REM vol.1 n.1 June 2009

REM

Research on Education and Media

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vol. 1, no.

June 2009

SIX-MONTHLY JOURNAL

Erickson

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vol. 1, no.

June 2009

SIX-MONTHLY JOURNAL

REM

Research on Education and Media

Erickson

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REM Research on Education and Media The magazine is published twice per year (hard-copy in Italian and online in English).

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Subscriptions office Tel. 0461 950690 Fax 0461 950698 info@erickson.it The Review is registred by the Court of Trento at number 1388, 19/06/2009 ISSN: 2037-0849 Editor in Chief Pier Cesare Rivoltella

Editor in Chief Pier Cesare Rivoltella Scientific Committee Ignacio Aguaded Gómez (Universidad de Huelva) Andrew Burn (London University) Ulla Carlsson (Göteborg University) Maria D’Alessio (Sapienza Università di Roma) Thierry De Smedt (Université de Louvain) Luciano Galliani (Università di Padova) Walter Geerts (Univerisiteit Antwerpen) Pierpaolo Limone (Università di Foggia) Laura Messina (Università di Padova) Mario Morcellini (Sapienza Università di Roma) Nelson Pretto (Universidade da Bahia) Vitor Reia-Baptista (Universidade do Algarve) Mario Ricciardi (Politecnico di Torino) Pier Cesare Rivoltella (Università Cattolica di Milano) Luisa Santelli Beccegato (Università di Bari) Jeffrey T. Schnapp (Stanford University) Editor Laura Messina Referees Committee The referees committee includes 20 well-respected Italian and foreign researchers. The names of the referees for each printing year are disclosed in the first issue of the following printing year. The referral process is under the responsibility of the Journal’s Editor in Chief.

Referral process Each article is anonymously submitted to two anonymous referees. Only articles for which both referees will express a positive judgment will be accepted. The referees evaluations will be communicated to the authors, including guidelines for changes. In this case, the authors are required to change their submissions according to the referees guidelines.

Articles not modified in accordance with the referees guidelines will not be accepted.

Secretary Alessandra Carenzio, CREMIT, Largo Agostino Gemelli, 1 - 20123 Milano.

Tel.: (0039) 02-72343038 Fax: (0039) 02-72343040 E-mail: rem@educazionemediale.it Note to the Authors Submissions are to be sent, as MS Word files, to the email address of the Secretary: rem@educazionemediale.it Further information about submission and writing-up can be found at www. erickson.it/rem Editorial office Roberta Tanzi Layout Loretta Oberosler Graphic design Giordano Pacenza Cover Davide Faggiano Printing Esperia srl – Lavis (TN)

This issue has been made possible by contributions from Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Puglia and from Department of Human Sciences, University of Foggia.

© 2009 Edizioni Erickson Via del Pioppeto 24, fraz. Gardolo – 38121 TRENTO

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INDEX

Editorial REM – Research on Education and Media Luciano Galliani

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Media education research. Multidisciplinary contributes and development perspectives Luciano Galliani

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The meaning of media practice. A SIREM enquiry for a national research about media practices of youngsters, parents and teachers Pier Cesare Rivoltella

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Digital space Mario Ricciardi

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Media and learning. What can cognitive psychology suggest to multimedia education?

Alessandro Antonietti and Manuela Cantoia

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eLearning. PLEs perspectives Paolo Frignani . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

Professional profiles in eLearning Lorenzo Cantoni

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School and media curriculum Nicola Paparella

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Media Education as pre-service and in-service training for teachers Floriana Falcinelli

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The evaluation of media programmes and products. Formative and participatory research Laura Messina

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The analysis of media consumption.

The active role of the “audience” Gianni Losito

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Media and animation in the community.

Scenarios of participatory design Pierpaolo Limone

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Pedagogy, social citizenship and ethics of (mediated) communication Salvatore Colazzo

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EDITORIAL

REM – Research on Education and Media The idea of creating a scientiic society in Italy — Italian Society for Research on Media Education (Società Italiana di Ricerca sull’Educazione Mediale-SIREM) — made up of people involved in the study of media and technologies from an educational perspective, was formalized in Rome in February 2006, during the conference La sapienza di comunicare (Competency in Communicating) held on the occasion of ten-year anniversary of MED – Italian Association for Education to Media and Communication, after having been fostered in recent years by several charter members of SIREM. In that occasion, the author of this Editorial presented the results of a bibliographic research, in collaboration with Laura Messina, on the Italian scientiic production over the last ifteen years concerning media and education that — for the number of titles (542), researchers involved (219) belonging to 40 Universities and pertaining to 75 Departments, and disciplinary domains concerned (19 scientiic sectors) — made us think that the time was ripe to establish a scientiic society able to offer these subjects a pluralistic and multidisciplinary area of confrontation and collaboration.

SIREM’s aim is not that of covering all areas of the research, on the contrary, its intention is to act in worthwhile accord with other national and international societies and associations also operating in the ield of education, media and technologies, particularly with SIRD – Italian Association of Didactic Research, with AICA – Italian Association for Automatic Calculation, with SieL – Italian e-Learning Association, with ICEM – International 5

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EDITORIAL REM – Research on Education and Media

Council for educational Media, with MENTOR, etc.

SIREM’s aims are those typical of a scientiic association wishing to expand, socialize and guide research, but with an original feature, stemming from the fact that Media and Information and Communication Technologies are educative subjects which attract researchers from different disciplinary areas.

The topics discussed in our irst conference, held in May 2008 in Padua, were intended as a kind of critical exploration on the areas of consolidated and emergent research in order to map out the study ield on media and education, to allow unsettled issues to be investigated, and to identify training paths of educative innovations especially for young researchers.

Within these scientiic horizons — the diffusion of which will be supported by the printed and on line version of the new bilingual journal REM (Research on Media and Education) — experts will start by outlining the problems of research in ten areas: media and learning processes, new digital media, media consumption analysis, school and media curriculum, media education in pre-service and in-service teacher training, media and animation in the territory, media programmes and products evaluation, lifelong learning and eLearning, social and ethic citizenship of the media, professional proiles in media education and in eLearning.

For several of these areas I retain that a critical analysis of research carried out in Italy and at an international level is necessary, beginning from the articles presented in this irst issue of REM, in order not to be overwhelmed by practices and experiences of media education and eLearning having no pedagogic quality.

Precisely for these reasons, another implication is to be included in our editorial commitment: to provide a tool for those working in the ield of media education, that enables them to deepen, and participate in, the developments of research, increasing their professionalism with the scientiic rigour to which today all people aspire, to consciously act in a world deeply marked by technologies and media, where new educational challenges — speciically related to learning and in a broader sense to social behaviour — highlight a wide range of problems not solvable by “operational practices” that the university often offer.

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Luciano Galliani Past President of SIREM

REM – Research on Education and Media

EDITORIAL

The Scientiic Committee, of which the author of this Editorial is member, has taken on the task of promoting the development and the internationalization of research, but also the responsibility of anchoring it in our educational contexts.

We look forward therefore to receive proposals of both theoretical articles and research reports. The editorial criteria are published in the journal web page (http://www. erickson/rem).

Authoritative referees chosen at national and international level will help us in this dificult task, not only to separate the wheat from the chaff, but more importantly, to identify original developments in research.

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Media education research Multidisciplinary contributes and development perspectives Luciano Galliani

ABSTRACT

Department of Education Sciences, University of Padua, Via Beato Pellegrino, 28 – 35137 Padova. E-mail: luciano.galliani@unipd.it

The primary objective of this article is to present a picture of Media and Information and Communication Technologies as multidisciplinary educational tools by focusing on the epistemological research issues in this area. To this end, the article identiies the processes of social change triggered by Media and ITC and the pedagogical and cultural paradigms involved in the development of innovation in education and training.

Keywords: Media; Education; ICT; e-Learning.

Research areas and cultural processes Some years ago, in a monothematic issue of Studium Educationis, the author of the present article (Galliani, 2002) rather exhaustively described the lines of educational research — aimed at linking theoretical relection to on-site experience and to teaching methodology based on a laboratory approach — and the perspectives of pedagogical and didactic schools of thought and action which have developed in Italy from the 50s onwards.

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REM – vol. 1, no. 1, June 2009 (9-23)

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Shortly afterwards, a survey was conducted following the lines of research in Italian universities in collaboration with Laura Messina (Galliani, 2007), taking into consideration the scientiic production (volumes and journals) published respectively in the last 12 and 7 years on the relationships between media, education and training. I speciically refer to this survey in order to summarize, without any pretence of completeness (Rivoltella, 2005), some approaches of educational research to media and technologies, referable to seven areas: pedagogical, sociological, psychological, semiological, philosophical-political, technological and economical.

Pedagogical area — articulated in its principal components: theoretical-methodological relection concerning education to media; experimental study of learning with the media; and didactic research on face-to-face and distance teaching processes through the media — is centred upon «educational communication technologies» and «processes» of logical and symbolic production/organization of multimedia texts (Galliani, 1979) and their active/interactive-participatory reception/interpretation and social functionalization in shared projects and values.

Sociological area — primarily interested in the study of new media culture (Anceschi, 1989), with its framed, close-up and virtual gaze (Lévy, 1997) which make up the «second reality», parallel and interwoven with real world experiences and attentive to media effects upon people (McQuail, 1983) and the power exercised in society (Chomsky, 1991) — is centred upon media communication actors (Mattelart, 1991; Morcellini, 1994): the producers-spreaders of cultural objects as facts that determine our place in the world (Martelli, 1996) and give shape to our image of the world (Silverstone, 1999).

Psychological area — mainly addressed to the study of knowledge and learning processes involved in visual, audiovisual, multimedia and telematic communication (Riva, 2004) with different perceptive, sensorial, cognitive and emotional functionalities (Vygotskij, 1962; 1978) — is centred upon the evolution of media conceptions as learning tools (behaviourism: Skinner, 1954), as symbolic systems (cognitivism: Olson & Bruner, 1973; Salomon, 1979), and as social mediation tools (socioculturalism: Cole & Engeström, 1993), thus summarizing processes of semiosis, cognition and participation in social practices (Messina, 2002).

Semiological area — oriented towards the study of the languages of image and multimedia textuality: analogical, digital, interactive (off and on line) (Manovich, 2001), in Morris’s distinction between syntactic, semantic and pragmatics (Grandi, 1992) — is focused upon the «mise-en-discourse» (Eco, 1975) and «mise-en-scène» processes (Wolf, 1991) peculiar to the non verbal languages (kinetics, musical, artistic) and to the passage from linear textuality to hypertextuality (Landow, 1992; Ricciardi, 1994) and from the intransitivity of the old mass media (Bettetini, 1984) to the transitive technology of the personal new media (Jacquinot, 2002).

