Cathy Davidson: Digital Learning Is Not I.T.
9.7.07 | IT (Instructional Technology) is indispensable to most educational institutions. Its development and enhancement are crucial to the institution. But does improving IT improve “digital learning”? Sometimes. Not always. Maybe not even often. The reason is that IT is usually institutionalized from the top down whereas digital learning is shared, contributory, collective, collaborative, customizable. With IT, teachers or, even more typically, administrators propose and implement and often require other teachers and students to use a particular new instructional tool in a certain way and to certain ends. In digital media and learning, the outcomes are less clear, the teachers have less of a determining role, and technology isn’t something delivered to others but is intrinsic to the larger learning project. Its building and application are part of the collective learning experience. The purpose of IT is to facilitate instruction. Digital learning can happen in school—but is as likely to take place at recess or in the lunch room as in the classroom.
In building the field of digital media and learning, we are developing methods and practices for learning in the Information Age and are looking for the best research for exploring what new modes of learning look like. For example, we know people are doing things differently with their time and their lives—but we don’t fully know yet if all the digital ways we spend our lives changes the way we think and what we think about. We’d like to know more about that. Digital learning enhances and takes advantage of all the various ways we do things on line, allows us to customize and remix and repurpose online tools, communities, games, and other media, and, wherever possible, also makes us think about the implications and applications of the technologies we use so that we can learn, think, and act better together.
To learn more about or apply to the HASTAC/MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Competition, go to http://www.dmlcompetition.net. The Competition deadline is October 15, 2007.
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Leshell Hatley (Uplift, Inc.)
10/11/07
10:36pm
This is a great distinction! There are several teachers in schools across the country that boast the digital learning they seem to witness when they assign or sponsor digital media (i.e. Second Life (SL) Islands where students complete an assigned challenge). The think that because the student successfully completed the project, that digital learning occurred. I argue that the digital learning starts while completing these projects but the heart of it can and should be seen observing what these students do with SL after the assignment is over and has been graded…and maybe even after months have gone by and that particular assignment has been forgotten.
Again, it is a great distinction and I’m glad it was expressed here.
Nichole Pinkard (University of Chicago/Center for School Improvemen)
10/24/07
9:56am
I also find this distinction useful as often in the schools in which we work we are trying to embed both simultaneously. We are trying to more effectively use IT to enhance differentiated learning in math and literacy. At the same time we are using digital learning to empower youth to use their voice as express through new media artifacts to critically examine their world.
Cathy’s point on the different role played by teachers in the use of IT or digital learning in the clasroom is important cause it highlights the shifting power dynamics between students and teachers in controlling the intended outcome between these forms of technology interaction.
For example, our sixth graders are asked to use an online math system where the path they are expected to take to demonstrate their learning is clear-follow steps a,b,c and d.
On the same day while sitting in our Remix Records class they are asked to create a song using GarageBand that is a response to the events of Jena 6. In creating their song they are not asked to follow a path but rather to make their own. Originality and creativity is the focus.
I think it is essential to have both IT and digital learning within a school, however, Cathy’s blog points out the important distinctions between both and the need to talk about the distinctions with teachers and students.
Cathy, thanks for helping to make visual an issue that I have been grappling with but unable to name!
Kim Gomez
10/30/07
10:52pm
I absolutely agree that IT and digital learning are both essential for the “21st century” learner. However, as Lashell and Nichole have pointed out there is a real disconnect between digital learning, performing an activity with digital technologies, and technology skill development. This distinction, by and large, is not evident to teachers. In large part I think it’s because this is a relatively new fine tuning of notions of what it means to be a digitally literate learner. I’ve seen plenty of kids who can “use technologies” when assigned tasks but who are not literate in understanding what the capacities of the technologies are with respect to creation, design, refinement of artifacts, tasks, and activities. We, in the field, need to be active in providing offering teachers thick descriptive and multi-representational examples of these distinctions.
Cathy Davidson
11/16/07
11:41pm
Thanks so much for these wise comments. To me, if we think of technology simply as a tool, we are missing the point. Technology is continuous with all aspects of social life, social learning, culture, and creativity—and that is why it is great to have youth involved not only with customizing and collaborating and teaching one another how to learn but with actually thinking critically about technology, who gets to have it, who doesn’t, how it helps them, and what they can and what they cannot do with it. I’m amazed that even five year olds who are deeply engaged in digital learning can offer insights into all of these things. For me, that’s what makes it all worthwhile and interesting.