Teaching and Learning and ICT’s

Alan Amory
Sarah Gravett
Duan van der Westhuizen

Faculty of Education
Digital natives

• “Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the
people our educational system was designed to teach.”
• Grown up digitally
For example computers, cell phones, music, video, games, interactive TV, Mix-
It, Facebook, bluetooth
• Today’s students think and process information fundamentally differently from
their predecessors
• “Different kinds of experiences lead to different brain structures“
• “Likely that our students’ brains have physically changed – and are different
from ours “
• Students today are all “native speakers” of the digital language of computers,
video games and the Internet.
• Immigrants: turns to the Internet for information second rather than first,
reads a manual rather than assuming that the program/device itself will teach
you how to use it
• Problem: Digital Immigrant teachers speak an outdated language and are
struggling to teach those who speak an entirely new language.
Digital Immigrants

• Believe learning takes place step by step, or sequentially

• Believe learning can’t take place while the TV/IPOD is on
• Don’t believe learning should be fun
• Believe old teaching methods are still valid

• “Smart adult immigrants accept that they don’t know about their new world
and take advantage of their kids to help them learn and integrate. Not-so-
smart (or not-so-flexible) immigrants spend most of their time grousing about
how good things were in the “old days.”

• So:
• Change thinking about METHOD of teaching
• Change thinking about content
21st Century Teaching and Learning

• Learning to be
Students learn not only about something but rather learn to be something. Here
learning is the enculturation into the practice of the discipline or profession,
often through legitimate participation in authentic tasks
• Information to knowledge
Avoid delivery of information. Help to attach meaning.
• Possessing information does not imply that learning has occurred, learning takes
place ”when students act on content, when they shape and form it. Content is
the clay of knowledge construction”
• Information is not knowledge
• Merely providing information is not teaching
• Learning to speak digitally
Multimedia literacy is part of learning to be and fosters pattern-making, skill
development, nonlinear thinking, navigation in incongruent spaces and complex
story-telling
• Learning Activity Design: Foster deep learning
Learning Activity Design

• View students as individuals with pre-existing knowledge, aptitudes, motivation

and skills;
• Acknowledge teacher beliefs influence the way they teach, designing learning
activities, use software in the classroom, use of collaboration and practice
science education;
• Support educational practices that result in complex changes that requires new
skills, in challenges existing solutions and implemented by all stakeholders
(including the students);
• Foster social cognition and active processing to develop shared
representations, interpretations and systems of meaning among participants
(both teachers and students);
• Recognize that students learn in different ways;
• Support an inclusive educational approach knowing that different gender
identities related in different ways to media, design and technology;
• Define goals that range from the sharply focussed (e.g. following a set of
protocols in a first aid course) to general ones (e.g. developing visual literacy
by deconstructing pop videos);
Learning Activity Design (contd)

• Emphasize the importance of context and therefore need to make use of

complex authentic real world tasks;
• Create learning activities that students find interesting, exciting and useful
(intrinsic motivation);
• Provide support, or tools, to develop new insights from existing information;
• Includes stratagems to foster develop student abilities to reflect on their own
learning processes in order to improve the knowledge, attitudes and skills; and
• Is conversational to support dialog in order to develop deeper insights.
ICTs in Teaching and Learning

• Learning to speak digitally. Fosters skill development and nonlinear thinking,

navigation in incongruent spaces, negotiation in complex environments, and
complex story-telling (reflections).
• Learning to teach digital natives. Students who grow up with digital tools and
cultural artefacts (for example cell phone applications, virtual game worlds,
and music sharing systems) are very good at pattern-making, sense-making in
confusing environments and multitasking that need to be acknowledged in
learning activity designs.
• Learning to imagine. Learning by metaphor occurs in pervasive environments
(a problem space that includes the real and cyber worlds) and multiplayer
online games leads to convergence that invites and requires imagination to
translate. However, in simulations where the divergence between real and
virtual worlds is minimized learning is by analogy to support direct transfer of
skills and knowledge from the virtual to the physical (instruction). However, it
is the act of imagination that leads to the construction of something new, and
thereby transforms both the individual and the world they live in.
ICTs in Teaching and Learning (contd)

• Information stream
The delivery of learning resources and other necessary information pertinent to
learning, research and administration
• Communication
Both synchronous and asynchronous modes that make use increasing
intelligent devices
• Collaboration
Provide support for social networking and community building
• Transformation
Information transformed from one, or many, information streams into more
meaningful individually or group constructed knowledge
• Professionalization
The use of technological tools associated directly with a profession (for
example, the use of Computer Aided Design software by architecture students)
• Learning to network. Social networking in a lived experience of most students
where they organize themselves into communities that are often based of race,
gender and belief systems. However, such networks do not function during
seeking solutions of complex tasks. In order words, people from diverse
backgrounds holding incongruently beliefs can work together to solve a
common problem.
• Learning to share. Rip and burn approach to music sharing is an example of
how many students make available information to their communities. While the
neo-liberal multinationals fight the “making-free” of the commodified assets,
the Open Access-Open Source-Open Content movements provides alternatives
that are based on individual freedoms that support human liberation.
 Emerging Technologies Web 2.0

• User Created Content

• Audience listening and creating
• Create collaborative, learner-authored resources open to public feedback
• Social Networking
• Connect with friends, colleagues, or even total strangers who have a
shared interest
• Opportunity to contribute, share, communicate and collaborate
• Mobile Phones
• Gateway to our digital lives and learning
• Encourage creativity and mediamaking
• Virtual Worlds
• Chance to collaborate, explore, role-play, and experience other situations
in a safe but compelling way
• Learn through simulations and role-playing
• Massively Multiplayer Educational Games
• Engaging and absorbing but difficult to produce
• Develop leadership and management skills and supports collaborative
complex problem solving