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Media education research

Philosophical/political area — primarily interested in the ethic issue of the media (Lima & Cinque, 2004) and in the relationship between democracy and information politics (Rifkin, 2000) and between privacy and systems of control (Carlini, 1996; Lyon, 1994; 2001) — on one hand, is focused upon the self-regulation codes of producers and the professional ethics of communication experts (e.g. Charter of Treviso), paying special attention to minors and their educative safeguarding (Self-regulation Code: Internet and Minors), and on the other, the focus shifts to the personal right of free expression against each mass-media homologation process (Losito, 2002) and individual and social control for business or political ends (Levy, 2001).

Technological area — on one hand, conigured by the development of electronics and telecommunications (computer and web) and on the other, by audiovisual and informatics production (Castells, 2001) — is centred upon digital convergence (Jenkins, 2006), acutely modifying media speciicity (Guidolin, 2005) and their contents through a functional hybridizing of different technical supports and a content compatibility with the diverse formats (multimediality) and the various media (multichannelling), thus favouring social processes of personalization, communication and learning using web 2.0 (Bonaiuti, 2006).

Economic area — after the bubble of the New Economy (Mandel, 2000) that conirmed the power of its three basic elements (knowledge as merchandise, digitalization of information and web effect) in the passage to «Third Internet» (Carlini, 2002), or more speciically, to a variety of networks, wireless and non, specialized in different pay services and contents — carves out a signiicant market niche for educational contents aimed at both entertainment, and educational, vocational, higher and lifelong training (learning objects: Petrucco, 2006). This approach is also centred upon the identiication/application of pedagogical criteria essential for products planning, realization and use and of indicators for quality evaluation (Galliani & Messina, 2003).

Apart from the methodological and content speciicity of the different areas of research, it is also possible to identify an educative convergence on three categories of media processes referring to knowledge and culture: processes of production/ reproduction, transmission/communication, and acquisition/construction.

The production/reproduction processes of knowledge and culture — meant as symbolic contexts and knowledge organizable into ontologies of scientiic domain (Paparella, 2007) — create their media reality in a self-referential way and they determine through industrial culture — (shows, exhibitions, conferences, fairs, markets, etc. aimed at content marketing) — what is relevant and choose what is information and what has to be consolidated and developed, thus establishing new cultural objects through which meaning and sense are reconstructed. Being media primary and secondary socialization agents (Thompson, 1995), they thus contribute to individual 11

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(personality development) and social (common rules and values construction) educative imprinting. The great lexibility of technology and information system creates a new situation of Social Network that stands irm in the disintegration of social relationships, hitherto guaranteed by the political and institutional networks and by their solidarity agencies (Touraine, 2005).

The transmission/communication processes of knowledge and culture — by means of digital, visual, audiovisual, informatics and telematic technologies — include the distribution of contents through multichannel media systems (radio, television, newspapers, internet, new media, but also off-line publishing) as well as the prearrangement of communicative environments (portals, sites, platforms) and of formative processes by individuals, or more often by institutions, bodies and agencies (e-Learning) (Rheingold, 1993). Programmes and schedules, which were once safe gate-keeping categories of reality contents as well as causal attributions and ethical evaluation, increasingly intersect and are put to test by the freedom of the network community (Formenti, 2000), its blogs and the learning and practice communities (Wenger, 1998).

The acquisition/construction processes of knowledge and culture — in their different formal, non formal, informal contexts and different environments of social communication — give centrality to the cognitive and emotional structures and processes activated by those subjects which are not only receivers-users, but also actors operationally engaged in the interpretation/negotiation of meanings. The recent igure of the late 20th century prosumer, able to elaborate media texts or interact with them, is changing with web 2.0 (Caron & Caronia, 2005) into a true individual and/or community author of discourses and practices, thus contending with the risk that the media can determine not only the cultural contents, but also the forms of knowledge (such as formatting of decoding) and spaces of global signiicance of the world (and so the critical interpretation) (Castells, 1996).

From these three interdisciplinary issues of media processes, it is possible to start afresh with new research proposals, exploring the paths of a territory which is continuously modiied by psycho-technological hybridization and solely marked in traditional research by safe mono-disciplinary highways crossing through known landscapes.

Media, technologies and social changes The 8th National Report on child and adolescent conditions made by Eurispes is entitled: I igli padroni (Tyrannical Kids). In the Youth and their models section, a scenario from 1991 is outlined by Gianmaria Fara: «Once the great ideologies 12

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and modernist subcultures have fallen, media values and pseudo-values will spread weakening ethic education, causing new sources of unrest among adolescents and young people, imposing the dificult and stressful search for a new personal and social identity. Signs of a diverse sense searching of the new generation can be noticed in those who are seeking a sense of direction to rediscover a system of values from which to draw reference points and stability in the face of the complexity of a post-modern society, which obliges these individuals to make a continuous personal elaboration» (Fara, 2008, p. 59).

Is this a scenario of 1991 or from today? Where 23% of children between 12 and 19 years want to be stars and 16% football players for the Italian national team, and Tv programmes such as «Amici» (Friends) by Maria De Filippi is generally considered a positive programme from an educative point of view. It is true that, apart from the heroes (showgirls and football players), there are the anti-heroes and the thousands of “tribes” (Punkbestia, No Global, Transgressive, New green, Teocon, Papa boys, Rasper, etc.), and there is Harry Potter which arrives in the bookshops and at the cinema reviving the tale of the good defeating the evil. However only 26% of children feel comfortable with themselves, and not even their family, friends, a good job or “doing what you want” can make them feel important. It is only a question of money.

It would be rhetoric for every researcher, ethically inspired, to ask himself whether the model introjected into daily behaviour pertains to young people or to adults.

The media and information technologies have innervated social transformation, and children, adolescents and teenagers, as they are «digital natives» (Prensky, 2001), are able to make full use of the great informative and technological resources in continuous evolution to increase their capacity of knowledge, social connection and creative expression. New cognitive and emotional proiles emerge by this Screen Generation (Rivoltella, 2006), which is characterized by total sensorial immersion, both because visual thoughts translate ideas into object actions through interface devices, and because multitasking skills of controlling many channels at the same time allow for rapid passages, integrative processes and, therefore, original learning paths (Mantovani & Ferri, 2008).

It is the MP3 and iPOD generation, of legally downloading songs and music as well as peer to peer ile sharing, of the beloved mobile phone (children 55% and adolescents 98% with the popular use of YouTube and MySpace and directly purchasing accessories and Vas), of adventure-sport-ighting video games and the relative SonyMicrosoft-Nintendo playstations (8 million players from 4 to 17 years of age). It is still however the generation of ilms and cartoons (preferably DVDs), and above all of Tv (78.4% children and 87% adolescents watch it between one to ive hours a day, while 48.2% children and 85% adolescents use Internet). Children and adolescents have very clear ideas about why they watch Tv and manage the programming for 13

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minors by making autonomous choices (“x-rated” accepted by 68% adolescents and ignored by 51% children).

The media world intercepts the authentic and immediate needs of children and adolescents for: fantasy, imagination, adventure, sentiment, amusement, play, comedy, information with the old media, as well as their need for peer recognizability; immediate communication of feelings, emotions, thoughts; research and creation of identity to tackle maladjustment, triggered by the dificult task of development, with the new media.

Here then are the risks. Because this is also the YouTube generation of exhibitionism and cyber-bullying such as on line child pornography, that shape media as “abusing subjects” for their pervasiveness and intrusion.

The «y generation» — termed by the daily newspaper USA Today, or «technosexual» according to the Calvin Klein perfume advert — could symbolically become an “abused subject”1.

Apart from the necessary self-regulatory codes for public and private broadcasting enterprises and ethical codes for journalists and producers, the political question arises, not only in our Country, on the limits of the right to inform and to be informed compared with the protection and safety of children and adolescents (the so called minors).

We could reduce these risks and consider only the beneits of the media, however, we cannot blame the facts by prohibiting the use of the mobile phone by law, when “intimate photos” are exchanged like stickers! The media are not “bad company” for children and teenagers who are mostly aware of the risks they are running. Perhaps the problem is the unbearable “digital divide” that separates the adults (mainly parents, teachers and educators) from the adolescents. We are, to a large extent, “digital immigrants” with different cultures, different languages and different tools. From the need to bridge the gap between youth, parents and teachers The Meaning of Media Practice, SIREM’s irst national research was born (presented in this journal by P.C. Rivoltella).

In fact (according to the latest survey entitle Observatory of Media Contents

by Nielsen), the difference between media consumption (television, cinema, music, theatre, books, etc.) and use of technological tools (computer, internet, mobile, etc.) is delineated by user culture, adolescents, teenagers and adults alike, or rather by the 1

In the above mentioned case, the company used a community of 5000 young people with the purpose of studying their needs and ways of communicating, and discovered that technology and sexuality are essential factors of socialization, therefore combining them sustains that media communication, producing only virtual sex, offers the possibility of daring, without running any real or psychological risks. By buying a Shyno t-shirt, with a nick-name and number written on it, you receive a card with a password. If you then send a sms to the Shyno service centre, the server links the code of the t-shirt to the mobile phone. In this way whoever (boy or girl) is attracted by the “content” of the t-shirt can digit the code on the mobile phone, sending a sms, mms or video message strictly anonymous. Besides, virtual sex (the greatest success of Internet!) has the advantage of free accessibility, isolation without danger, anonymity also of the other (male, female, gay and transgender), availability of different formats and media, and fantasy in self or others reification.

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formal and informal learning by means they acquire technical as well as cognitive and ethical competencies (Cartelli, 2008).

The digital gap is steadily moving from access to the conscious use of media and technologies, clarifying the intervention of media education beyond the technological dimension that has distorted the digital literacy making it a simple acquisition of the so-called European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL). Digital literacy is an educative path also promoted at European level (Perez Tornero, 2004), that proposes itself not only in the continuity with the outline of Unesco on Media Education (Unesco, 2002) but also with pedagogical paradigms and didactic practices elaborated over the last twenty years of the 20th century, when the multimediality and the interactivity (Galliani, 1985) made the acquisition of new knowledge necessary in order to identify, select, access, conduct, integrate, analyze and evaluate information and to create/produce new information communicating with others (Costa, 1995; Galliani, 1999).

