Designing for Learning in a Networked World

Nina Bonderup Dohn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351232333
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Designing for Learning in a Networked World provides answers to the following questions: what skills are required for living in a networked world; how can educators design for learning these skills and what role can and should networked learning play in a networked world? It discusses central theoretical concepts and draws on current debates about competences necessary to thrive in contemporary society. The book presents detailed analyses of skills needed and investigates the question of how one can design for learning in specific empirical cases, ranging in academic level from preschool to university teaching.

The book clarifies the different conceptions of design within the educational field and offers a framework for thinking critically about instances of networked learning. It analyses digital and Computational Literacy and discusses participatory skills for learning in a networked world. Examples of specific empirical cases include teaching programming to students not necessarily intrinsically motivated to learn; facilitation of a participatory public in the library and designs for children's transition from day-care to primary school, discussed as a matter of networked contexts.

Engaging thoughtfully with the question of '21st century skills', this book will be vital reading to scholars, researchers and students within the fields of education, networked learning, learning technology and the learning sciences, digital literacy, design for learning, and library studies.

Part 1

Common framework

Chapter 1

Introduction

Competence demands in today’s networked world

Nina Bonderup Dohn

This book addresses the skills required for living in present-day society and ways in which educators may facilitate the learning hereof. Because – as we shall argue – present-day society to a large extent is networked and because arranging to facilitate others’ learning is most adequately viewed as a designing for learning, the book accordingly investigates designing for learning in a networked world. It aims to provide answers to the following three questions:

• What skills are required for living in a networked world?
• How can educators design for learning these skills?
• What role can and should networked learning play in living and learning in a networked world?

In accordance with Jones (2015) and Carvalho and Goodyear (2014), the term 'networked learning' in the last question refers to learning in and through networks. The book speaks into current debates about the knowledge and skills necessary to thrive in contemporary society; as individual, group, nation, even as civilisation – “21st^t century skills”, as they are commonly and popularly called (Trilling and Fadel, 2009; P21, n.d.; Beetham and Sharpe, 2013; Chu et al., 2017; Kivunja, 2014). Our goal is to provide a balanced exposition of skills required, with a focus specifically on the demands that become apparent by looking at the world through the lens of it being ‘networked’. Balance is sought by, on the one hand, acknowledging the novel challenges posed by today’s technology and communicative practices whilst, on the other hand, not neglecting the many continuities in competence demands across the shift in millennial digits following from contingent conventional Western chronology. Many of the skills needed in the 21st century were also needed in the 20th as well as in centuries before that. For this reason, we find it more constructive to focus on what characterises present-day societal competence demands, given that the world is networked, irrespective of the confinement or not of these demands to the 21st century. We do not purport to supply an exhaustive list of skills, but rather to provide a cogent exposition of some of the important ones, centring on how they manifest themselves and interrelate, as well as on how they may be taught and learned. We should stress that we speak of ‘present-day’ society because this is the society available for analysis, but that we do so with the expectation that the world of tomorrow for which education aims to educate may be similarly characterised as networked and for this reason will require similar skills to the ones needed today.

Our book differs from other books on networked society, competence and design for learning on four important counts: first, in contrast to prevalent books on the networked character of contemporary society, our focus is not on providing a sociological account or a cultural critique, but on investigating how to design for learning for such a world. Second, as indicated, this means that we look at the question of knowledge and skills for today’s world through the specific lens of its being networked socially and technologically. Third, in contrast to many books on design for learning, we take a two-pronged approach to the skills identifiable with this lens and focus both on curricular and professional development questions involved in the design for learning them. That is, for one thing, we ask which designs for learning may facilitate learners in developing the skills. For another, we ask what skills are required on the part of educators for them to be able to design for networked learning. Fourth and finally, our selected empirical studies differ from other collections of case studies in purposefully combining networked learning cases to provide a life-wide and life-long perspective on designing for learning the identified skills, emphasising through example how such designs can be undertaken both inside and outside the formal educational system.

In this introductory chapter, we provide an initial characterisation of present-day society as networked (to be elaborated upon in Chapter 3). This allows us to identify a set of traits giving rise to competence demands on today’s citizens. Following this, we include an articulation of the way central competence-related terms such as ‘competence’, ‘skill’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘literacy’ will be used in the book. This, combined with the identified traits, lets us point out the set of skills that we shall concentrate on in the rest of the book. Towards the end of the chapter, we shortly summarise each of the following chapters.

