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23 de noviembre de 2001 | ||||||
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1. Introduction and Background These understandings have led us to recognize the lack
of what we have called a technological teaching theory, that is to say
a theoretical framework for interpreting and analyzing the possibilities
or just features, of new technological developments for teaching practices
at higher education. Our current research concerns and efforts are aimed
to the construction of such a framework. Our contemporary societies are framed in a new socio-economic scenario characterized by a globalization process. This process has two main features: first, a large, progressive, and systematic expansion of transnational corporations and their capital investments in almost every country; and second, a growing concentration of economical, financial, and technological power held by these corporations. The analysis of the origin, development, and consolidation of the capitalist order allows us to understand some of the current phenomena such as the internalization of production processes and the globalization of the financial sphere. However, it does not allow us to make sense out of some social and political phenomena such as the growing poverty and the systematic ecological damages to our planet, among some of the central problematic issues of our global world. We also face and participate in an irreversible tendency to globalization from a cultural perspective. New technologies have been adjudicated with an unquestionable central role as agents for shaping a new society: a knowledge society without frontiers. In this society Internet as The Network, represents a central provider not only of a vast amount of information, but also of new formative opportunities, regardless of the fact that at the same time these opportunities take place in a new growing commercial space for selling and buying educational degrees needed for competing in the labor market. Probably, the biggest cognitive challenge we, all of us, face is re-thinking what we need to fully understand this Net as a tool. The now classic technophobe and technophile attitudes towards technology - the belief in the discriminative role of the Internet, in the first case; and in the second, the blind confidence in the Internet as the key factor for achieving levels of knowledge never reached before - do not succeed in understanding the nature of this tool as a cultural and a social product. Among the intellectuals, the current high level of acceptance of new technologies seems to be related to the expression of an elite culture, in the sense that new technologies allow the communication within intellectuals around what they already have in common. Intellectuals, states Dominique Wolton (2000), have moved from the newspaper to the Internet in terms of information provided by technology; they ignore other communication means such as the radio and the television and do not fight for improving these other technologies. Intellectuals have disdained, Wolton continues explaining, the television because of its low quality content standards, without recognizing and rescuing its potential communicational power. The radio and the television technologies not only have the potential to reach distant and isolated places, but they also represent an accompaniment that provides information and entertainment. By playing this role they communicate, and this is probably their strongest feature, namely, generating common experiences among those who nothing have in common. Unlike these now classic technologies - the radio and the television - the strength of The Net resides, first, in that it allows the communication and the encounter among those who already have things in common, and second in that it makes all this possible speedily. The power of "generalist" communication means, such the radio and the television, resides precisely in that they involve both dimensions of the communication phenomena: the collective and the individual; on the other hand, the new communication means involve only the individual sphere (Wolton 2000). We ask ourselves, then, about the role we would like education to play facing the impact of new technologies. If being a literate person currently means being able to understand how to communicate in everyday life, how to understand the information provided by different communication means, how to read a book, it is evident that it also means developing the literacy skills for working with new technologies in order to have access to new knowledge and information resources. And if the role of new technology resides in giving us the possibility to accumulate and access vast collections of information, the role of education should be the construction of the criteria needed for assessing, selecting, and understanding this information in the appropriate disciplinary context in which this information is framed. Our research has allowed us to understand the way in which information, knowledge, and technology are being reconsidered as cultural and pedagogical phenomena in different ways through teaching practices developed by actual educational institutions and educators. One of these reconsiderations is related to the differentiation among three central concepts for understanding new technologies and education: information, knowledge, and content. The first of these terms, information, is commonly understood in relation to access to the Net. However, we have identified that this way of defining information has certain misleading implications. Firstly, it does not recognize the contextual considerations that frame the production of this information; and secondly, it does not include the many other informational sources relevant for thinking about education and educational phenomena. Regarding this second implication, it is important to acknowledge that the Net is not the one and only main source of information in education. Books, newspapers, textbooks, curricular materials, teachers and instructors' notes, and encyclopedias, among others, are all relevant sources of information. In certain cases this information represents an educational source specially re-constructed for schools and educational institutions, such as in the case of textbooks. Other information sources represent social and cultural productions that need to be re-constructed for being meaningfully integrated into teaching experiences. Educational content, on the other hand, implies a broad scope of topics involving concepts, ideas, and principles selected, ordered, and assessed for being addressed in the classroom context. The central challenge that takes place in any classroom setting resides in re-signifying meaningfully this information, recognizing its relevance, and