Abstract:

Being constantly created and recreated by our own inventions [de Kerckhove, 1996], reminds us that belonging to a social species in which communication is the basis of individual thought and knowledge, renders communication tools [McLuhan, 1997] a transforming factor for thoughts, culture and therefore society.

Information systems in advanced countries are pressed by changes coming from the Knowledge society but, de facto, are still deeply rooted in what Massa [1997] - mutuating a concept from Foucault - defines as didactic devices, fit to make the bodies compliant while supplying distinct knowledges, based on prearranged rules but patently unfit for a world in which networking is changing the infrastructural conditions for the development of knowledge.[Calvani, 2005]

The unescapable need for a new congruent relation between the lifestyle of contemporary society and the realities of education (both formal and not) characterizing it - on pain of an entrenchment of the weakening and reciprocal unbalancing process - cannot ignore the fact that the educational crisis has different causes than the adaptive emergence springing from the digital explosion.
The risk is firing up an imitative adaptation process [Mayer e Rowan, 1977] in which the quality and efficiency evaluation parameter for a given didactic institution might happen to be the degree up to which such institution conforms to the ritual of the socially established procedures set to uphold the rational myth about what quality and efficiency in education are supposed to be.

And among these myths, we can fully include the adoption of Information and Communication Technologies in didactics as a forced and self-sufficient transition towards renewal and re-qualification of the educational system, without any implied, radical change in the current teaching procedure nor any re-definition of the cognitive identity [Demetrio, 1994] and professional identity of the teacher himself.

At the same time, it is impossible to ignore the educational emergency arising from the cognitive remodelling which the diffusion of digital technologies keeps producing on the younger generations, while the digital savvy [Prensky, 2009] shown by the teenagers when they learn in self-directed mode, driven by interest, through peer-teaching and peer-feedback, fails to penetrate school and university systems.

And yet, in this case too, the phenomenon of digital natives should not be emphasized while ignoring that - as reported by studies such as Bennett, Maton and Kervin, The ‘digital natives’ debate: A critical review of the evidence (2008) - given that the kids live immersed in technology, they are still quite far from showing such a digital skill to "be able to use skillfully and critically the technologies of the information society (TSI)… to find, evaluate, keep, produce, present and share information, and to communicate and participate in collaboration networks over the Internet.” (2006/962/CE).

The problem today lays therefore in understanding how to accept, rule and to enhance the new forms of utilizations and production of knowledge which are turning upside-down a great part of the cognitive and social strategies derived from alphabetization and by the historicl evolution of education systems, whithout falling a victim to rational myths that cause a confusion between conditioning relations and determining relations. [Jacquinot-Delaunay, 1999]

Keywords:

pedagogic innovation, web 2, 0, ict pedagogic use, digital natives, digital skills.