Rethinking Cognition, Representations, and Processes in 3D Online Social Learning Environments

Three-dimensional (3D) online social environments have emerged as viable alternatives to traditional methods of creating spaces for teachers and learners to teach to and to learn from one another. Robust environments with a bias toward peer-based, network-driven learning allow learners in formal environments to make meaning in ways more similar to those used in informal and in-person settings. These new created environments do so by accounting for presence, immediacy, movement, artifacts, and multi-modal communications in ways that help learners create their own paths of knowing using peer-supported methods. In this chapter, we will review the basics of the technologies and the theoretical underpinnings that support the development of such environments, provide a framework for creating, sustaining, and considering the effectiveness of such environments, and will conclude by describing two examples of 3D virtual worlds used to support course instruction at the university level.

Growing Up Wireless

This chapter illustrates the role of the mobile phone in the rise of new cultural models of parenting. According to a phenomenological theoretical approach to culture and everyday life, the author argues that the relationship between technologies, culture, and society should be conceived as a mutual construction. As cultural artefacts, mobile communication technologies both are domesticated by people into their cultural ways of living and create new ones. How are mobile phones domesticated by already existing cultural models of parenting? How does the introduction of the mobile phone affect family life and intergenerational relationships? How does mobile contact contribute in the construction of new cultural models of “being a parent” and “being a child”? Analysing new social phenomena such as “hyperparenting” and the “dialogic use” of mobile phones, the author argues upon the role of mobile communication technologies in articulating the paradoxical nature of the contemporary cultural model of family education.

Communicating in the Information Society

The present chapter provides a conceptual framework for the newest digital communication tools and for the practices they encourage, stressing the communication opportunities they offer and the limitations they impose. In this chapter, Internetbased communication technologies are regarded as the most recent step in the development of communication technologies. This approach helps have a broad perspective on the changes information and communication technologies (ICT) are bringing along in the social practices of so called knowledge society. As a matter of fact, these changes need to be considered within an “ecological” approach, that is, an approach that provides a very wide overview on the whole context (both in synchronic terms and in diachronic ones) where ICT are spreading. In the second part of the chapter, the authors present two examples of relevant social practices that are challenged by the most recent ICT, namely journalism (news market) and Internet search engines.

Knowledge, Culture and Society in the Information Age

Informational society, mainly after the development of online and mobile devices, is changing the forms with which we build our image of the reality. Speed, virtuality, and networking are three of the factors of this change. Speed means that information is circulating faster and faster, but also that it becomes aged very soon, with the necessity of being updated. Virtuality, after its first conceptualizations like a parallel dimension in the 1990s, is nowadays an integral part of our system of relations. Networking, finally, is becoming the main category for interpreting our culture, made of multiple dimensions of sociability, inside and outside the net. Knowledge, in this context, is not yet a truth authenticated; it is, on the contrary, a social activity, a process quite similar to a conversation where each of the discussants is negotiating a point of view. This is the scenario into which modern teachers, parents, and youngsters are acting.

Children and Computers

This chapter describes the design, the methodology, and the preliminary results of the research Children and Computer. Experience and Conceptual Frameworks (3-6). The research, started in 2004, is supported by IBM Foundation Italy and University of Milan-Bicocca—Dipartimento di Scienze Umane per la Formazione “Riccardo Massa.” The research team, led by Professor Susanna Mantovani, includes: Chiara Bove, Paolo Ferri, Valentina Garzia, Susanna Mantovani, Anna Poli, Donata Ripamonti, and Angelo Failla (IBM Foundation Italy), Morgana Stell (IBM Foundation Italy).

New Episthemologies in a Changing Media Environment

This chapter draws the landscape of the passage from modernity to information society. This is a passage referring to our idea of the universe, the way we’re thinking, the modalities with which we make sense of the world. Describing them, it is also possible to understand the main challenges for education: a shift from linear to complex methodologies, the need to provide students with abilities for searching and evaluating information, and the development of a new episthemology with its cultural codes and its languages. If school doesn’t individualize new tools for interpreting youngsters’ behaviours, it shall not be able to understand its new role in this changing society: to work at digital literacy thinking of it as a knowledge literacy.

The Future of Digital Society and the New Values of Media

This chapter concerns the conceptualization of information society and its social impact. From this point of view it worked like a myth, emphasizing the role of technology and producing some effects on social behaviours. This idea is develop in three main ways. First of all the chapter explains how the myth was born and how it is producing effects. Second, it investigates how it is changing the anthropology of how we are thinking about technology and its development. Finally, it imagines how media education is affected by this process, pointing out some ideas for redesigning its epistemological profile.

Media Education, Digital Production, and New Media

The aim of this chapter is to reflect about the teachers’ training in media education. This training in England is quite insufficient and almost based on the transfer of reading competencies: this means that is does not prepare the teacher to work with digital media, normally characterized by authoring activities. Starting from the experience of a master degree developed in the London Institute of Education, the chapter tries to show how many of the problems involved in this training were discussed and solved with the teachers enrolled in the master. The hypothesis presented is based on the mix between theory and practice, the creative activity of the participants, and the centrality of the role of the learner.

Adolescents and the Internet

This chapter deals with young people’s digital media appropriation in an education perspective throughout Europe and Quebec. The comparative study, Mediappro, shows that 12 to 18-year-olds develop numerous and shared uses in fundamental domains such as ethics or social issues of IT, but their appropriation remains incomplete, mostly in information and creative activities. The study also highlights such a significant gap between home and school appropriation in all the countries that for the adolescents Internet activities in school are not part of “their Internet.” The benefits of this research study lay on a more precise knowledge of adolescents’ attitudes and skills and therefore the possibility to elaborate recommendations towards the main participants in education issues, parents as well as school systems.

Integrating Technology Literacy and Information Literacy

Information technology literacy can be seen as an integration of what are commonly two separate literacies—technology literacy and information literacy. This chapter defines them, reviews issues related to both, and argues that both must be acquired and functionally utilized for students and workers to achieve success in our heavily technology-oriented society and workplace. The authors address learning outcomes and design components that should be considered in training and instructional settings, and give examples of instructional strategies for achieving them.