Media Selection from the Teacher's Point of View

Teachers, trainers, and educational designers often face the problem of choosing the most suitable media for achieving their educational purposes. To solve this problem, they need to take into account both the variables at play in the educational setting and the characteristics and potentialities of the media available. This chapter discusses the criteria for media choice, with particular attention to the point of view of the individual teacher who makes decisions on the basis of the educational strategies he or she deems most appropriate and, given that schools usually have limited resources, must favor techniques for material retrieval and reuse rather than new development.

Semantic Web and Digital Libraries

An analysis of the reality surrounding us clearly reveals the great amount of information, available in different forms and through different media. Volumes of information available in real time and via the Web are concepts perceived as closely related. This perception is supported by the remark that the objective of the Web was the definition and construction of a universal archive, a virtual site in which the access to documents was possible with no limits of time or space. In this digital library, documents have to be equipped with logical connections making possible for each user the definition of a reading map that expands according to the demand for knowledge gradually built up. This perspective is pointing now in the direction of the Semantic Web, a network satisfying our requests while understanding them, not by some magic telepathic communication between browser and navigator, but rather a data warehouse in which documents are matched to meta-data,1 letting specialized software to distinguish fields, importance, and correlation between documents. Semantic Web and library terms have an ever increasing close relationship, fundamental for the progress and the didactic efficiency in knowledge society.

Teachers, Tutors, and Mentors

The goal of this chapter is to describe the main transformations of our Information Society and to show how these kinds of transformations are changing teaching roles in schools and universities. Particularly, the focus is on teachers and tutors in on line education: the first ones are gradually passing from the “sage on the stage” to the “guide on the side” (of the learner) and understanding that their job is no longer individual, because their activities are much more staff activities; the second ones are really important because the learner, in an online environment, needs more than in presence to be helped from the cognitive and emotive point of view. The chapter provides a description of the main activities of these professionals: organization, knowledge and experience sharing, and evaluation. In conclusion, we try to indicate some problems whose importance decision makers should consider.

Some Insights into the Impact of ICTs on Learning Agency and Seamless Learning

The learning capacity of individuals is becoming recognised as the most valued commodity in a knowledge and information society and this has fostered an increased attention on the innovation, transfer, and management of knowledge. To explain these processes, it is necessary to move beyond what has traditionally been conceived of as a learning environment and to develop alternative models that acknowledge and accommodate the learning competencies required to successfully engage with a contingent and dynamic learning culture, the changing nature of knowledge, and the influence of the cultural background of learners. Such models need to explain the lifelong and continuous nature of learning as learners move seamlessly among a range of diverse learning environments. This chapter proposes the concept of learning agency which incorporates the intelligence inherent in learning environments as a mechanism to explain seamless learning within and across environments, particularly those that are rich in technology.

Contribution of Psychopedagogy to the Inclusion of ICT in the Pedagogical Environment

This chapter aims at critically analyzing distance education and the interactions between ICT, teaching, and knowledge structures based on the contributions of psychopedagogy. The first section examines the innovations currently taking place in the field of psychopedagogy, in which the concept of the physical classroom is being replaced by that of the virtual classroom. The second and third sections analyze, respectively, the learning through ICT and the incorporation of the Web in the pedagogical practices, their possibilities, and limitations. A fourth segment regards the use of the Web by the youngsters and analyses the possible reasons for its great significance and use among youngsters. The conclusion of this chapter stresses the need to acknowledge the value of the interrelationship between the culture of physical presence and cyberculture in the teaching environment, as well as the need for teachers to change their mentality and to become effectively enabled to add ICT to their pedagogical practice.

Distributed Virtual Reality Learning Environments

In this chapter we discuss the emerging technologies of collaborative virtual environments (CVEs), and outline their suitability for improving the pedagogical support provided by online learning environments. We provide a critique of current approaches to online learning (ranging from Web-based to video-conferencing), and argue that they are generally poor with regard to support for complex task-based interactions, as required by modern approaches to collaborative learning, as well as being weak in

E-Teaching Scenerios

In this chapter a modern approach to e-teaching scenarios at the university level is introduced that focuses on the teacher. This approach covers content-related and communicational components of an e-education scenario. Content creation and delivery via Internet, as well as teacher-learner communication is shown from the point of view of the teacher. The content related part of an e-teaching scenario uses the well-known variety of computer-assisted training applications. The communication part refers to all aspects of teacher-learner and learner-learner communication within e-teaching scenarios. Based on elementary communication patterns and an easy-to-use technical infrastructure a set of reference communication processes for e-education is created and carried out depending on the chosen teaching method. To prove the technical feasibility of the concept the whole e-teaching process is supported by prototypic software solutions.

Teaching Team Competancies

Within institutes of higher education, the incorporation of various types of group work into pedagogies is already widespread, yet many examples fail to embrace a rationale for, or the potential benefits of, multiple contributor environments essential in a knowledge intensive society. We propose that for optimum IT workplace effectiveness, in which principles of knowledge management need to be applied, it is necessary to take into account the competencies of the teams in which individuals work and to explicitly teach team competency skills.

From the Monitoring of the Teaching-Learning Process to Didactics' Transparency

The chapter starts with a short introduction on students’ assessment and school evaluation and the great changes investing them in last decades. Soon after the same topics are deeply analyzed with respect to results coming from educational research and to the introduction and use of ICT; as a consequence the limits of the partial application of ICT and information management to separated educational fields emerge. From the above remarks arises the author hypothesis of a paradigmatic change in education management and the consequent need for a deeper use of ICT and information systems in the management of educational data; contextually it is explained how the above change can lead to didactics’ transparency in teaching-learning processes.

Simulation, Training, and Education Between Theory and Practice

This chapter reports the results of a theoretical and practical research work on simulation, both as a teaching strategy that creates a dynamic and experiential situation which enables participants to take on roles in relation to the variables to be tested or modified, and the learning content that the students need to acquire. With reference to the training and educational needs of contemporary society, the theoretical premises underlying simulation are considered and examined in relation to recent findings regarding the process of learning and teaching and the acquisition of knowledge, as well as some recent research results. On the basis of the findings, it appears necessary to reflect on the synergy triggered through simulation. It particularly emphasized the role of simulation in the integration of different skills and types of knowledge, leading to the overcoming of the compartmentalization of knowledge and its fragmentation into discrete subjects or disciplines. Questions remain open regarding the role of ICT in the whole simulation process.