Abstract
The paper addresses the issue of education after the information revolution. Why hasn’t the 4th revolution revolutionized education (yet)? Possible reasons of the recalcitrance of education are: the lack of a solid and shared corpus of evidence on the positive and negative effects of ICT on learning, and the continuously evolving nature of digital literacy. The information revolution can thus go one of two ways: the top-down, policy or project guided way, and the bottom-up way that stems from non-educational practices that are “colonised” by educational purposes. The first way has been taken by many educational reforms, but hasn’t radically changed education. What will instruction look like when (if) the 4th revolution happens in education? The paper discusses some exemplary cases of ICT practices and their effect on the main tenets of traditional education: the role of teachers and the relationship among peers, the existence of a special space and a dedicated time for learning (separated from other places and activities), the attitude (active or passive) of the learner. These practices show that education is not a natural kind, and that we can imagine different educational paths and environments. Also, they show that the simple introduction of ICT per se does not change education: an effort at re-conceptualisation as well as the definition of clear and measurable objectives, are necessary conditions for a real change to happen.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
E.g.: The International Association of Mobile Learning: http://mlearning.noe-kaleidoscope.org/; Handheld learning conference: http://www.handheldlearning.co.uk/; MoLeNET: http://www.molenet.org.uk/; MobileActive: http://mobileactive.org/
- 2.
E.g.: Games Based Learning initiative, The Consolarium, LTS Scotland: http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/ictineducation/gamesbasedlearning/index.asp; Games Based Learning conference: http://www.gamebasedlearning2010.com/; Educause http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Review/EDUCAUSEReviewMagazineVolume39/GameBasedLearningHowtoDelighta/157927
- 3.
- 4.
E.g.: Becta: http://www.becta.org.uk/; European Schoolnet: http://www.eun.org/web/guest;jsessionid=C88D79E4E3EE7B1A7E8583DF559DF3D6; National Education Technology Plan: http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/os/technology/plan/2004/site/edlite-default.html; InfoDev: http://www.infodev.org/en/index.html
- 5.
The director of the project is Nicholas Negroponte, but Seymour Papert and Alan Kay (all three from MIT) are amongst the educational theorists and computer scientists recognized as being at the same time inspirers and supporters of the initiative that has seen light in 2005. OLPC: http://laptop.org/en/
- 6.
- 7.
Not School: http://www.notschool.net
- 8.
English in Action (Open University): http://www.englishinaction.com/
- 9.
Millee: http://www.millee.org/
- 10.
E.g.: Layar http://www.layar.com/
- 11.
Apple-Nike: http://www.apple.com/ipod/nike/
- 12.
Question box: http://questionbox.org/
- 13.
Frequency 1550: http://freq1550.waag.org/
References
Agrawal, Sandip, et al. 2009. PhonePoint Pen: Using mobile phones to write in air. In MobiHeld09. Barcelona, Spain.
Ally, Mohamed. 2009. Mobile learning. Transforming the delivery of education and learning. Edmonton: AU Athabasca Press.
Anderson, Craig Alan, Douglas A. Gentile, and Katherine E. Buckley. 2006. Violent video game effects on children and adolescents. Theory, research, and public policy. Oxford/New York: University of Oxford Press.
Aviram, Aharon, and Deborah Talmi. 2005. The impact of information and communication technology on education: The missing discourse between three different paradigms. E-Learning and Digital Media 2(2): 169–191.
BBC. 2005. Should mobile phones be banned in schools? May 27. http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/newsid_4570000/newsid_4579100/4579159.stm
Bloom, Benjamin. 1984. The 2 sigma problem: The search for methods of group instruction as effective as one-to-one tutoring. Educational Researcher 13(6): 4–16.