transferring thinking modes from one field to another. Teachers' and instructors' work does not diminish in importance but rather acquires a new essential dimension. Educators need to continue teaching what they have always taught: the difference between the relevant and the trivial. But now, this difference seems to be exponentially expanded. It seems as if distinguishing between the important and the irrelevant is more complicated when the amount of information to select from is probably greater that it was before. In addition, given the fact that most of the information is constructed without distinguishing among audiences - children, teens, adults, professionals from different fields, etc. - teachers' task seems to be focused on recognizing the features of this information, the purposes for being published on the Net, and especially, constructing the criteria needed for accomplishing this analytical reflection regarding information. From the elementary grades to the post-graduate courses, students' understanding processes seem to be encouraged and facilitated when instructors provide references regarding who says what, when, why, in which theoretical construct certain knowledge is framed, and what methodological perspective support the construction of that knowledge. The need for this process of validating the information seems to be increased when the source is the Internet, since the information published on it commonly implies a broad scope of meanings and purposes. This process, and students' experiences developing it, leads to an hypercriticism needed for working with information. From these considerations it is possible to understand that by utilizing technology, as in using any tool, one can either enhance the educational experience or trivialize it. The border line seems to be the recognition that information is not the same as content for teaching and learning. Communication is another relevant dimension through which the Internet is addressed as a resource for education. Portals, as great communicational hosts within the Net seem to make it possible for different communities to realize their shared purposes and projects and to interchange their perspectives and solutions for scientific, community and social problems. The construction of a responsive and collaborative culture among schools, beyond districts, regions, public or private administrations, may help us adopt a powerful tool that could support our shared efforts to find better solutions for our common problems. These considerations are related to our recognition of an important feature of our current educational institutions: the isolation within which most of their tasks are developed. We now have the opportunity to work with new tools that could break this isolation, generating new encounters, knowledge sharing, and joint efforts. Schools have always been concerned with moral education. They now have at hand a powerful resource in these communication tools for developing actions and projects to address this relevant educational concern. The challenge that professors face while recommending the use of new technologies will consist in finding ruptures with the "isolated interactive" way in which communication seems to be configured within these very new technologies, a way that also implies an isolated living experience. In addition, they also face the challenge of recognizing that the current access to information, which seduces because of its velocity and quantity, demands from us first, being able to question ourselves about the best ways of acting regarding over-abundance; second, return to some of the traditional pedagogical categories such as order and hierarchy in order to deal with new technological formats; third, constructing criteria for assessing and using information; fourth, generating complex structures of signification for dealing with information flows; and finally the distinction and re-composition of the fragmented (Goldman-Segall, 1997.) In this reconsideration of technology and education, we have also found that technophobe and technophile strategies for technology integration are still present in some educational projects. These strategies utilize technology in an indiscriminate manner for any educational purpose. We have seen, for instance, distance education projects in which students are asked to study from the computer screen without taking into account the fact that studying implies slow, recapitulative reading patterns, as well as note taking, annotations, and the use of indexes and the like. We have also identified the opposite cases, that is to say, technophobe analysis that focus on the "access" problem of new technologies - the construction of differential educational circuits - and from that analysis deny its integration into educational institutions. This strategy fails in recognizing that new technologies do generate new opportunities for thinking about information and communication. Overcoming these strategies, namely the technophile and the technophobe, is the necessary condition if we are to think about educational experiences aimed at good teaching opportunities. That is to say, by transcending our focus on the very use of the technology in and of itself and moving towards meaningful educational experiences, we may be able to re-create new ways of thinking about knowledge, technology and education. From all these considerations it has been possible to identify new questions and concerns that lead our current research enterprise: How do good teaching experiences succeed in imposing pedagogical conditions over technology developments? What are the features of these practices that re-create technology as tools? How do teaching experiences generate certain conditions for working with technology that promote in these very technological tools new teaching possibilities? We aim to answer these questions by studying teaching
practices impacted by technology in higher education, and by re-interpreting
these practices in the light of new analytical dimensions to think about
