Digital tools and challenges to institutional traditions of learning: technologies, social memory and the performative nature of learning

TLDR

In the new media ecology, learning is increasingly viewed as a transformational and performative activity, and studies that ignore the role of sophisticated technologies in shaping knowledge lack ecological validity. The article reflects on how digital technologies and learning are interdependent, arguing that human agency, cognition, embodiment, and technology must be integrated to better understand and enhance learning. The authors argue that digital technologies increasingly pressure institutional learning, transform how we learn and interpret knowledge, and make learning a hybrid process largely dependent on the tools we use.

Abstract

Abstract The purpose of this article is to offer some reflections on the relationships between digital technologies and learning. It is argued that activities of learning, as they have been practised within institutionalized schooling, are coming under increasing pressure from the developments of digital technologies and the capacities to store, access and manipulate information that such resources offer. Thus, the technologies do not merely support learning; they transform how we learn and how we come to interpret learning. The metaphors of learning currently emerging as relevant in the new media ecology emphasize the transformational and performative nature of such activities, and of knowing in general. These developments make the hybrid nature of human knowing and learning obvious; what we know and master is, to an increasing extent, a function of the mediating tools we are familiar with. At a theoretical and practical level, this implies that the interdependences between human agency, minds, bodies and technologies have to serve as foundations when attempting to understand and improve learning. Attempts to account for what people know without integrating their mastery of increasingly sophisticated technologies into the picture will lack ecological validity.