Digital Learning Lives

This book explores the importance of the adoption of digital technologies by contemporary education systems. Partly a synthesis of findings from projects carried out in Norway by the author over the past 15 years, the data have been extended to raise key questions about the effectiveness of current education strategies for the Facebook and YouTube generation.

Digital technologies have transformed cultural perceptions of learning and what it means to be literate, expanding the importance of experience alongside interpretation and reflection. Learning the Virtual Life offers ways to consider the local and global effects of digital media on educational environments, as well as the cultural transformations of how we now define learning and literacy. While some have welcomed the educational challenges of digital culture and emphasized its possibilities for individual emancipation and social transformation in the new information age, others accuse digital culture of absorbing its recipients in an all-pervasive virtual world. Unlike most accounts of the educational and cultural consequences of digital culture, Learning the Virtual Life presents a neutral, advanced introduction to the key issues involved with the integration of digital culture and education. This edited collection presents international perspectives on a wide range of issues, and each chapter combines upper-level theory with "real-world" practice, making this essential reading for all those interested in digital media and education.

Managing Online Learning is a comprehensive guide to planning and executing effective online learning programs. Featuring contributions from experienced professionals across operations in university and corporate settings, this all-in-one resource provides leaders and administrators with informed strategies for supporting learners’ and instructors’ evolving needs, implementing and evaluating pedagogically sound technologies, projecting revenue-generating models, and anticipating future scaling challenges. These highly applied chapters cover essential topics such as unit design, management of staff and finances, student engagement, user experience and interface, data analytics, and more.

An essential resource for teaching and assessing student's use of technology This comprehensive book offers a practical pathway for developing twenty-first-century skills while simultaneously strengthening content-area learning. Digital Learning contains a wealth of research-based practices to integrate the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) National Education Technology Standards (NETS) for both students and teachers. Each of the suggested project-based learning examples (in Language Arts, Mathematics, Science and Geography) can be used successfully as stand-alone units, but are even more effective when approached in a cross-disciplinary way. Provides detailed descriptions of each of the NETS, how to teach them, and how to know if students are meeting them Includes dozens of activities that integrate the NETS with each content area and align with Common Core standards Gives clear instruction on teaching twenty-first-century skills Includes a complementary DVD with video interviews and project maps to help see how students are progressing The digital learning described in this book has been created to meet the diverse needs of students in a variety of situations.

Reimagining Digital Learning for Sustainable Development is a comprehensive playbook for education leaders, policy makers, and other key stakeholders leading the modernization of learning and development in their institutions as they build a high value knowledge economy and prepare learners for jobs that don't yet exist. Currently, nearly every aspect of human activity, including the ways we absorb and apply learning, is influenced by disruptive digital technologies. The jobs available today are no longer predicators of future employment, and current and future workforce members will need to augment their competencies through a lifetime of continuous upskilling and reskilling to meet the demands of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This book features curated insights and real-world cases from thought leaders throughout the world and identifies major shifts in content formats, pedagogic approaches, technology frameworks, user and design experiences, and learner roles and expectations that will reshape our institutions, including those in emerging economies. The agile, lean, and cost-effective strategies proposed here will function in scalable and flexible bandwidth environments, enabling education leaders and practitioners to transform brick-and-mortar learning organizations into digital and blended ecosystems and to achieve the United Nation’s ambitious Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. Chapter 18 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

This book describes and explains how digital technologies enter adolescents’ everyday life and learning in different contexts and environments. The book is based on research conducted in recent years in the Czech Republic, the results of which are set within a broad theoretical and international framework. The authors consider the theoretical and methodological anchoring of the topic, describing various approaches in an effort to comprehensively describe and understand the learning process of today’s pupils. They focus on ways to explore learning in the digital era, domestication of digital technology in families, and parents' approaches to digital technology. Attention is paid to adolescents’ competences and autonomy in the use of digital technologies, as well as their views on technology in their lives and learning. The authors summarize the most important results of the research, but also consider the options of empirical research and their own experience with the research of such a complex concept.

"Over the last decade, the practices by which scholarly knowledge is produced – both within and across disciplines – have been substantially influenced by the appearance of digital information resources, communication networks and technology enhanced research tools. Viewed from a methodological perspective, the rich ICT-based environment in educational settings influences research methods, ethics and the general conduct of research. Methodological Challenges When Exploring Digital Learning Spaces in Education represents a collection of work of established academics as well as emerging early career researchers all of whom focus on various methodological challenges. From numerous perspectives, the chapters in this volume deal with three particularly demanding challenges for educational research in digital learning contexts. The first challenge concerns how research manages to explore networked learning within a multi-faceted ICT environment. What kind of research designs and forms of data collection are able to grasp this complexity of multiple learning taking place within these contexts? The second challenge deals with how researchers experience the research context and interact with various actors within these settings. How to capture and understand interaction between contexts and across different dimensions of contexts in time and space? And finally, the third challenge is about exploring how children make meaning across physical places and virtual spaces. All together, these challenges are questioning the traditional research methods that we use and are familiar with. This volume is devoted to stimulating debate about the various methodological challenges facing the researcher in the digital sphere of educational research, and furthermore, exploring what kind of new methodological approaches these challenges impose. It is aimed at students, researchers and academics within education and those working with learning across disciplines and contexts interested in methodological issues. Greta Björk Gudmundsdottir lives and works in Oslo, where she is a Researcher at the Norwegian Centre for ICT in Education. Kristin Beate Vasbø also works and lives in Oslo, where she is an Associate Professor at the Department of Teacher Education and School Research, University of Oslo. "

This book explores the potential of what children can do with technologies, rather than what technologies can do for children.