Bransford, John D., et al. 2000. How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
Bremner, Charles. 2009. Mobile phones to be bannes in Frenchprimary schools to limit health risks. The Times online, May 27. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6366590.ece
Brown, Tom H. 2008. Mlearning in Africa: Doing the unthinkable and reaching the unreachable. In International handbook of information technology and primary and secondary education, Springer International Handbooks of Education, vol. 20, no. 9, ed. Jone Voogt and Gerald Knezek, 861–871. New York: Springer.
Bulstrode, Mark. 2008. Half of Cambridge students admit cheating. The Independent, October 31. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/half-of-cambridge-students-admit-cheating-980727.html
Butgereit, Laurie. 2007. Math on MXit: the medium is the message. In Proceedings 13th annual national congress of the association of mathematics education of South Africa, White River, South Africa.
Byron, Tanya. 2008. Safer children in a digital world. The report of the Byron review 2008. http://publications.education.gov.uk/default.aspx?PageFunction=productdetailsPageMode=publicationsProductId=DCSF-00334-2008
Casati, Roberto. 2009. Learning beyond electrification. Mobile technology offers opportunities for redesigning the teaching process. Interdisciplines. http://www.interdisciplines.org/mobilea2k/papers/5
Clark, Andy, and David Chalmers. 1998. The extended mind. Analysis 58: 10–23.
CTGV. 1990. Anchored instruction and its relationship to situated cognition. Educational Researcher 19(6): 2–10.
Dewey, John. 1997. Experience and education. New York: Free Press.
Dukker, Stephen. 2007. Is the OLPC project doomed a failure? Znet, August 07. http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/it-strategy/2007/08/07/is-the-olpc-project-doomed-to-failure-39288450/
FAS. 2006. Harnessing the power of video games for learning. Summit on educational games. http://www.fas.org/gamesummit/Resources/Summit%20on%20Educational%20Games.pdf
Felicia, Patrick. 2009. How are digital games used in schools? Complete results of the study. European schoolnet. http://games.eun.org/upload/gis-full_report_en.pdf
Floridi, Luciano. 2003. Two approaches to the philosophy of information. Minds and Machines 13(4): 459–469.
Floridi, Luciano. 2004. The Blackwell guide to the philosophy of computing and information. Malden: Blackwell.
Floridi, Luciano. 2007. A look into the future impact of ICT. The Information Society 23(1): 59–64.
Floridi, Luciano. 2010. The Cambridge handbook of information and computer ethics. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press.
Gee, James Paul. 2007a. Good video games + good learning: Collected essays on video games, learning, and literacy. New York: P. Lang.
Gee, James Paul. 2007b. What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gentile, Douglas A. 2009. Pathological video game use among youth 8 to 18: A national study. Psychological Science 20: 594–602.
Greenwood, Louise. 2009. Africa’s mobile banking revolution. BBC News, August 12. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8194241.stm
Johnson, Rachel. 2007. A degree in cut and paste. The Times online, March 11. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/rachel_johnson/article1496130.ece
Johnson, Lawrence F., et al. 2010. The Horizon report. Austin: The New Media Consortium. http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2010/
Keating, Candes, and Murray Williams. 2006. Schools seek to ban addictive Mxit. IOLNews, August 23. http://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/schools-seek-to-ban-addictive-mxit-1.290620
Korte, Werner B., and Tobias Hüsing. 2007. Benchmarking access and use of ICT in European Schools 2006. Final Report from Head Teacher and Classroom Teacher Surveys in 27 European Countries. Elearning Papers, 2, 1. http://www.elearningeuropa.info/files/media/media11563.pdf
Kozma, Robert. 2008. International handbook of information technology in primary and secondary education. Berlin: Springer.
Maes, Pattie, and Pranav Mistry. 2009. Unveiling the “Sixth Sense,” game-changing wearable tech. In TED 2009, Long Beach, CA.