teaching and technology as a field of study. The methodological perspective of this research is framed in a collaborative approach for analyzing and interpreting teaching practices. Within this collaborative work we develop an inductive analytical process that allows us to construct and re-construct hypothesis. From this perspective, we do not differentiate between qualitative and quantitative approaches, since this separation undermines and reduces the complexity of the methodological debate. It is our understanding that researching about teaching practices should involve methodological designs focused on practical problems, oriented by the purpose of improving these practices. This approach implies recovering professors' voice, namely the protagonists, in the interpretative process of the researcher and its validation. In other words, we not only observe professors' lessons, but also work with them in the process of understating these experiences. To address our research questions we have observed different higher education classes and interviewed 42 Professors at 3 National Universities of our country: 28 professors at the University of Buenos Aires (three of them work in the Virtual Campus of this University), 8 professors at the National University of El Litoral and 6 professors at the University of Tucumán. All the classes observed belong to the social science. In our research we have studied two different kinds of situations in which technology is being incorporated by faculty in higher education experiences. First, we have studied and registered faculty work with new technology in the process of designing teaching strategies and materials to be framed in different educational projects such as Virtual Campuses. In these situations faculty were asked to work with technology or develop the technology-based materials needed for these educational projects. In such situations we have tried to understand and identify the questions and concerns raised by professors in their processes of working with technology. Secondly, we have studied the experiences of professors that incorporate technology in their teaching practices. That is to say, we have observed, registered and analyzed their classes, and interviewed them in order to understand their teaching practices with technology. The techniques we worked with in this research include observations of classes, interviews with professors and students, and interpretative meeting discussions with professors. In addition to professors' voices, we have also worked collaboratively with different specialists, experts that study the interpretations we develop, in order to generate an analytical framework that stretches and deepens the validation system. Working meetings with professors, specialists, and teaching teams depict a powerful scenario for the interpretative process of our research. In these meetings multiple collaborative experiences take place and make possible the development of new theoretical categories and analytical hypothesis. Framed in this collaborative research enterprise, we also recognize the ethical dimension involved in researching about teaching; professors, researchers, and specialists get together for unraveling and discussing different aspects of the classes being studied, so that the reflection could be moved forward, in an environment of respect for all the considerations being made by each member. 4. Preliminary Findings In this section we introduce some preliminary findings and discuss their implications for thinking about teaching practices and technology in higher education. These findings refer to different analytical categories that we have been able to construct by studying and interpreting different teaching practices and their relation to the social, political, and cultural context in which they are framed. 4.a- New Technology and professors' questions:
the notion of "pedagogical residue" For instance, professors who participate in educational projects with new technologies in which they have to produce their classes to be televised or video reordered ask questions about how to better develop their teaching strategies within the particularities of these communication environments. They look for answers to these questions by reflecting on the features and specificities of new genres such as the "televised class." In this reflective process, they came to recognize that their own experiences with these new genres are ultimately framed in their own pedagogical knowledge about teaching: the introduction of the topic, the incorporation of relevant examples, the construction of analogies and comparisons, the introduction of controversies to foster reflective processes in their students, among others. Thus, while professors' work with new technologies began with a reflection on the very nature of this mediational technology, this reflection has actually turned to a consideration on their very teaching practices beyond the technology. In the case of professors that participated in the construction of WebPages and online materials for a distance learning program , they have identified certain experiences as to be the most valuable learning opportunities for students. These experiences were related to the construction of study cases and the development of self-assessment opportunities for students to monitor or auto-regulate their learning processes. Professors identified the study cases as strategies that promote and facilitate students' understanding processes of complex topics and problems. Students have also recognized the study cases as opportunities that assist their understanding of practical problems and genuine situations. New technologies have not only provided faculty with a new possibility for developing their teaching strategies, but they have also provided students with assistance and support in recognizing their own understanding processes. All in all, we are recognizing how professors face their
questions and concerns regarding their work with new technology - new
in the sense that they represent new means and environments for them -
by finding resources and understandings in the teaching theories. This
recognition leads us to support the idea that there seems to be a "pedagogical
residue" emerging from professors' work with new technology, when
this technology is not transparent to them. The first kind is related to professors who recognize themselves as "innovators" because they introduce new technologies in their teaching or academic practices. Examples of these experiences can be found in faculty that include the e-mail for students' academic queries or PowerPoint presentations for delivering their lectures. However, it is interesting to note how the introduction of these technological resources seems to be the extensions of previous strategies. The use of the e-mail for students' learning questions seems to be the extension of faculty special hours for academic assistance. PowerPoint presentations seem to be extension of faculty transparencies and blackboard notes and representations. In other words, faculty that incorporated e-mail and PowerPoint were the same faculty that used to have similar strategies already in place in their teaching practices. While we recognize that these experiences represent interesting cases of uses of technology in teaching practices, we also believe that they are not really that different from other, more conventional, practices. It may be the case that the development and use of these technological resources allow faculty to re-think and re-view their classes and that