Today’s networked world

Today’s world is characterised by being networked in a number of systematically related senses. In Chapter 3, we elaborate on the concept of network, arguing for a formal conception which cuts across more specific uses of the term to describe e.g. information and communication technology (ICT) connections or human relationships. This formal conception is what systematically relates the different senses in which today’s world may be viewed as networked. We present an overview of these senses in the following.

The world is networked in the sense that places dispersed geographically around the globe are linked to each other through an infrastructure of interconnected computers (sense one). It is networked in the sense that communication increasingly takes place and is stored in spaces mediated by the internet (sense two). It is also networked in the sense that information selection, retrieval, exchange, presentation (on user interfaces such as websites or mobile applications), representation (as marked-up data), archiving etc. to a large extent take place as machine–machine interaction with limited or no human involvement, i.e. with machines as agents (sense three). And it is networked in the sense that our lives play out in hybrid spaces where physical and virtual resources integrate in complex ways to support us in our activities (sense four). Finally, it is networked in the sense that people are connected to other people through family, work, leisure activities and public and political life, meaning they both have a ‘personal network’ and partake in networks associated with their different life practices (sense five). And it is networked in the sense that events and situations are connected to other events and situations by means of technology, infrastructure and people (sense six). Now, since people have always been connected to other people and events to other events, the world may be said to have always been networked in these final two senses. On the other hand, as concerns networks of people: the character of the connections and their interrelations arguably have changed considerably over the past century, resulting in the world being networked differently today than before in this sense, too. As concerns networks of events: the ways in which events can be connected have proliferated and intermingled, not least because of technological developments, multiplying and diversifying also the kinds of events that may be involved, which warrants mentioning this sense along with the others.

These statements echo claims that have been proposed over the last couple of decades. Van Dijk introduced the term ‘network society’ twenty-five years ago in the Dutch book De netwerkmaatschappij, to describe as he puts it (in the current third edition in English) “the changing organisational forms and (infra)structures of these societies” where ‘these societies’ refer to “contemporary developed and modern societies marked by a high level of information exchange and use of information and information technologies” (Van Dijk, 2012, p. 23). Castells advocated the same term in 1996, arguing that it is a more accurate description of (then) present-day society than other well-known characterisations such as ‘knowledge’ or ‘information society’ (Castells, 1996/2002, 2004). All societies have been information and knowledge societies, he maintained, utilising the information and knowledge they had available to further their goals. What is special about ours is 1) informationalism, i.e. “The action of knowledge upon knowledge itself as the main source of productivity” (Castells, 1996/2002, p. 17), made possible by 2) society’s social organisation in networks, 3) which are enabled, sustained and enhanced by an infrastructure of computer networks, 4) allowing a globalisation of capitalism’s chains of production, reproduction and consumption. Castells further coined the phrase ‘networked individualism’ to characterise the way individuals live and engage in the network society. The phrase highlights how connections between people have changed compared to earlier generations and thus how the world is networked differently from before, also in the person-centred sense of the term (fifth sense above): individuals live their lives as at once more ego-centred and more connected. Ego-centred, because individuals increasingly take themselves as the locus of authority concerning which goals to pursue and how to do it, rather than closely knitted social units such as family or local community. Connected, because social contact in general stretches far beyond kinship, immediate work relations and geographical neighbourhood to individuals coupled in large, loose networks of weak ties (Granovetter, 1973). Community obligations diminish and weaker responsibilities of bridging to diverse connections and bonding with several social networks come to the fore (Putnam, 2000).

More recently, Rainie and Wellman (2014) have gone so far as to claim that networked individualism is the new “social operating system” of society. They deliberately utilise this computer metaphor because they wish to maintain that “societies – like computer systems – have networked structures that provide opportunities and constraints, rules and procedures” (Rainie and Wellman, 2014, p. 7). They draw on internet studies performed by Rainie and colleagues at Pew Research and on former work by Wellman and collaborators to claim that networked individualism has arisen supported by three revolutions of human interaction: The Social Network Revolution, taking place in the middle of the 20th century and resulting in a change of focus for people’s social interaction, from the local community to a geographically dispersed network. The Internet Revolution, taking place within the last thirty years, allowing an immense increase in communication radius and frequency, i.e. supporting people in communicating more frequently and continually with an even larger geographically dispersed network. And finally, the Mobile Revolution, taking place within the last fifteen years, supporting (near) continuous accessibility of individuals to their social network, thus facilitating even more frequent communication with one’s connections. Rainie and Wellman argue that the networked individualism of today on the one hand fosters social freedom to choose one’s network affiliations and thereby to negotiate one’s social identity, whilst it on the other hand is highly socially taxing because the upkeep of a social network requires incessant cultivation of one’s connections.

