Educational Technology and Polycontextual Bridging

Book excerpt: Technology has become ubiquitous in nearly every contemporary situation, while digital media have acquired considerable importance in the lives of young people. Alongside their interest in digital media, schooling constitutes a core component of the life of children and adolescents. Youth’s use of digital media creates tensions between traditions and expectations of renewal within the school. The once-sharp divide between school and leisure time is eroding. How will the school as an institution relate to this comprehensive process of change known as the digital revolution? How can the school build a bridge between the world of youth and school material to enable students to learn in a new digital age? This endeavor is named polycontextual bridging in this book. What are the good examples of polycontextual bridging? What novel educational goals can be achieved by net-related activities when incorporated into the school, and how can out-of-school learning be successfully framed by educational purposes? These questions are addressed from different perspectives by several scholars in this book. The chapters in this volume offer the most thorough, up-to-date discussion on the challenges of technology use in school education. In tackling the critical issues created by technology, this book provides an important resource for student teachers, teachers, education scholars and those interested in a critical examination of digital expectations and experiences in school education. This book is motivated by a pressing need to come to grips with the dilemmas caused by an apparent clash of learning cultures in the individual classroom, in the schools, in the education of teachers, and in the institutions of teacher education. The book is also a tribute to Gavriel Salomon and his research on the cognitive effects of media's symbol systems, media and learning, and the design of cognitive tools and technology-afforded learning environments. The book also contains his masterpiece “It’s not just the tool, but the educational rationale that counts”. Further, three internationally recognized experts – Howard Gardner, David Perkins, and Daniel Bar-Tal – describe Salomon’s remarkable academic contributions. This book is an attempt to explicate, illustrate, and critically examine the idea of polycontextual bridging between youth’s leisure cultures and school material to enable students to learn in a new digital age. The authors do not present a common front on the complex question of the proper use of information and communication technology in the school but instead present a diversity of arguments and viewpoints. The book is an attempt to raise questions and start a debate.