Post with 19 notes
It Takes a Global Village: Distributed Cognition and the Digital-Age Classroom - the abstract
(The abstract of the paper I presented two weeks ago at the McLuhan Galaxy Conference in Barcelona)
By applying McLuhan’s “Global Village” and “Collective
Unconscious” metaphors to computer-mediated communication and online
social applications, this paper analyses some of the challenges and opportunities
of teaching “digital natives” in connected classrooms, in order to illustrate
changes brought to higher education by the distribution of cognition by
computers and digital networks. Discussing the relevance of generational
determinism for this debate, my argument will focus on the restructuring of
communication and information flows, from the standpoint of the effects of
information availability and literacy. I argue that the concept of “distributed
cognition” can enlighten the new practices brought to higher education
classrooms by the generalized use of information and communication
technologies.
