Digital life, mathematical skills and cognitive processes

A consistent part of the literature shows the significant role of digital experience in digital natives’ cognitive processes. The main goal of the current study was to investigate the impact of digital learning on the improvement of mathematical skills and on some change in cognitive processes in 166 primary school children from schools located in different parts of Italy. Participants were divided in two group: one group experienced the study of math mainly through digital tools, the other spent more time on pencil-and-paper trainings. All our participants were assessed with a battery of tests measuring numerical and cognitive abilities. Our results suggest the positive effect of a different type of training for the empowerment of visuo-spatial and numerical abilities. Specifically, effects of a digital experience are particularly evident in some specific numerical areas, such us accuracy, speed, semantic and syntactic numerical knowledge. Also, participants with greater experience of digital trainings score higher on spatial orientation

Transmedia Skills Education and Learning in the Age of Emerging Competencies. Introduction

The use of collaborative media engages people in a continuous process of learning and exchange, favouring the emergence of new skills and competencies that no longer belong only to the traditional assets of literacy, such as schools and families. Every generation develops blended competences under the influence of new tools and communication frameworks. On the one hand, most people have started to define their own social life-streams using the Internet, social networks, and personal (wearable) devices in different environments: at school, at work, at home, for leisure and spare time. On the other hand, technologies and digital-based learning represent just one side of the education process. The comfort that (the uses of) technologies offer often creates a false sense of successful education if technologies are not adopted in a transversal way to properly support learning activities and the growth of transdisciplinary competencies.This issue of the IJTL observes, describes, and analyses how education, in both formal and informal learning environments, can rethink, reconsider, and reinvent technologies, social practices, traditional environments and collaborative media, in order to offer transversal learning strategies favouring emerging competences and transmedia skills. Six articles approach education and transmedia skills from different points of view presenting experiences, case studies, and practices in Europe, South America, and Asia