Two sectors call out for research addressed towards sustaining educative innovation: Kid Tv (2nd position in the European audiovisual market), pedagogically designed to render infants, school kids, young children and preadolescents active through 13 satellite channels (29% use) or digital Tv (26%); and 9 on demand packets offered

by IpTv of Alice, Fastweb and Tiscali (8%), adding up to 63% of the over 6 million young users who own a television set at home. Compared to traditional television that proposes “intransitive� products, modern television facilitates interactive, involved, and participatory behaviours through programmes that stimulate cognitive, playful, experiential, relective and interpretative activities. Besides multichanelling which focuses upon digital Tv, multimediality centred around the Internet (second sector of research) is offered with an even wider range of self-centred products, reaching 60% of Italian homes and is used by one child in ive. Compared to the most visited sites (in order: search engines, on line newspapers, instant messages, forums/blogs, generated content such as YouTube, peer to peer, Wiki, chat, social networks such as Facebook), children who use Internet for personal growth are those who are more culturally prepared and are also familiar with its contents. Welcome therefore to research on Digital Competence Assessment (Calvani et al., 2008), especially if it is able to guide children and young people down pedagogical and didactic paths to generate ethic-social dimensions of digital competencies and not just technological or cognitive skills.

New cultural and pedagogic paradigms for media education SIREM cannot set out on its enterprise without taking into account the consequences caused by the advent of new media or better still by the digital convergence 15

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of information and communication technologies and the analogical simulation of their social practices. In other words, it means to overcome the historically dichotomous paths or in any case distinguished paths in academic theorization (Rivoltella, 2001; Calvani, 2007), and in formative practices, between media and technologies or between media education, on one hand, and new didactic technologies, on the other, called teaching and learning technologies in higher education curricula. Right from the start (the 60s/70s: Flores D’Arcais, 1963; Dieuzéide, 1965; Lefranc, 1965; Mialaret, 1964; Tardy, 1964) and then with the historic issue of Communications by Jacquinot (1981) Apprendre des médias, the distinction between «education to the media» and «education with the media» is posed, considering them alternatively as study subjects or study tools, referring to two cultural paradigms: the semiological one that focuses upon the knowledge of languages (cinematographic, television, audiovisual and multimedia) and their values/meanings/sense (informative, social and aesthetical), and the technological one that mainly concentrates upon different techniques (graphics, photographic, cinematographic, video and audiovisual) in the teaching-learning processes of disciplinary contents.

With the onset of the computer and informatics, the technological-functionalist paradigm is consolidated compared to the semiological-social one, but interactivity and hypertextuality have opened up towards a third pedagogical-strategic paradigm which centralizes upon educative communication as an authorial, collaborative and social practice. The new media and Internet have accomplished this process by opening formal contexts of didactic-centred communication to anthropocentric contexts of multimedia consumption, social integration and virtual simulation.

Expressive multimediality, technological interactivity and social virtuality demand a new cultural and pedagogical paradigm in order to understand and govern the changes triggered in the educational object, in the training context and in the educational subject (Galliani, 2004a).

In this perspective: – the multi-linguistic representation of reality, by means of scientiic-disciplinary learning objects/contents (Galliani, 1989), requires that processes and paths of formal education be implemented by a new multimedia production (not only written) of knowledge and culture; – the relational construction of knowledge, developed by man-media-network empiric interactivity (Trentin, 2004), requires that the trans-formative action of the social context and its free or organized communities be recognized in the processes and paths of life-long learning; – empowerment of the body (Capucci, 1994) and mind (de Kerckhove, 1991; Mantovani, 1995) — through techno-symbolic ampliications, sensorial prosthesis and technological grafting, multiple identities peculiar to virtuality and its space-time 16

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“simul-action” processes — requires that a conscious individual and collective steering of artiicial shaping of personality be preigured in education.

Taking into consideration the educative inality of the media research and entailing processes, three categories of formative actions can be highlighted which are implemented in formal, non formal and informal contexts, according to the importance given in the study: to the meaning-sense of information in media and multimedia texts; to the use of the media and to new cultures that determine their consumption by different public; to the strategies of individual development and social citizenship.

In any case, the formative action, meant as communicative action and as social action, produces educative practices oriented towards motivating, directing and optimizing the learning processes of the media, with the media and through the media.

In fact, the pedagogical vision focuses upon the relationship between communication, with its representation-symbolization processes of natural, human and social realities, and learning with its development processes of speciic cognitive-emotional aptitudes and expressive and relational skills-competencies.

The irst area of formative actions deals with media and multimedia texts as new objects of disciplinary and transdisciplinary education to be investigated in their semiotic components of sensorial-linguistic and technological integration-interaction between word, sound and images and in their original representational forms of reality installing values in informative and narrative texts, exercising powers of meaning and cognitive-emotional-playful-aesthetic seduction. For this reason curricular paths of education to media are necessary, articulated in continuity (Galliani, 1988; 1994) through many forms of readings — syntactic (codes and narrative structures), semantics (reality representations and content analysis), pragmatic (user ideologies), strategic or of cultural communication (belonging of subjects, subcultures and mediacultures) — and of didactic writings (imitative, projective, creative, collaborative) (Messina, 2004; 2007), balanced between scholastic experiences and experiences in society, in direct contact with communication, where contents are generated by the users and shared in a common on line space.

The second area of formative actions regards the educative use of media as compared to social effects determined upon different public (consumption analysis), with special attention towards developing subjects (starting from infancy). It deals with the transition from a concept of the media as “observing systems” of reality to that of “observed systems”, and therefore employed as educational tools (Galliani, 2004b) in symbolic and technological mediations (with direct and indirect, immediate and differed, intentional or unintentional effects). Using the media and technologies for studying and for individual and collaborative learning has triggered communicative innovations in formal education systems (school, university, vocational training) as well as in transferring education in the media and in Internet through e-Learning. A 17

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second pedagogic path, now centuries old, is that of media programmes (cartoons, ilms, radio and television broadcasts, Tv, software, video games, etc.) “educationally oriented” towards children, teenagers, young people and adults. In this area readings of production and consumption contexts have also imposed as well as linked writings by group-media and individuals using digital technologies (cameras, video phones, video cameras, digital editing, electronic publications, etc.) aimed at social communication (e.g., forums, blogs and social networks in web 2.0).

The third area of formative actions concerns pedagogic strategies of individual development and social citizenship through the creation of critical thought (rational, relective and in action) and of ethical thought (free, democratic and participatory).

This means to leave behind the ideological approach of “social reproduction” adopted by the media and the moralistic practices of “liberating exorcism” (from ilm discussions to talk and reality shows), and to construct with research-action methods the scientiic, didactic and technical tools (Galliani, 1996) to interpret the (today) participated processes of media creation of the symbolic universe. The latter, with its iconic and eidetic imagery, inluences the real universe of social relationships wherein political, economical and ethical choices are made by individuals, groups and institutions within an intercultural and global dimension.

The role of media communication in the construction of social representations — that inluences cognitive processes and behavioural practices (opinions, attitudes, stereotypes) — becomes fundamental because it is the «symbolic system» that anticipates, interprets, categorizes and then justiies and integrates educational action with social action (Galliani & Costa, 2000).

The third pedagogic-strategic paradigm — that builds educative communication as an authorial, collaborative and social practice — poses another condition to the research. In fact research on media education must be integrated with intercultural education as a pedagogic substratum, in order to establish a connection between “other” cultures, with their analogical components, and “our” culture with its digital components, towards a mediated intercultural communication (Galliani, 1996) open to “beyond” and “elsewhere”. This “passage” of culture and identity is increasingly more frequent on the web during the construction of educative communication as authorial, collaborative and social practice, where the electronic Self of “egocentric contraction” concentrated on one’s own interiority (iPod/iPhone) enters in contact with the worldwide phenomenon “You to You” (YouTube: a hundred million of life fragments, often bizarre and paradoxical, of which 65,000 a day are telescopically enlarged). The POD metaphor is that of mobility and walking, of the «migrant thought» — of which Franca Pinto Minerva (2002) admirably talks about — willing to reach beyond the limits of one’s own communicating, of one’s own way of conceptualizing reality, and of feeling and experiencing emotions, crossing towards 18

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unknown regions and discovering other ideas, words, further images and visions of the world.

Therefore, media education can be considered as a means of achieving and developing a “migrant thought”, using the main road of diversity of the media and symbolic alphabet with which to read-write-understand the thousands and one differences of the real universe, sharing “other people’s views”.

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The meaning of media practice A SIREM enquiry for a national research about media practices of youngsters, parents and teachers Pier Cesare Rivoltella Department of Pedagogy, Catholic University of “Sacro Cuore”, Largo Gemelli, 1 – 20123 Milano. E-mail: piercesare.rivoltella@unicatt.it

ABSTRACT

This contribution is a irst sightseen about the results of a research developed by Catholic University of Milan and University of Padua on adolescents’ practice with digital media. The research is based on qualitative methodologies and made of focus groups with parents, teachers and youngsters.

It points out almost three highlights onto which the scientiic community could develop more research: the fact that media are becoming “normal” in people social life; the new role of mediation that media are assuming in the social contexts; the necessity to study more in dept issues like the cognitive proile of the so called “digital natives”, their way of building knowledge or learning.

Keywords: digital media; youngsters media consumption; media and cultures.

Research Project This contribution is a irst sightseen of the results of a research project about the meaning of media practice. Conceived with Luciano Galliani and Laura Messina, both scholars at Padua University, the project belongs to the scientiic activities of SIREM (Italian Research Society on Education and Media). The research aimed to outline some items and suggestions to be presented in the second SIREM Congress, planned in Barcelona in the irst months of 2010.

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The theoretical landscape behind the project is the international research Mediappro (http://www.mediappro.com). From the end of 2004 and Autumn 2006, it made a meaningful screening of what youngsters do with the media in ten European countries and in Quebec. The “Italian part” of the research, published in the book Screen Generation (Rivoltella, 2006), is here under a particular consideration. In fact it is an interesting extension of the European one. First of all because it works not only with adolescents (12-18 aged) like Mediappro, but also with their parents and teachers. Secondly, from the methodological point of view, it doesn’t use only questionnaires and in-deep interviews, but also focus-groups. These are two really important choices. The irst: nowadays it seems quite dificult to think about educative aspects of media consumption without “crossing” data concerning both youngsters, parents and teachers: what youngsters watch or listen to isn’t without effects on their relationships with parents and teachers, mostly from the education point of view. On the other side, working with focus-groups in an ethnographic perspective, seems to be the best way for minimizing the risk that youngsters could say to researchers what they think the researchers are expecting to be said by them: so it should be possible to know their real practices and representations.

