User-Generated Content and Contexts: An Educational Perspective

Abstract

New mobile, individualised mass communication with mobile devices and the internet offers flexible contexts, which have become normalised in young people’s everyday lives. Our look at internet-based video platforms reveals learner-generated contexts in the form of mobile videos, which link to the classroom, e.g. Maths work. We discuss the potential for flexible contexts within the school, which – in contrast to user-generated contexts – is characterised by standardised sets for learning. In order to discover options for assimilating flexible contexts, we refer to the didactic concept of situated learning, which emphasizes the relevance of situations for learning. Learning as a form of meaning-making depends constitutively on situations, which are highly individualised in the context of new mass communication of everyday life. For a better understanding of these general, cultural developments, we view new mass communication as part of the cultural tradition of spaces, which reach from the invention of the ‘central perspective’ of the Renaissance, via mobility by cars to mobile, individualised mass communication. Such a broad perspective attempts to frame our discussion of possible ways of assimilating learner-generated, mobile contexts into school learning. Our ecological approach motivates us to critically consider the transformation of learning by mobile, flexible situations. With some concern and skepticism we observe the trend towards minimalisation of content and learning activities into micro-elements, which we correlate to the process of ‘McDonaldization’. A second important didactic concept, that of knowledge building, serves as a model for the integration of native mobile experts from the world of everyday life into a collaborative construction of knowledge. With regard to students as native experts, we identify the need to support them in using their naïve status of native experts and reach a higher level of reflexivity. To achieve this we propose ‘reflexive context awareness’ as an urgent educational task.