI.

The technological leap is overwhelming in its speed characteristics and growth rate. While the telephone took 75 years to reach 50 million users, the Internet did it in just 4 years. In 2010 more than a quarter of the world's population was online.

New technologies are ways to configure logic and knowledge very different from school. The first work based on personalization, seduction and personal and emotional involvement, and usually very fast and immediate interaction. The school, however, is an institution based on disciplinary knowledge, more structured, less exploratory and time and space as given, slower.

With the presence and incorporation of technology in the classroom, changes occur in the organization of teaching in the classroom. Dussel and Caruso (2000), defines the classroom as "a material structure and a structure of communication between subjects." What we now know for classroom is a group of schoolchildren learning at the same time all the same things, and serving an adult teacher posed a unified and central to the whole organization. We, our parents and our children are educated with this pedagogical structure of the classroom.

With the addition of computers and technological devices as permanent netbooks in the classroom, with individual screens and their networking, involve a redefinition of the classroom and educational space. It is difficult to support the teaching front, simultaneous and homogeneous. Therefore, Area Moreira (2001:4) argues that "hypertext navigation through the WWW is a different experience for each of the students involved so that, in the same classroom, there will be a pace and sequence of learning homogeneous and unambiguous to all. This requires the teacher to develop a more flexible approach and individual attention to each student or group work. "

Cell phones with access to cameras, videos, chats, music, Facebook pages, blogs, social networks have broken the boundaries of time and school space, allowing to be "and not" in several places at time.

New

technologies lead to changes in the notion of culture and knowledge.

The school is an institution of cultural transmission organized in a historic moment - the modernity of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries - around an idea of public culture and the predominance of rational thinking, reflective and argumentative, with horizons longer than the immediate situation. Instead, many new communication technologies are structured

from the user and promise to accommodate the tastes of the client from emotional empathy with short term horizons and renewable.

Has emerged a culture shaped by "users" and are essentially multimodal, combining text, images and sounds very innovative. Alessandro Baricco (2008), focuses on this as a "cultural transformation" of those years where on the Web, the value of information is based on the number of visits to and that is referenced by more users, regardless of quality of information.

To Baricco, the mutation is in the loss of depth value as a source of knowledge: "The idea that knowledge and belief means to penetrate deep into what we study, to its essence, is a beautiful idea is dying: the replaces the superficial ... "as an example we have Wikipedia, which is not made by experts but by the community.

Regarding the teachers' attitudes to changes and against expanding access to new technologies, we appreciate that some still use the computer as a "typewriter", while others see it as a major innovation in ways to produce and circulate knowledge, argue that this is a change of time, and you have to reorganize the teaching thinking in the new production traits of knowledge, such as hypertext, interactivity, connectivity and community.

Applications that appear to be more common among the poorest teachers, who consider the Internet as a gigantic library, which they believe enough to participate and produce texts with images increasingly synthetic and simple, and trust that the new technologies, especially through the use of images alone are attractive and fun and achieve better learning.

It pays to be cautious about developments involving new technologies in classrooms. As held by the Italian educator Anita Gramigna (2006:103), in these new conditions interesting operations may occur if one has knowledge "the metacognitive awareness of the valence of multimedia, and if" the user "knows own research focus is critical in the cascade of information to which they have access. " But if they do not, There is a large risk "of cultural impoverishment, disorganization, cognitive strategies superficiality." It is important to develop in students the ability to read and produce multimedia texts, move into information overload, the possibilities and limits of information searches.

To overcome the digital divide and bring to school to digital culture, is not enough to equip schools with computers or Internet access: it is also necessary to work in teacher training and in developing new codes of practice to allow more complex and meaningful uses of digital media, promoting the creation of virtual communities, as forms of cyber, generating forms of cultural production less standardized, more autonomous and creative.

Bibliography:

AREA MOREIRA, M (2001). "Uses and material resources practices in the school context. Of print culture to digital culture "in Quaderns Digitals, 42, no. 477. Available http://www.qudernosdigitals.net/datos_web/hemeroteca/r_42/nr_477/a_ ... Baricco, A (2008). The barbarians. Essays on the mutation. Barcelona, Anagram. DUSSEL INES (2011) Learning and teaching with new technologies, VII Latin American Forum on Education. Fundacin Santillana. Argentina. Dussel, I and M. CARUSO (2000). The invention of the classroom. A genealogy of the forms of teaching. Buenos Aires, Santillana. Gramigna, A (2006). "Hypertextuality, multimedia and new languages", in: ESCOLA-NO BENITO, A. Curriculum edited and knowledge society. Text, multimedia, and school culture. Valencia. Tirant Lo Blanch, pp. 87-108.