Aims and research plan Moving from these biases, the aim of the research is to study how youngsters, parents and teachers use digital media — particularly computer, Internet and mobile phones — for investigating: – the sense they make of these practices, working on their representations of the media (Farr & Moscovici, 1985), and on methods of appropriation (Thompson, 1995) leading them to integrate these media in their individual and social routines; – the educative disposition (consciousness, problem-focusing, choices and strategies for educating) of parents and teachers about the relationship of youngsters with the media; – the youngsters’ perception of what adults make with the media and of their educational attitude.

The methodology of the research is explorative; our choice is clearly qualitative.

We don’t aim to build the consumption proile of the Italian adolescent: in fact “the Italian adolescent” doesn’t exist, because the only adolescents we refer to are those who live with us, in family or in the classroom. What we’re going to do is to draw some trends, to do some remarks on the data we’ve collected. This is the reason why we choose focus group as methodology of research. This choice grants to us almost 26

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two advantages: it makes possible for us to work on subjects’ representations and, at the same time, to collect information from the negotiations we assisted to among them during the focuses themselves. These elements are not absolute for us; but we want consider them such as starting points for new and deeper researches. Finally, we built an investigative enquiry (Bertolini, 1999), aimed to give suggestions more than deine end-point about questions: in these terms it has to be received by the reader.

The sample was selected in six geographic areas, into which six research équipes realized 12 focus groups, 6 of them with youngsters, 3 with parents, and 3 with teachers1.

Youngsters were chosen in three age ranges: 10/11 years old (the so called tweens2 — Tufte, Rasmussen & Christensen, 2005), 13/14 years old, 15/16 years old.

Referring to these ages we selected parents and teachers; the second ones were teaching in the same classrooms of the youngsters themselves.

In Table 1 it is possible to visualize the general frame of the research.

Town

Age

Youngsters

Parents

Padua

10/11

•

Salerno

10/11

•

Ferrara

13/14

•

Cosenza

13/14

•

•

Milan

15/16

•

•

Lecce

15/16

•

Table 1

Teachers •

• •

•

The general frame of the research: focus groups distribution.

During each focus group, as usual, there were two researchers working, one of them with a role of recorder. The items were the same for each of the targets: – practices (what they do with the media?); – ideas about the meaning of making (what does it means making something with the media?); 1

2

We want to thank here the équipes. The researchers they were made of are: C. Piu, A. Burdino, F. Molinaro (University of Calabria); P.C. Rivoltella, S. Ferrari, A. Carenzio (Catholic University of Milan); P. Frignani, G. Ganino (University of Ferrara); L. Galliani, L. Messina, S. Tabone (University of Padua); N. Paparella, E. Palomba, M.G. Simone (University of Salento); R. Fragnito, M. Annarumma (Open University Pegaso).

In English the word “tweens” is the short form of “betweens”; it means people that is between childhood and adolescence. It is a really interesting target for the marketing, because this people can easily influence their parents consumptions.

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– ideas about adults’ practices (what they think the adults do with the media, and what they think about the risks?) in the case of focus with youngsters; ideas about sons/pupils practices in the case of focuses with parents and teachers.

The last item was different for each kind of focus. We asked to the youngsters what they think about educative presence of adults: they feel their parents/teachers are taking care of what they do with the media? On the other side we asked to parents/teachers to relect on their own educative practices: are they able to “mediate the media”? How and why?

Youngsters’ media consumptions: common trends Elaborating the research data, we start from some trends they share with other recent researches, in an international context. They refer to: social presence of the media, uses and appropriations of adults and youngsters of the Internet and mobile phone, functions they recognize to them.

The irst evidence is about the pervasive presence of the media in individual and social time of youngsters: the media are for them a real everyday environment (a “second skin”); they perceive the media not as something of extraordinary, but as tools completely integrated in their ordinary practices; so it is conirmed what the research already highlighted about a networked generation whose characters seem quite different from adults ones (Tirocchi, Andò & Antenore, 2002). The difference between adults and youngsters is especially about Internet use (to chat in Messenger, or maintaining its own social network with Facebook or MySpace): in fact for youngsters it is dificult to imagine their parents working with a PC if it is not for professional reasons. This difference is less strong about the mobile: both parents and youngsters think to it as a tool with which it is possible to build up and maintain social relationships; for both of them this tool has been domesticated (Haddon, 2004) really becoming a prothesis of our being (so it is dificult we could go out leaving it at home!). Conirming that, the mobile is always on, night and day, without differences of age and gender (Scifo, 2005).

If in all these cases we have no great differences in adults’ and youngsters’ practices, on the contrary their representations of the media are speciic. The adult thinks to mobile phone like a control tool, the youngsters think it is a tool for keeping freedom. The idea of control depends to the fact that when we have a mobile we are searchable, or better: people think we are searchable. In fact I’m not able to know where my son is, thanks to mobile: he could lie to me, he could tell he is near to home, while he is hundreds of miles far from me. But, probably, parents 28

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well know this: what they want is not to be informed about where their son is, but about the fact he is well. With the words of a parent of our research: «Mobile gives to me tranquillity!».

Youngsters perfectly understand this psychological aspect of the adult. A young girl says during a focus group: «How could I go out! My parents couldn’t know what I’m doing, where I am, if I’m getting well or not». To have a mobile phone lets the adolescent be free; the adult, relaxed, is not worried, less preoccupied with what his/ her son is doing.

What we have here is the so called telemothering (teleparentage: Caron & Caronia, 2005), that is the media capacity to become a new space for familiar negotiation: it means that mobiles allow us to think to a new educative frame starting from communication practices parents and sons are building around media themselves and their uses of them.

Researching about youngsters’ media consumption: discontinuity trends Despite of the elements conirming research data already highlighted in the last years, we found some other aspects really new. We can try to consider them.

Media and technologies “normality” Usually youngsters needs about the Internet are satisied with for kind of practices: – communicating, that is the intentional communication, when we have something to say (and this is the case of e-mail); – keeping in touch, that is the phatic dimension of communication, the need of being part of a social network when we have not the chance to meet people F2F (it is what happens with MSN, or with mobile SMS); – integrating with the pairs, that is sharing with them a model of a mobile, or doing the same things (this is what belongs to identity development in this age); – inally, spending time. In the Internet — as one of our focuses adolescents says — «I spend my days»: and in this sentence it seems to perceive no worring reasons. The focuses conirm that youngsters’ fascination for the Net is disappearing. “To spend own day in the Internet” doesn’t mean don’t do other things; it simply means that is “normal” that, while I’m at home doing something (I’m doing my homework, I’m going in and out from my sleeping room, I’m watching television), at the same time my PC is on, and my Messenger is open on the desktop.

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“Normality” seems to be the key-word. We’ve here a new perception of PC and of the Internet: they are natural, and mainly useful. Youngsters’ approach to technology is changing. They live it less in a ludic way, without separating the real world of life from the virtual one of the Net; like the adults do, their uses are more functional, worry with the target. The effect is a development of crossmediality in the consumption (Ferri, 2008). In 2006, while we were working at our research Screen Generation, this aspect wasn’t so evident: youngsters were attending to manage information with the Internet, to communicate with mobile, to enjoy with playgames. What they were doing, was to “specialize” tools according to the activity they had to do with them. Two years later the mobile is already used as a multimedia (camera phone), browsing the Net with it: these ways of use, for cost reasons, in the recent past were belonging only to the adults.

On this landscape the presence of the media becomes less evident, they are no more perceived as something of extraordinary, the close up is on their effective usefulness.

Beyond negative stereotypes One of the main issues in the recent research has been the representation of the danger concerning the Internet practices (Nicolaci-da-Costa, 1998; Lafi, 2003). This danger is particularly associated with the risk of meeting unknown people and with pedopornography. A speciic section of questionnaires (like that we used in our research I rag@zzi del Web, Rivoltella 2001) was voted to verify if youngsters were aware of the danger and how they represented it. What the research showed about these items is that, irst of all, youngsters didn’t perceive the danger, especially in the ways the adult was expecting they could represent it. So, the adults thought that for youngsters the danger in the Internet was to meet pedophiles, for youngsters the real danger was that their PC could be damaged by a virus. On the other hand, when researchers invited youngsters to show what they felt about this matter, they were used to adopt stereotypes of the media, without that these could had effect on their real lives.

In our research we found quite different things. Youngsters don’t use more adults words for representing danger situations concerning the Internet; they refer to experiences lived by friends or made in the classroom. Their discourses are really different from adults’ ones: «It’s true! Everybody can contact you. To accept or not is one of your choices! But, if you don’t know him…». It seems that children and adolescents are more conscious about the risks, at the same time they feel the risk is something you can be aware of if only you pay attention to: be careful about your privacy (don’t give your mobile number or your home address to anybody), don’t trust in unknown people, don’t download unauthorized materials.

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What we have here is a skilled behaviour: youngsters know the risks of the Internet, but (according to the “natural” perception we were talking about before) they tend to feel that this is what it is possible to ind in every context of life.

Parents seem to trust in their sons much more than in the past. They are in general less worried, but with some residual problems with Messenger. The reason why is that they normally don’t understand the difference between it and a chat; so they think that youngsters use it for meeting new people, while on the contrary Messenger is almost a space where they foster the relationships they already have with their friends. Not only. Parents seem to know they don’t talk enough with their sons, they are not so present from the educative point of view. They feel their behaviour is often the “laissez faire”, they know that «To say no, is dificult!», they are sure that «The prohibition is not enough!». The negative representation of the media is fading out; on the contrary it is arising a new educative consciousness (but there is a not yet clear vision about tools and strategies for developing it).

It is interesting, in this frame, that sons are becoming to have no trust in parents.

Working to our focus groups, we found a curious inversion of the traditional relationship between adults and youngsters. In education, this relationship is usually asymmetric: and the up position is the adult’s one. So, we suppose that there are no parents that, almost once, tried to read the SMS of their sons or the messages of their Messenger: this is one of the control activities that are a natural behaviour for every parent. The interesting thing is that nowadays there are many youngsters controlling their parents’ practices: so some young people participating to our focuses, revealed to us they read their parents SMS for knowing if they have some relations with men or women. This conirms the change of PC and mobile, their becoming ever more mediators of familiar relationships.

