I understand that the real challenge in education is not the technologies, but the development of pedagogical models that change the traditional teaching and learning model and generate new dynamics to achieve new learning outcomes.
UNESCO, since 2005, has been warning about technological determinism in education:
"this strong technological conception is accompanied by little reflection on the methodologies used. In this way, the traditional teaching model is being reproduced using new information and communication technologies".
In this paradigm, technology has ceased to be a "means" to become an end in itself. Numerous researchers have warned that the problem lies in the mere acquisition of technologies for the simple transfer of content through a different medium, without changing the way we relate to the student, to knowledge, and to society.
In distance education, for example, technological tools have become the purpose, and the educational (pedagogical, didactic, cultural) and communicational (language, metalanguage, media, codes) dimensions, as well as the educational subjects (people's characteristics and needs) are often forgotten. It is understood that with a graphic designer, with content, and with a good technological tool, distance learning is solved.
Rarely do the proposals for pedagogical work that explore new technologies overcome the traditional model of teaching. The traditional form of the teacher giving expository lessons is placed in an advanced communication system. The difference is limited to the mediation vehicle.
In the society of new technologies, information is confused with knowledge, and the encyclopedic model of the French Enlightenment continues to be perpetuated, now with cutting edge technology. Citizens, paradoxically, are more and more informed, but find it increasingly difficult to express a point of view about the information they receive.
I am not criticizing the technologies, but rather the use that is made of them. The new technologies, when well applied to teaching, can offer important advances: they have the potential to activate the participation of the receiver of the messages in the instructional processes; reduce the level of abstraction of new knowledge; facilitate conceptual memorization and the application of what has been learned in solving real or simulated problems, among others. But it must be borne in mind that the use of new communication and information technologies is not an inapellably effective resource for learning.
It is therefore necessary to integrate new technologies into well-founded educational programs, making pedagogical use of these tools. After all, it is the goals, objectives, contents, and methodologies that allow technology-based programs to have an educational meaning, and not the other way around, as is generally observed in most of the experiences analyzed.
Without a doubt technology can help us face this global and complex world, but without changing the processes, without changing the visions of reality, I don't see any possibility of change.
It is necessary to rethink the educational model as a whole, questioning things that are taken for granted, such as the content-based model that calls for revision. The students of this future need much more than repetitive information and techniques. There is a need to develop meta-cognitive, complex thinking styles, open to uncertainty and constant change, to account for a world in constant transformation.
They need to learn how to learn, and learn how to think. For this, education must move beyond the dimension of content focused on the various disciplines, as an object of study, and address the pedagogical dimension of the teaching process.
That is why I believe that the great challenge lies in conceiving a didactic-pedagogical proposal that relies on the technological means and transcends them, going beyond the visions of the educational technologists.
(Article originally published July 10, 2016 on Linkedin)
