Post-constructivism, languages and learning environments. From the study of the media and hypertext to the web 2.0, instructional design, post-constructivism and enactivism

Este artículo surge con el objetivo fundamental de dar respuesta a dos interrogantes: a) ¿Cómo han cambiado las tecnologías en los últimos veinte años y qué recorrido se ha efectuado desde la Tecnología Educativa?, b) ¿Qué desafíos les esperan en el futuro próximo a los profesores de Tecnología Educativa? Para adentrarnos en su desarrollo, partimos de la siguiente premisa: hoy, más que ayer, los profesores de Tecnología Educativa antes de ser expertos en la introducción de las TIC en la didáctica, están llamados a repensar la didáctica, incluso con las TIC.This article born with the fundamental aim to answer two questions: a) How technologies (TE) have changed in the last twenty years and which way has the educational technology been followed? and b) What are the challenges for educational technology teachers in the next future, what borders do they have to face? To go into detail about its development, we start from the premise that today more than yesterday, teachers who teach Educational Technology are called to rethink teaching, even with ICT

Visible design

The presence of digital artefacts in the surrounding world holds both a structured and a structuring role that has an impact on the rationales with which we act and organise our behaviour and knowledge. The process that leads towards a major subject’s agentivity and towards a primary role of the design, useful to act in a complex context, is supported by digital technologies. Media Education takes us to new operative and cognitive modalities and promotes a critical attitude. Also at school, the design process plays a central role since the complexity of contexts, their fragmentation and the lack of “meta narratives/grand narratives” (Lyotard, 1987) requires that the teacher build situated rationales. Digital technologies can support the design process. Thanks to digitalisation, the design artefact becomes a fluid object that comes from the design, which can then be used in the classroom as a mediator and make students visualise the path. It supports the teacher and the students in their actions and it is completed in the documentation. The design artefact replaces the teacher in some routines, that is, the activities of the teacher to frame the class, to connect the present activity with past and future onesand to build a net of meaning that provides a comprehensive vision of the path. Those aspects affect the students’ guidanceand their motivation, but the presence of the artefact in the classroom also supports the teacher by fostering self-confidence. This is the proposal that the present article aims at deepening

A study of teacher/student relations in a formal face-to-face university context supported by online tools within an enactive approach

AbstractThe university didactics now requires a re-examination both in terms of objectives, and in terms of didactical formats. If the objective is to enable students to develop a professional habitus, the hypothesis is that the use of a situated approach and the presence of contexts of negotiation supported by new technologies can be effective. This paper analyses the relations that occurred within the “General Didactic” course at the Faculty of Education (University of Macerata) with more than 200 students and identifies the role of interactions in both an online environment and in the face-to-face class context in order to understand the evolution of the system according to an enactive approach

Technologies and trust

What is trust and how new technologies are changing or affecting the concept of trust? This publication offers insights from researchers working in educational technology and distance education, collected in the frame of the European FP-7 Marie-Curie People project “Stimulators and inhibitors of a culture of trust in educational interactions assisted by modern information and communication technology”, and provides examples of implications of trust for successful learning experiences in distance education. The research goal is to understand how trust has changed or is changing: this is related not only to the modification of the meaning, but also indicators upon which people built their judgements

Innovation as socially shared practice: the contribution of the Teaching and Learning Center

The contribution describes a study on the organizational devices and the professional development programs carried out at the Teaching and Learning Center (TLC) of the University of Siena and at the Teaching and Learning Lab (TLL) of the University of Macerata. The focus is on systemic actions capable to elicit innovation at an organizational level, starting from the work of the institutional centers for research, professional training, and digital enhanced learning embedded in the university. In the final paragraph, future developmental trajectories for constituting an inter-universities network of TLCs are discussed