Teachers’ point of view School, talking about media and communication technologies, is requested to educate young people preparing them for the future. At the same time, media and newspapers normally present teachers such as people unable to this mission, because they seem not having competencies and education for doing that. This mediatic representation is really far from reality. Since 1985 (in this year our Ministry of Education launched the irst Plan for Educational Technologies Development) we can afirm that Italian school system gradually bridged the gap with the other European countries.

In the last three years, new teachers declare they normally use e-mail, they browse the Internet, they write their documents on PC. Our teachers are becoming digital teachers (Biondi, 2007; Calvani, 2007). Our research conirms this trends as we can understand from three evidences.

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In the irst place,teachers show a personal and professional curiosity for technology. It is proved by the presence of computer in their ordinary activities and by the great number of them participating in the national actions of the Ministry for teachers professional development (ForTIC, DM59, DM61). If we use the categories of European Project U-Learn (Midoro, 2005), we have a few beginners in technology and a lot of practitioners.

Secondly, teachers know and accept the role of technologies in youngsters’ world: «The change to multimedia is a must!» suggests one of them. This is a crucial passage. If a teacher understands the place of the media in the life of the youngsters, he is ready for preparing a space for the media in his teaching activity.

Finally, focus participants need to give an order to their knowledge («We don’t need only practice, we need grammar!»): they understand that base-skills are not enough with media and technologies; it needs to develop a technological culture able to “open” their teaching activity.

Asked about their appropriation of computer, Internet and mobile, teachers show to deal with them in different ways. Computer is well considered: it is useful for «planning» and «auto-evaluation». About the Internet they have some doubts: it is less used why not every school is wired, a lot of them have old computers, and there is always the risk that some pupils could browse some «uncorrect» pages. Finally, the consideration of mobile phone is quite negative: it has to be «out of school», it perverts writing abilities of the pupils, it isn’t useful for taking photos or making videos because «the image quality is bad». Anyway teachers don’t agree with the idea that schools must provide only technological skills; they are sure that it has to educate to languages developing media literacy among youngsters.

Teachers want to know «what happens with the students» according to relationships and cognition. Media are increasing social behaviours? Or they reduce youngsters’ attitude to interpersonal communication? And how is it possible to merge school “verbal-sequential” processes (book-based) with “digital-parallel” ones (screen-based) as they are diffused in the new information culture? As a teacher of one of our focuses well says: «You click and open windows... you browse the page with the eyes... you ind a link... you understand something».

Research suggestions In conclusion we highlight three issues our research put in evidence; we think they could be good occasions of relection from the research point of view.

First of all, it seems we need to shift from a representation of technology as a simple tool to a new idea of it as mediator of relationships. This trend is fostered by 32

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what we saw according the mobile as control or freedom technology and its role in the negotiations between parents and sons. In this case we suggest some questions it could be interesting to work on: the inversion of asymmetry in competence transfer (how many times the son is the irst technological trainer of the parents?); the new ways of complicity in familiar communication (mothers and fathers “messaging” with sons such as adolescents); strategies and tools for parental control (sons, as we saw, sometimes investigate about parents’ SMSs). The common element here is the particular position of technology respect to the stage onto which the relationships between youngsters and adults are played (Meyrowitz, 1985), that is its capacity to stay between the stage and the backstage (Goffman, 1959) allowing to each of the actors to look inside the backstage of the other ones. If youngsters talk among themselves, without parents could listen to them (backstage), they can play the role of the good son with their parents (stage); but if the contacts of a mobile or a SMS open the space of youngsters’ backstage, then parents are invited to have a look of it.

The same thing could happen on the other side, and it is no necessary that it should be the result of a “spy-activity”: may be that sharing our backstage could be made possible by a new dialogic relationship between parents and sons, thanks to mobile phones and the Internet itself.

Second. The “normality” of mobiles and of the Internet (particularly instant messaging services) are transforming the ways of communication among youngsters. This doesn’t means that F2F communication is disappearing: the aim of youngsters when they chat in MSN is not the negation of the body, the desire of not staying alone, or the search for an anonymous communication able to by-pass social cues. On the contrary they are really normal boys and girls, well socialized; even if they can use mobile or Internet for communicating, they prefer — when it is possible — to meet one another in presence. The really interesting thing is that technology doesn’t replace, but extends relationships. It is a way for keeping in touch even if it is impossible in presence. The consequence is the development of new forms of communication, with their etiquettes, protocols and practices; it should be very interesting to make research about them for trespassing some common ideas, widely diffused, revealing the thought of people that probably doesn’t know youngsters and never did research on their behaviours of consumption!

The last issue directly refers to learning; it brings us to the heart of the problem that is giving the title to this article. Which is the relationship between “old” and “new” media practices with cognition? It is possible to show the existence of a relationship between cognitive styles of people and media functions? Is it really true that digital natives are more skilled but less able to go in depth relecting on questions? May be that, for answering these questions, could be better to make research on the meaning of making, than pointing out mere simpliications provided by common sense.

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References Bertolini, P. (Ed.) (1999). Navigando nel cyberspazio. Ricerca sui rapporti tra infanzia e Internet. Milano: Rizzoli.

Biondi, G. (2007). La scuola dopo le nuove tecnologie. Milano: Apogeo.

Calvani, A. (Ed.) (2007). Tecnologia, scuola, processi cognitivi. Milano: Franco Angeli.

Caron, A.H., & Caronia, L. (2005). Culture mobile. Les nouvelles pratiques de communication.

Montréal: Les Presses de l’Université.

Farr, R.M., & Moscovici, S. (Eds.) (1984). Social Representations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Farr, R.M., & Moscovici, S., Rappresentazioni sociali. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1989).

Ferri, P. (2008). La scuola digitale. Come le nuove tecnologie cambiano la formazione. Milano: Bruno Mondadori.

Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor. (Goffman, E., La vita quotidiana come rappresentazione. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1969).

Haddon, L. (2004). Information and Communication Technologies in Everyday Life. A Concise Introduction and Research Guide. Oxford: Berg.

Lafi, S. (Ed.) (2003). L’educazione diffusa. Napoli: L’Ancora del Mediterraneo.

Meyrowitz, J. (1985). No sense of Place. The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behaviour.

Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Meyrowitz, J., Oltre il senso del luogo. L’impatto dei media elettronici sul comportamento sociale. Bologna: Baskerville, 1993).

Midoro, V. (Ed.) (2005). A Common European Framework for Teachers’ Professional Proile in ICT for Education. Ortona: Menabò.

Nicolaci-da-Costa, A. M. (1998). Na malha da rede. Os impactos intimo da Internet. Rio de Janeiro: Campus.

Rivoltella, P.C. (Ed.) (2001). I rag@zzi del Web. Internet e i preadolescenti. Una ricerca.

Milano: Vita e Pensiero.

Rivoltella, P.C. (2006). Screen Generation. Milano: Vita e Pensiero.

Scifo, B. (2005). Culture mobili. Ricerche sull’adozione giovanile della telefonia cellulare.

Milano: Vita e Pensiero.

Thompson, J.B. (1995). The Media and Modernity. A Social Theory of the Media. Cambridge: Polity Press. (Thompson, J.B., Mezzi di comunicazione e modernità. Una teoria sociale dei media. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1998).

Tirocchi, S., Andò, R., & Antenore, M. (Eds.) (1992). Giovani a parole. Dalla generazione media alla networked generation. Milano: Guerini & Associati.

Tufte, B., Rasmussen, J., & Christensen, L.B. (Eds.) (2005). Frontrunners or Copycats?

Copenhagen: Business School Press.

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Digital space Mario Ricciardi

ABSTRACT

DICAS – Department “Casa Città”, III Faculty of Engineering, Polytechnic of Turin, corso Duca degli Abruzzi, 24 – 10129 Torino.

E-mail: mario.ricciardi@polito.it

Technology breaks free of the domain and boundaries of techniques in order to become the principal actor of an entire civilization: this “technology” corresponds to Information and Communication Technologies based on the computer. It enters our everyday life and takes familiar shapes. It replaces media or mixes, hybridizez, with them and constitutes the habitat of human beings in the twenty-irst century.

Nowadays the processes of digital convergence have created a new igure of cultural content consumers, called prosumers.

Prosumers’ behaviour is closely related to user-generated content, a particular form of relation between technology and culture. The creative activities of prosumers and outsiders reveal a strong increase in digital productivity, but also the tendential indifference towards the characteristics of the contents in favour of packaging. This new typology of consumers can be regarded as the symptom of a big migration and the sign of paths revealed, up to now, in the most immediate aspects and not in their deep changes.

Keywords: digital convergence; user-generated content; transformative technologies; cultural technologies.

Digital convergence We are now witnessing the uniication of communication and entertainment services, previously distinct: ixed telephony, mobile telephony, broadband Internet and television.

Edizioni Erickson – Trento

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The telecommunication industry has absorbed the network technology; in this way it can transfer data all over the world in a more eficient and cheaper manner.

Companies working in distinct industrial sectors have now the same market and, consequently, the same business as they converge on IP Networks.

Which processes involve the consumers in this market? Here we ind an interesting fact: youngsters are reducing the TV viewing time.

The change in consumption habits generated by the digital convergence processes is driven by the youngsters: this variation is evident in TV consumption. The ratio between people up to 24 and those over 55 is by now in excess of 1:2.

TV consumers are not content generators, they stand outside the new paradigm.

The new consumers of cultural contents are the prosumers. Prosumers’ behaviour is closely related to user-generated content, a particular form of relation between technology and culture. It is a huge market made up of consumers that are in continuous evolution and in a growth mode, but they are individuals who change not only in their behaviours but also in a fundamental fashion. For the present, interest is directed principally at the most easily observed behaviours, such as those of the mass-consumer (the principal consumer of television). As yet no research has been carried out about the deep on-going mutations.

Without communication technology convergence and hybridization, these subjects would have nothing to say, nobody would have known about them, they would have nor means nor voice to be heard, therefore they could not communicate.

Spreading of consumer production technologies, lowering of costs and the spread of broadband are the three elements which, acting together, typically constitute the so-called process of crossmediality. Also the new activity of the evolving consumer is marked by the merging of producers and consumers: the result is the prosumer.

Anyway, is the convergence between producers and consumers possible without creating deep changes in the productive system, in the market and in the culture of the concerned individuals?