Mitchell, Alice, and Carol Savill-Smith. 2004. The use of computer and video games for learning. A review of the literature. London: Learning and Skills Development Agency. http://gmedia.glos.ac.uk/docs/books/computergames4learning.pdf
Mitra, Sugata. 2009. Remote presence: Technologies for ‘beaming’ teachers where they cannot go. Journal of Emerging Technologies in Web Intelligence 1(1): 55–59.
Mitra, Sugata, and Vivek Rana. 2001. Children and the Internet: Experiments with minimally invasive education in India. British Journal of Educational Technology 32(2): 221–232.
Mitra, Sugata, et al. 2005. Acquisition of computing literacy on shared public computers: Children and the ‘hole in the wall’. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology 21(3): 407–426.
Nussbaum, Bruce. 2007. It’s time to call One Laptop Per Child a failure. Businessweek, September 24. http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/NussbaumOnDesign/archives/2007/09/its_time_to_call_one_laptop_per_child_a_failure.html
Papert, Seymour. 1980. Mindstorms: Children, computers, and powerful ideas. New York: Basic Books.
Papert, Seymour. 2004. Entretien avec Seymour Papert. Education et Territoires – Conseil Général des Landes. http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5zdl4_seymour-papert-2004_webcam/
Prensky, Marc. 2005. What can you learn from a cell phone? Almost anything. Innovate. Journal of Online Education 1(5). http://innovateonline.info/pdf/vol1_issue5/What_Can_You_Learn_from_a_Cell_Phone__Almost_Anything!.pdf
Prensky, Marc. 2006. Don’t bother me mom, I’m learning! How computer and video games are preparing your kids for twenty-first century success and how you can help! St. Paul: Paragon House.
Resnick, Mitchell, et al. 2009. Scratch: Programming for all. Communications of the ACM 52(11): 60–67.
Rudd, Peter, et al. 2009. Harnessing Technology Schools Survey 2009 Analysis report. Berkshire: National Foundation for Education Research. http://research.becta.org.uk/upload-dir/downloads/page_documents/research/ht_schools_survey08_analysis.pdf
Sharples, Mike. 2005. Learning as conversation: Transforming education in the mobile age. In Proceedings of the conference on seeing, understanding, learning in the mobile age, Budapest, Hungary.
The Economist. 2010. Don’t shoot the messenger. America’s president joins a long (but wrong) tradition of technophobia. May 13. http://the-economist.com/node/16109292/comments
Traxler, John, and Agnes Kukulska-Hulme. 2005. Mobile learning in developing countries. Commonwealth of Learning. http://www.col.org/SiteCollectionDocuments/KS2005_mlearn.pdf
Trucano, Michael. 2005. Knowledge maps: ICTs in education. Washington, DC: infoDev/World Bank. http://www.infodev.org/en/Publication.8.html
Trucano, Michael. 2009. Mobile phones: Better learning tools that computers? (An EduTech debate). EduTech. http://blogs.worldbank.org/edutech/mobile-phones-better-learning-tools-than-computers-an-edutech-debate-0
Van der Klein, Raimo (Thinkmobile). 2008. The box and beyond. Slideshare. http://www.slideshare.net/Thinkmobile/the-box-and-beyond-web
Vecchiatto, Paul. 2009. Mxit becomes teachers’ pet. MyDigitalLife, April 20. http://www.mydigitallife.co.za/index.php?option=com_contenttask=viewid=1045673Itemid=35
Wagner, Daniel, et al. 2005. Monitoring and evaluation of ICT in education. A handbook for developing countries. Washington, DC: infoDev/World Bank. http://robertkozma.com/images/ict_ed_ch2_monitoringandeval.pdf
Whitehead, Alfred North. 1929. The aims of education and other essays. New York: Free Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Pasquinelli, E. (2012). What Happens to Infoteachers and Infostudents After the Information Turn?. In: Demir, H. (eds) Luciano Floridi’s Philosophy of Technology. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4292-5_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4292-5_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-007-4291-8
Online ISBN: 978-94-007-4292-5
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPhilosophy and Religion (R0)