Who’s afraid of the digital (learning)? A reflection on the potential of technology to ‘augment’ learning

This article is published in Spokes #47, December 2018. Read it here.

Back in 2008, in an article that since then has been discussed over and over again, writer Nicolas Carr cried out:

“Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell— but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. [1]

Ten years later, author and journalist Farhad Manjoo argues:

“I’ll make this short: The thing you’re doing now, reading prose on a screen, is going out of fashion. [...] If you look ahead to the coming year online, one truth becomes clear. The defining narrative of our online moment concerns the decline of text, and the exploding reach and power of audio and video. […] Together, they’re all sending us the same message: Welcome to the post-text future.”[2]

Things are moving. Fast. And with them an overwhelming debate over the power of digital culture, as well as over the need for new skills to match these disruptive technologies.[3]

Nevertheless, today we are still scared of the digital. Many people are still convinced that they are incapable of understanding computers and digital infrastructure, although they may be incredibly skilled in non computer fields [4]. Others worry that the use of digital media affect, even alter, our brains and our learning depriving us, for example, of our ability of concentration, deep reading or physical interaction with the world. And others fear that we are losing control over what is learned and how it is learned.

But is it really so? These questions are far from trivial; they are central to our life and work, as citizens, as educators. Digital culture has undoubtedly brought [5] an important transformation in many aspects, but where does change lay when we talk about learning?

In this article I explore the digital experience from a learning perspective. Beginning with a discussion of the pros and cons brought by the digital to learning experiences, I am then arguing that we should address digital experiences as the new ‘situations’ in which knowledge is constructed and actualised, building on either new or already existing but strengthened affordances that help learners create meaning and gain more/better understanding. This is not an article on technology; it is rather a reflection on the potential of technology to ‘augment’ learning.

You can read the whole article here.