It is not suficient to regard the process as the evolution of consumption. It is necessary to consider more deeply the nature of these processes that merge production and consumption, culture and technology. The processes are generated by individuals, people who are elusive in their deep character and way of thinking.

Let’s take, for example, the phenomenon of user generated content. If we consider the users not as consumers, or even as evolved consumers, whose habits and traditional functions are continually varying, but as content generators, that is cultural producers, the point of view changes. Historically consumers have not been cultural producers, on the contrary they have chiely been passive and controlled users of goods. The users can be now characterized through an activity, an action or at least a reaction, concentrated on “contents”, that is on cultural acts, instead of goods consumption.

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The irst signal is the strong increase in productivity (Lyman & Varian, 2003).

Individuals produce more than companies and professionals, but their production creates very little value in comparison to companies and professionals.

I call these actors outsiders and they form a vast group who often engage in intellectual activities mediated by network environments and digital technologies.

The great variety of communication technologies, of old and new media, coincides with the indifference towards contents; what increases, instead, is the attention towards the transfer mode and the packaging, the real winner. The image overpowers the text, the image with embedded sounds is the prevailing message. It is clear, to me, that using the deinition of content for the objects of these intellectual activities is not adequate, it is also too unreined.

The boundary between the professional products and the products made by nonprofessionals (the outsiders) is often tenuous and nearly disappears. A new opportunity opens up; we cross a boundary and a new space is in front of us: the outsiders’ (that is non-professionals’) personal production exceeds on the whole that of specialists and professionals. This productivity does not take into account any kind of rule; the outsider is essentially a do-it-yourselves, a real amateur.

Work and communication: technology hides work Working by communicating The digital environment is based on the sharing of data, of knowledge and of productive cooperation (Marazzi, 1999). Therefore, it is a habitat where knowledge and production do not clash, are not separated, not even hierarchically organized, as in a Fordist society; on the contrary, knowledge organizes production in a new way, dis-organizing the command structure, that is the typical vertical organization of an industrial economy and replaces it (or tries to) with a form of horizontal organization following the model of network, where the nodes are all at the same level: this is the Internet model.

Functional equivalence can be the opportunity for a new form of equality. This is the position of the great day-dreamers who gave birth to digital civilization1; there is no direct line running through these positions and the current developments of economy, nor is there a line of continuity. There are rifts, conlicts, terrible and devastating ights which have characterized and still characterize our society.

There have never been a truer statement, conirmed by facts, than the one written

by Wiener in his preface to Cybernertics (1948): ÂŤWe have contributed to the initia1

See the authors Norbert Wiener, Vannevar Bush, Douglas Engelbart, Theodor Nelson and Tim Berners Lee.

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tion of a new science which, as I have already said, embraces technical developments with great possibilities for good and for evil. We can only hand it over into the world that exists about us, and this is the world of Belsen and Hiroshima…».

These days, we too face the same dilemma between good and evil, between positive consequences and those which are tragically negative for humankind. Even today we need to know to whom these powerful knowledge machines are entrusted and who decides their use “for good and for evil”.

«The introduction of communication, therefore of language, in the production sphere is in effect the real origin of the momentous turning point that, like it or not, characterizes our present. But it is a transformed language, often an unnatural one.

It is then possible to realize how communication, and its productive organization as low of information, has become as important as the electric energy in the mechanical production era. Communication is what permits the reversal of the relation between production and consumption, supply and demand, and it is always the communication of information that requires to structure the productive process in the most lexible way, breaking all the inelasticity implied in the employees’ way of working» (Marazzi, 1999, p. 15).

Technology in our eyes, in the common sense and in social imagination, replaces work. The medium through and the decisive setting in which digital civilization can start are the virtual communities. They are the prime example of this new organization (Rheingold, 1993; 2002): – low investment costs; – facilitation of use: domestication is fast and based on practical training; – participation of subjects.

Virtual communities develop in parallel with the material society and exploit the law introduced by Bill Gates’ model: Friction-Free Capitalism (1996).

Also in this case we face the dilemma of having to choose between an underground and free culture, that is a culture of global but in the same time popular élites (Jenkins, 2006), and a culture of proit and business making.

Data sharing (from open source to creative commons) is generated by these technologies: informatics and telematics, computers and networks.

Sharing I want to stress the process of sharing (in which communication technologies are fundamental) more than that of convergence. Sharing means confusion and instability.

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My objective is to rid these categories (confusion and instability) of the negative value they are usually assigned. In my opinion they have a problematic value and it is the domains that distinguish digital society both in the scenarios characterized by processes of deep change and in the conlicting scenarios marked by the resistance and opposition to the processes themselves.

The pervasiveness and velocity are caused and boosted by networks. The digital environment is founded on data sharing of knowledge and productive cooperation: – working by communicating; – communicating is the occupation of digital environments and communities; – the pioneers can be found in the virtual communities.

The founding paradigms of society are bypassed and not criticized and destroyed: they are wrecks, sometimes powerful, which keep on lowing down the river of time in which we all are immersed.

But most of us don’t perceive time in its linearity and above all don’t represent and don’t communicate it this way. Media are lined up nor on a linear time sequence nor on the paradigm of space appropriation, that is on the control of the typical territory of the industrial society.

Inequality and culture We use the word culture, but we probably mean completely different things.

It is a culture of conluence (that does not distinguish those who have and those who have not) (Jenkins, 2006). If this is true it deinitively wrong-foots the socialist axis, the foundation of the working class movement in Europe, based on the emancipation through education and not simply on class conlict and/or wage claims.

Today in culture there are our needs, our quality of life, everything which pertains to bios and that originated at the birth of Europe.

The big novelty is its quantitative extension but also the subjects that take part in this process. Quantity is turned into quality, if we consider that these actions, these uses and these functions can be assimilated into intellectual acts and can be aggregated in order to constitute a new cultural capital. The former “élites” of our societies are seeing a decline in their inluence, from a social and class perspective and even in their national impact. The European model which originated from Enlightenment has ended together with its values, ideals and visions.

The novelty is the blending and the “con-fusion”, not only the convergence, between digital technologies and media (which we historically called mass media).

The con-fusion occurs together with the processes of evolution and of strong change 39

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in each primitive medium (considering both the classical mass media and media deriving from Internet technology, from the system of networks and crossmediality practice).

It is a view in contrast with the idea of networks as an inert megastore: you come in, you buy (in reality you take something without paying at that moment) and nothing happens. The objects are inanimate, the functions are innocent and everything lows smoothly without problems. This is the prevailing feeling among young university students (Gay, Mazali, Monaci & Taddeo, 2008)2: the network does not change the relation with the traditional media.

Therefore McLuhan’s statement is even more appealing and richer for its consequences: «Technological environments are not merely passive containers of people but are active processes that reshape people and other technologies alike» (McLuhan, 1962).

The technological habitat has some characteristics: availability of goods and not property, it is the society of access (Rifkin, 2000).

We can distinguish between access (as offer and facilitation to use) and appropriation. Access may be considered as neutral availability, as offer of goods on display; it does not affect choices, motivations and inclinations of users and potential consumers. Instead, appropriation presumes an intellectual action, a cultural prerequisite that makes the difference. But this difference is not created by communication technologies or digital environments: these elements simply constitute the habitat.

At the end of the research a conirmation seems to arise: those who have some advantages are the ones who already have some fundamental cultural prerequisites, starting from their level of education (Sartori, 2006). This is the real material obstacle!

According to a recent survey ordered by the Permanent observatory on digital contents to AcNielsen Italia, «Italian technological population can be divided in two distinct segments: Technofans, i.e. those who use the network as a place where you can train, learn and have fun, where you can develop interpersonal or group relations; Eclectics, i.e. those who use the web in a very varied way. What distinguishes the two categories is just a different management mode of technologies in their lives. The 2

See the results of the Progetto di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale – PRIN (Project of National Remarkable Interest) 20052007 entitled TRAME – Tecnologie e ambienti di Rete per la memoria del XXI secolo (TRAME – Technologies and Network Environments for the Memory of XXI Century). In particular see the results of Giovani, media e consumi digitali (Young People, Media and Digital Consumption), an empirical research developed with quantitative methodologies on a sample of young university students, with the aim of deepening and analyzing some emergent dimensions of media consumption and of the relation with the new technologies (Gay et al., 2008). The addressees of the quantitative survey, 409 students, from 19 to 27, have been chosen among the university students of Turin area coming from heterogeneous study courses, but with a common cultural background in relation to the study of communication and media (the degree courses interested in the survey have been: Cinema and Media Engineering of Turin Polytechnic, Communication Sciences, DAMS e MultiDams – Academy of Fine Arts – of University of Turin and the interfaculty course, mainly of economical orientation, Information and Communication Management).

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Two approaches to technology but also two different world views Common features

+ Culture

> Love of novelty > Culture of pleasure > Propensity for leadership

– Culture

“I like to learn, I like to improev my knowledge” +16% vs technofans

“To be successful it is better to quickly find a good job rather than wasting time studying” +12% vs eclectics

“I would be willing to make sacrifices and to have less of comfort while respecting the environment” +13% vs technofans

“In a family, it is right that a man earns more than a woman” +9% vs eclectics

“I feel as a citizen of the world” +12% vs technofans

“I think that our life is guided by fate” +8% vs eclectics

Two clusters description was built by identifying the most discrimination answers between the 2 groups, in more than 800 statements belonging to Nielsen database.

Figure 1 Two approaches to technology. (Source: AcNielsen Italia & Osservatorio permanente sui contenuti digitali, 2008)

irst ones prefer game contents, give much importance to the technologic medium used (it must always be the latest), are multitasking and are often used to a kind of “disposable” consumption. They visit sports, car and moto websites, use videogames, chat, communicate through social networks, use videosharing. They exploit all these technologies, concentrating above all on mere technological innovation, without integrating it with all the other aspects of life. On the contrary, for Eclectics technologies have become an advanced tool of their everyday life, oriented to service and news research and to the management of their interests and social and working activities.

They use the main search engines, make reservations for their holidays online, visit news and inancial sites, make regular use of home banking, buy cultural contents and other services through the Net, in addition to the exploitation of the Net itself as a mean of communication and amusement» (ACNielsen Italia & Osservatorio permanente sui contenuti digitali, 2008).

In addition, according to the results of the survey, «the relation between use of technologies and fruition of cultural and entertainment contents does not come to light in an unequivocal way: if, on one hand, the poor aptitude for technology results generally in a limited interest in cultural and entertainment contents is NOT possible, on the other hand, to state the contrary. The classical variables of segmentation 41

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are not suficient to interpret the relation between technological aptitude and use of cultural and entertainment contents» (AcNielsen Italia & Osservatorio permanente sui contenuti digitali, 2008).