this revision may generate a benefit for the class experience. However, from the perspective of students' learning opportunities, the qualitative value of these technological materials is low compared to the previous conventional experiences. The second kinds of experiences we have studied refer to faculty who recognize that new technology has transformed their very knowledge domain. Given this transformation, they assert, there is a need to incorporate technology in their teaching experiences. For instance, a professor in the field of Research Methodology has explained how new technology generates new communication opportunities among several research communities, overcoming the isolation and fragmentation of knowledge production; and how new software and application for statistical analysis, for example, generate new possibilities in the research process. He genuinely understands how these transformations have permeated his field of knowledge and then he addresses them in both his teaching strategies and in his course content. We have found a similar case in the area of teaching Architecture and Design. From the learning perspective, these practices generate new opportunities for students to reflect on their learning processes. They value teaching practices that provide them with feedback on their own productions and that foster the re-construction and improvement of these productions. By archiving these successive productions, faculty and students have powerful tools for reflecting and considering the process of learning and knowledge construction. To conclude, within these second kinds of experiences, the incorporation of technology represents a significant impact on the knowledge domain under consideration, and then generates opportunities in which the focus is on the content rather than on the technology. 4.c- Hypertexts in teaching practices We believe that hypertext represents a paradigmatic case for the study of narrative from a postmodern perspective. We identify its origin in the work of some modern writers, and in the very notion of "footnotes" that we came to know from the printed word. However, Hypertexts generate new reading experiences and new forms of cultural and intellectual interchange. Developing topics in an hypertextual language allows for the introduction of related problems and theoretical debates around them, the introduction of different analytical perspectives about the topic, and multiple forms of representations that facilitate students understandings. The collaborative nature of hypertexts and the Internet generates the construction of texts that involve multiple perspectives. Hypertexts, then, are in essence a complex narrative structure made possible by new technologies. They generate open, permeable, reproducible, infinite interpretative books. From an educational perspective, we believe that the construction of hypertexts represents an interesting case of technology impact on innovations. Once an hypertext has been created and implemented, teachers and professors face the challenge of introducing activities within this narrative structure as to allow students to distinguish between the central and the accessory, the simple and the complex, and the many different layers of meaning and derivations embedded in the texts. By doing that, professors create "re-centering spaces". By "re-centering spaces" we identify professors' teaching interventions that, opposed to technological characteristics of the hypertext, encourage a process of re-centering the knowledge being addressed. If the hypertextual language implies a de-centering strategy, the pedagogical intervention of professors generates the opposite re-centering process. 4.d- Simulations in teaching practices By recognizing the importance of a de-centering or estrangement process, educators develop teaching strategies that encourage students to identify the need of addressing whatever they study from different perspectives. That is to say, these experiences depict the need of de-centering from the situation in order to better address the understanding of the situation. Professors' intervention models seem to be depicting, then, a recurrent work opposed to the technological nature of the virtual environment: the de-centering strategy as opposed to the identification strategy. If we also recognize that some of the best teaching models seem to be the ones that express personal points of view, thinking modes, and independent searches in the process of interpreting cases or problems, we find that technology, when it is related to hypertextual materials and case base environments, can encourage and support these teaching models. Conclusions In understanding the impact of technology on professors' teaching practices we have found some recurrent conceptual categories. Pedagogical residue, re-centering and de-centering processes, and technology that trivializes or technology that transcends, are among these recurrent categories. "Pedagogical residue" refers to what remains in professors' pedagogical knowledge as a consequence of working with technology that appears as non-transparent to them. Re-centering and de-centering processes refer to a variation in the teaching narrative that operates in opposition to technology specificities from a teaching perspective. Technology that trivializes or technology that transcends refers to the way in which, by being framed in different educational projects, technology can either enhance educational opportunities, or trivialize them. The use of new technology in teaching practices depicts the nature of technology as a mediational tool, but it also goes beyond the very notion of tool, assuming a political and pedagogical meaning. The innovative character of this understanding is precisely this complex move beyond the tool. The real challenge in Latin America consists of transforming the situation in which technology use is framed into non-exclusion social and cultural places. In our research we have recognized the need of including both current faculty experiences in using technology, and the questions and concerns posed by some professors when they are compelled to work with technology. Our interpretative conceptual categories, then, emerge from two different situations that interestingly depict the state of our field: it is a field under construction. Indeed, we wonder whether the "technological teaching" field involves a constitutive methodological challenge: the challenge of assuming its under-construction nature, since technology seems to be always two steps head of the teaching theories that re-construct it from a pedagogical perspective. Bibliography and References: Biddle B.Good, T. y Goodson, I. (2000) La enseñanza
y los profesores. III. Barcelona: Paidós. |
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