Now, the analyses of Rainie and Wellman involve quite a lot of claims that appear unsubstantiated and exaggerated, both in their descriptions of the “always-available mobile connectivity” (p. ix) of networked individualism and in the characterisation of the lives of paradigmatic ‘networked individualists’. Thus, concerning the former, they completely ignore that in actual networked life one repeatedly incurs e.g. flat cell phone batteries, geographical locations out of reach of the antenna signal, server breakdowns, maintenance shut-downs and software updates or failures, all of which breach communication and connectivity. Lack of actual connectivity occurs several times every day for any number of reasons even in countries such as Denmark and (the urban parts of) the USA with a highly developed mobile infrastructure. It is a regular state of affairs to be planned for once one gets outside of urban areas in a country like Australia. And it is the rule rather than the exception for rural areas in developing countries like Bangladesh (cf. Chapter 14). Concerning the characterisation of the lives of ‘networked individualists’, Rainie and Wellman disregard the many social occasions and activities where mobile and computer communication is frowned upon by youth as much as by older generations – or is impractical or outright impossible (e.g. doing hard physical work-outs, swimming, practicing music in a band). Their stories narrating the lives of particular ‘networked individualists’ (e.g. in Chapters 1, 10 and Interlude pp. 109–113) imply overstated multitasking abilities of networked individualists (cf. e.g. Jones and Shao, 2011; Judd, 2013; Judd and Kennedy, 2011; Sana, Weston, and Cepeda, 2013; Wood et al., 2012, for studies documenting the detrimental effects of multitasking on learning, both in experimental setups and in classroom settings). Quite banally, they neglect that most people are asleep for at least one fourth of a 24-hour period, seriously undermining claims to the effect that they are always available. Furthermore, their view of technology is very optimistic with hardly any consideration of the challenges which the networked society may pose to democracy and citizenship in general as well as more specifically to the possibility of adequate opinion formation, knowledge development and learning: Increased digitalisation of public discourse risks delimiting access to democratic participation to only those citizens who are skilled in ICT-mediated communication, leading to demographic inequality both nationally and globally. In Chapters 13 and 14 we take up these risks in the context of reporting on studies of governmental initiatives in Denmark and Bangladesh which aim to address them. Similarly, serious threats are posed to users’ balanced opinion formation, knowledge and learning by the so-called filter bubble, i.e. the tendency for search engines to filter information to one’s prior search preferences (leading to invisibility of incompatible information); by users’ proneness to engage on social media only with people with whom they agree; and by the proliferation of unwarranted or false information (Pariser, 2011; Sunstein, 2009). We discuss further challenges in Chapter 4. Still, given some moderation of claims and an awareness of risks such as the ones mentioned, Rainie and Wellman’s description of the triple Social, Internet and Mobile Revolutions does provide a relevant background for understanding the demands posed on citizens in present-day society.

Characteristics of our networked world

Looking at today’s world through the lens of it being networked makes specific characteristics stand out as significant. In the following we shall hone in on the characteristics which the different senses of the world as networked combine to highlight. This will allow us in a later section to look at competence demands raised by these characteristics.

A first, obvious, characteristic of our networked world is globalisation, highlighted in particular by the sense of ‘networked’ concerned with ICT as global infrastructure (sense one). ‘Globalisation’ is to be understood in the market-oriented sense mentioned above with Castells, i.e. that lines of supply, manufacture, assemblage and consumption is distributed globally, though with very different weights around the world at each stage. Competition on products, jobs and consumption is international, at least within some domains; and mobility of part of the workforce is correspondingly required. Further, globalisation is to be understood in the sense that a number of pressing political issues are of a globalised nature. Overpopulation is one such issue. Sustainability, both humanitarian and environmental, is another. Social fairness, including fair possibilities of learning and bettering one’s (unfair) situation, a third. Religious or political fanaticism a fourth. Undue standardisation and loss of desirable plurality and local differentiation (linguistically, culturally, academically etc.) are at once potential unwanted results from globalisation and a fifth pressing issue of globalisation. As Castel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgement of third party materials
• Preface
• List of contributors
• Part 1 Common framework
• Part 2 Skills for a networked world
• Part 3 Case studies: designing for developing skills for a networked world
• Conclusion: designing for learning in a networked world
• Index