Therefore the categories need to change: it is necessary to ind others which are new and adequate to interpret a “new” process in which wide “availability” of technologies (of communication) and then their use and “fruition of cultural contents” blend together.

Are they the same things? Can using communication technologies and using network environments be different? And can it be different from the traditional fruition of culture? This is the whole point.

Today tradition is made by media and networks. So, we can state that they act deep in individuals’ culture. This is the sensational discrepancy: resistance rests in (social and cultural) disequality and it is still valid «Wissen ist Macht»! Then, these technologies do not modify the old balance of forces linked to status.

«It seems that it depends on the cultural discriminant to allow and orientate towards an active or passive use of the new technologies: in itself technology constitutes a neutral tool. For a correct analysis of the impact of new technologies on the national economic system, it is necessary to place side by side the concept of digital divide and that of cultural divide» (AcNielsen Italia & Osservatorio permanente sui contenuti digitali, 2008).

What is not considered here is, on one hand, the hypermediation (many media and many technomedia which do not put any ilters or do not require prerequisites dificult to obtain to make the medium or the chosen channel usable) and on the other hand, the quotidianization of these practices. They are constant and incessant and they recur very frequently in our world.

Digital natives and digital immigrants I think we can speak of natives about digital technologies only when human beings do not learn to read and write any longer according to the alphabetic model.

Can communication technology in its different versions — digital technologies, multimedia, interactivity — constitute the decisive frontier? It can be the barrier that, distinguishing young people from the others, gives them a status. Maybe it is a poor status, perhaps only functional, but “deinitive”. They are the “natives” opposed to the “immigrant”.

In this perspective an essential dichotomy is re-established and digital technologies are discriminant. But is it just an environment or is it an irreversible process that will soon transform the majority of world population in “natives”?

In the meanwhile it reintroduces a distance, if not a separation between students and teachers, at least in these years. Analyzing the results of the research Young 42

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Students “digital natives”

Teachers “digital immigrants”

Information received from many multimedial sources in a fast way

Information acquired in a slow and controlled way, by a limited number of sources

Parallel processes and multitasking.

Single processes and well defined tasks.

Attention to graphics, sound and video rather than to the text

Attention to the text, rather than to graphics, sound and video

Random access to hypermedial information

Linear, logic and sequential information

Simultaneous interaction/networking with many others

Individual work of students

Just-in-time learning

Just-in-case teaching

Instant gratification and rewards

Deferred gratification and rewards

Significant learning, immediately useful and amusing

Teaching according to the curriculum

Table 1

Student “digital natives” and teachers “digital immigrants”. (Source: Prensky, 2001)

People, Media and Digital Consumption (Gay, Mazali, Monaci & Taddeo, 2008), students’ technological habitat is rich, but produces much less intense effects than one could think.

Young Italians consider themselves worse than European peers (The Gallup Organization & Agenzia Nazionale per i Giovani, 2008). There is a widespread perception that their possible destiny can be but negative and that everything is occurring in a motionless, luid, evasive and unmodiiable present. Neither work nor education are engines capable to satisfy young generations’ expectations or integrate them inside the big national institutions. Young university students who were interviewed do not belong to any elite. Statistics conirm that doctors’ children, as notaries’ ones and of other “noble” professionals of old times, have elevated possibilities to duplicate their fathers’ job. The others almost none. Without any passions, just for convenience, it is better to follow one’s own father’s path.

We have to think, considering the sample of young people analyzed, that selectivity is the consequence of abundance. Surrounded by a universal megastore, boundless in its offers, in its potentiality of use more than purchase, the Internet is perceived exactly as Bill Gates meant it: a consumers’ paradise. In this megastore cultural products and cultural tools can be found. The means through which one can arrive at the cultural object are more and more directly interconnected with it, they are its second nature, a transparent and soft skin that wraps it up completely. The cost of domestication is very low, effort is mixed with entertainment, so it makes learning easier.

Culture boundaries are remarkably larger and they run the risk of a degradation that passes from materiality of the environment to the spiritual one, to personal culture.

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Technological tools and environments can be a narrow path, but feasible for new forms of domestication that will collide against the barrier still active at a universal level: alphabetization, the logical-sequential model. The word “text” today is more and more metaphorical: it alludes to an organized writing, but weakened when in contact with visual cultures, now winning if not triumphant.

Our student uses his means simultaneously and without any apparent discrimination: «The student places side by side, in a massive way, tools for “passive” fruition of the contents, characterized by a low or elementary level of interactivity, such as TV, cinema or radio, and tools that allow copying, reworking and redistributing of contents, such as cd and dvd players/writers, mp3 players, videocameras and digital cameras etc.» (Gay, Mazali, Monaci & Taddeo, 2008, p. 108).

Who watches?

While researchers distinguish media and technologies, young interviewees DO NOT. Researchers, young as well, are textual even if they live intensely in the digital environment; their interviewees are, on the contrary, acculturated people without alphabetization (according to the title of one of McLuhan’s essays, 1953), that means without text.

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Bolter, J.D. (1984). Turing’s Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. (Bolter, J.D., L’uomo di Turing: cultura occidentale nell’età del computer. Parma: Pratiche, 1985).

Gantz, J.F. (2007). The Expanding Digital Universe. IDC White Paper. (http://www.emc.com/ collateral/analyst-reports/expanding-digital-idc-white-paper.pdf).

Gates, B. (1996). The Road Ahead. Penguin: New York. (Gates, B., La strada che porta a domani. Milano: Mondadori, 1997).

Gay, N., Mazali, T., Monaci, S., & Taddeo, G. (2008). Giovani, media e consumi digitali.

Napoli: Liguori.

Heim, M. (1987). Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Himanen, P. (2001). The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age. London: Secker & Warburg. (Himanen, P., L’etica hacker e lo spirito dell’età dell’informazione. Milano: Feltrinelli, 2001).

Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. (Jenkins, H., Cultura convergente. Milano: Apogeo, 2007). * All references to online resources in this paper and in the bibliography were verified at October 2008

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Digital space

Lyman, P., & Varian H.R. (2003). How Much Information?, California: University of Berkeley. (http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/).

Manovich, L. (2001). The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press. (Manovich, L., Il linguaggio dei nuovi media. Milano: Olivares, 2002).

Marazzi, C. (1999). Il posto dei calzini. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri.

McLuhan, M. (1953). Culture without Literacy. Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communications, 1, 117-127. Reprinted in E. McLuhan & F. Zingrone (Eds.) (1995), Essential McLuhan (pp. 302-313). Toronto: Anansi.

McLuhan, M. (1962). The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. (McLuhan, M., La Galassia Gutenberg: nascita dell’uomo tipograico. Roma: Armando, 1976).

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Rheingold, H. (1993). The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier.

London: Harper Collins. (Rheingold, H., Comunità virtuali: parlare, incontrarsi, vivere nel ciberspazio. Milano: Sperling & Kupfer, 1994).

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(Rheingold, H. Smart Mobs. Tecnologie senza ili. Milano: Raffaello Cortina, 2003).

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University of Melbourne. (http://cyber.eserver.org/reid.txt).

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L’immaginario cinematograico nell’era digitale (pp. 11-32). Milano: Guerini.

Ricciardi, M. (2007). Comunicare per immagini. Scienze Gastronomiche, 2, 70-78. (http:// www.unisgjournal.it/ita/022007/ricerca/ricciardi.pdf).

Ricciardi, M. (2008a). Il museo dei miracoli. Il museo come opera d’arte e invenzione tecnologica. Milano: Apogeo.

Ricciardi, M. (2008b). Cooperare Collaborare Condividere. In M. Ricciardi (Ed.), Interfacce della memoria (pp. 3-22). Napoli: ScriptaWeb. Ricciardi, M. (2008c). Saggio introduttivo. In N. Gay, T. Mazali, S. Monaci, & G. Taddeo (Eds.), Giovani, media e consumi digitali (pp. IX-XXXVII). Napoli: Liguori.

Ricciardi, M., & Bossi, V. (2009). Convergenza tecnologica e creatività digitale. Economia dei servizi, 1, 69-84.

Rifkin, J. (2000). The Age of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism, where All of Life is a Paid-For Experience. New York: Tarcher/Putnam. (Rifkin, J., L’era dell’accesso. La rivoluzione della new economy. Milano: Mondadori, 2000).

Sartori, L. (2006). Il divario digitale: Internet e le nuove disuguaglianze sociali. Bologna: Il Mulino.

The Gallup Organization, & Agenzia Nazionale per i Giovani (2008). Italian Youth Survey. (http://www.agenziagiovani.it/docs/Italian%20Youth%20-%20First%20Release%20-%20 August%202008.pdf).

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Media and learning What can cognitive psychology suggest to multimedia education?

Alessandro Antonietti and Manuela Cantoia

ABSTRACT

Department of Psychology, Catholic University of “Sacro Cuore”, Largo Gemelli, 1 – 20123 Milano.

E-mail: alessandro.antonietti@unicatt.it; manuela.cantoia@unicatt.it

The aim of the paper is to consider two kinds of possible contributions that cognitive psychology can give provide to multimedia education, namely, advancement of: knowledge and suggestions for intervention. By an overview of recent studies, actual practices are discussed in order to assess a possible connection between cognitive styles and multimedia browsing. The inluence of multimedia tools on a general skill (attention), on processing multimedia contents and on beliefs (learning conceptions) are discussed as well. As far as intervention is concerned, planning and assistance in the use of multimedia tools can be supported by the some studies whose results are illustrated. The overall picture sheds light on the need of focussing on the potentialities and the processes that multimedia tools stimulate in order to allow learner to develop metacognitive awareness, that is, a way to achieve better learning outcomes though multimedia use.

Keywords: cognitive processes; learning; multimedia; media education.

Introduction What kind of contribution can cognitive psychology give to relection and practice in educational contexts in order to improve a critical and conscious use of multimedia Edizioni Erickson – Trento

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tools? We argue that such a contribution might concern two main issues: enhancing knowledge and suggesting directions to intervention.

The irst issue includes topics such as: – understanding of people use multimedia tools in real practice. Multimedia tools are usually devised to prompt at new kinds of behaviour (Antonietti et al., 2003; Guarnieri et al., 2005): are these expectations actually accomplished? – Assessing the effects produced by the use of multimedia tools. These effects are not to be considered in a deterministic way (Antonietti, 2005; Antonietti & Colombo, 2008), even though in the experimental settings a particular use of the multimedia tools is stimulated in order to assess what occurs to mental processes. Even in these cases, however, tools are conceived with the aim to induce a change in the user (for instance, fostering some strategies or skills): do things really go that way? Can we claim that the beneicial effects yielded by multimedia tools are actually supported by empirical data? Or, on the contrary, should one be afraid that the use of certain tools could lead to negative effects, as sometimes suggested?

The second kind of contribution is focused on giving instructions about how to plan the use of multimedia tools and how to assist learners in order to reach educational goals.

This paper is aimed to argue evidences of these two kinds of contributions above described.

How are multimedia tools employed?

The irst question which is addressed is: do multimedia tools actually lead people to perform mental operations in a different way compared with traditional media?

Let us consider the case of video games. In order to understand the peculiar cognitive counterparts of video game using, we need to separate the aspects depending on the content of the video games from the aspects which derive from the computer-supported nature of video games themselves. This goal might be pursued by comparing two tasks which have the same content and are experienced in a computer-supported versus a not-computer-supported condition. This procedure should allow us to test the recurrent claim that using computers to play games induces one to activate thinking processes that are peculiar to that tool. The main aim of the experiment carried out

by Antonietti and Mellone (2003) was in fact to identify possible differences in the strategies adopted while playing the game Pegopolis both in the traditional and in the computer-based version. Pegopolis consists of a board divided into 37 squares where 36 pieces are arranged so that the central square is empty. The goal is to try, 48

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Media and learning

by piece jumping, to remove as many pieces from the board as possible. You are only allowed to move a piece from an occupied square to an unoccupied square, directly opposite, jumping over a piece to capture it. Only vertical and horizontal jumping is allowed. Pieces can be moved only through jumping over another piece. The captured pieces are removed from the board. The game is over when there are no more jumps available. It is not possible to modify an already performed jump. Such a game can be played either by moving pieces on a real wood board or by moving pieces on a virtual, computer presented, board; this allows the researchers to verify whether the behaviour, the strategies, and the attitudes toward a video game are signiicantly affected by the medium employed to play it.

Why should the peculiar features of the virtual version of Pegopolis affect game playing? The computer-based version of Pegopolis provides players with a frontal perspective of the board and this helps to have a holistic view: all pieces can be simultaneously considered so that the best moves are easily identiied and a general strategic approach is prompted. Furthermore, the load needed by eye-hand coordination processes and by motor control involved in computer interaction is reduced (players have simply to click on the piece to be moved) as compared to the real game, so that mental effort can be better focused on reasoning and movements do not interfere with cognitive activity. Constraints (that is, rules about illegal moves) are directly embedded in the virtual Pegopolis and an immediate feedback to each move is given: this releases players from checking for the admissibility of the moves performed. It is worth noticing also that, since in virtual Pegopolis moves are physically irreversible (i.e., once a move is performed, it is not possible to go back and to perform a different move), a relective attitude should be induced. Finally, the virtual version of the game should enhance motivation because of the curiosity and novelty perception associated with the use of a technological tool.

Results showed that no signiicant difference between the real and virtual version of Pegopolis emerged, except for the fact that playing the game with the computer was faster than playing it on the wood board, the virtual version reduces time for moving the pieces. A pure “computer effect� failed to emerge both in the performance levels and in the reasoning strategies followed. This lack of differences was also supported by retrospective reports by participants who did not notice relevant changes in their experience by passing from the real to the virtual version of the game or vice versa.

One can thus maintain that a medium per se is not inluencing the way people accomplish the task, but this statement takes to a following question: How is a multimedia tool actually used? Is it used as those who produced it would have expected?

For instance, it has been suggested that hypermedia presentations beneits from the net-structured knowledge (in comparison to the traditionally linear-structured information) which provides learners with a greater lexibility of use. The lexibility 49

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offered by hypermedia tools, it might be argued, should enhance learning as it allows a correspondence between the individual’s imposed structure on the materials to be learned and his or her own cognitive proile: when a learner is given the opportunity to move freely through a hypermedia presentation, he or she should develop personal navigation patterns whose features mirror his or her own cognitive characteristics.

The evidence of the beneits of the hypothesised relationship between style and hypermedia navigation is not conclusive; however, it could be argued that previous studies have a number of limitations in that only a restricted set of styles have been investigated, using a single measure with no focus on interaction with other potentially important factors. Hence, a study (Calcaterra et al., 2005) was designed to investigate the effects of analytical-sequential vs. holistic-intuitive styles of thinking and of hypermedia navigation behaviours on learning performance. Even though the reticular structure of hypermedia leads us to argue that the holistic style is the most suitable in order to browse a network of non-semantically organised content, it can also be argued that the best learning outcomes are achieved when individuals navigate the hypermedia tool according to their preferred thinking style. Thus, this argument would suggest that no one style will result in better performance; rather, that the best results are acquired by learners whose browsing behaviour is consistent with their own styles.

Results showed that hypermedia navigation behaviour was linked to skills rather than to styles. It emerged that expert computer users and high orientation ability students showed dynamic browsing patterns, that is, a high number of mouse movements, changes of perspective, zooming. However the students exhibiting sequential-holistic styles showed no distinct browsing paths. Contrary to the expectations, learning outcomes were not affected by styles. Only one effect emerged: as far as the particular mode of knowledge representation is concerned, students who privileged the holistic sections of the hypermedia and who showed preferences toward holistic processing tended to develop map (that is, holistic rather than linear-sequential) representations of the acquired knowledge.

To test further the hypothesis that hypertext navigation depends on cognitive style, a second study was carried out (Fiorina et al., 2007). It was decided to investigate relationships between stylistic differences and hypermedia navigation not in an instructional, but in an edutainment context where curiosity, rather than achievement, was the main motivation. Two arguments may justify this choice. It must be acknowledged that young people browse hypermedia more often for pleasure than for learning purposes, so, a situation that resembles that of hypermedia navigation carried out for pleasure may relect a situation which is socially relevant. An edutainment environment, as opposed to an instructional environment, may stimulate more easily the emergence of some personal stylistic preferences, if any at all. This is why 50

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the decision to omit elements and instructions suggesting that learning outcomes were the goals to be reached or the aspects to be appreciated was taken and why the navigational task was presented as an opportunity to satisfy possible curiosities about a topic which included both cultural and entertaining issues.

Also the second study failed to prove that style is associated with individual differences in hypermedia browsing. This leads us to cast doubts on the idea that personal style is a structural characteristic that is highly inluential in determining people’s browsing behaviour. More precisely, it was suggested that thinking styles do not directly induce people to follow one strategy or another when having to carry out cognitive tasks on the computer. On the contrary, styles induce individuals to focus their attention and efforts on aspects of the situation that are considered relevant. In this perspective, hypermedia tools may therefore be unable to provide users with elements that will enable them to decide on the best approach or one that best its their personal features. On the other hand, it can be argued that people, even if they are suficiently experienced computer users, are not sensitive enough to perceive the prompts in the hypermedia tool that could help them to navigate according to their thinking style. A third possibility is that hypermedia tools are arranged so that the same suring pattern can it different stylistic proiles; so, even though each person is following a different personal style, they all have the same behaviour. Lastly, a radical argument is that styles must not be conceived to be internal traits independent from the features of the task to be carried out and from the context. They should on the other hand be conceived as dispositions, proclivities and repertoires of practices that tend to occur within a given socio-cultural environment. From this point of view the inconclusiveness of research on the link between styles and hypermedia navigation may depend on the fact that all learners, when exposed to hypermedia tools, share approximately the same cultural deinition of the task to be carried out and realise that a given suring behaviour, irrespective of their own personal preferences, is relevant to that setting.

What are the implications of these results? On the one hand, they cast doubts upon the alleged association between style and spontaneous hypermedia navigation.

Even though participants were free to browse the hypermedia tool according to their own way of thinking, they failed to show navigational patterns that were consistent with their personal cognitive preferences. This induces us to reconsider one of the beneits allegedly produced by hypermedia that educators often mention, namely, possible personalisation of knowledge access. The indings of these studies suggest that organising the contents to be learned in a non-linear associative network is not enough to induce people to personalise their interactions with such contents spontaneously. If the hypermedia designers’ aim is to allow users to differentiate browsing behaviour, they should irst of all devise structures and interfaces that explain what 51

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navigational paths are available and help users to grasp the distinctive features of such paths. This should enable them to easily identify which path they prefer for accessing and processing information and to understand the learning beneits they may get from choosing that path. Educators should stress, though the availability of different browsing strategies and ask users to consider which strategy is in line with the demands of the task.

What effects do multimedia tools produce?

In the previous section we tried to show as cognitive psychology can contribute to investigate as a multimedia tool is employed, so allowing us to assess whether some alleged features of multimedia learning are actually recognised and implemented.

Once we have understood in which manner do people actually use a multimedia tool, we can wonder if the use of such a tool can will modify the way we learn. As far as multimedia learning is concerned, three kind of effect will be discussed here: – inluence on a general skill (attention); – inluence on processing the content of the media; – inluence on people’s beliefs.

Attention has been frequently considered by many theories as one of the cognitive functions inluenced by media. It has been proposed that excessive exposure to the television would activate attention processes in an inadequate way (sudden changes in the images would induce intolerance in the focusing of attention for a long time on the same object), thus generating dificulties in the tasks that require high attention levels. What effects can a frequent use of computer have on attention?

A study as been carried out to face this point with the participation of 250 students distributed as follow: II and V grade of the primary school, III grade of the junior high school, IV grade of high school (Fabio et al., 2004). Two synthetic evaluations of the school performances were assigned to each participant. In order to assess the ability of attention two tests were administered. The irst one measured sustained attention, that is, the ability to maintain attention for a long while on a certain kind of stimuli.

The test was applied in two conditions: in the no-distracter condition participants had just to ind the target stimuli on a sheet; in the distracter condition participants, while they were engaged in the attentional task, listened to a recorded reading of a few texts and then had to answer to some questions on their content. For the second test, teachers were asked to assess the attentive global behaviour of the participant in the classroom (for example, «Does the student follow teacher’s instructions? Is he/she inattentive?»). The higher the scores are, the best the student’s attention is.

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As inal test, students answered to a questionnaire on media tools use (television and computer). Data showed signiicant relations between television use and attention.

In the sustained attention test, performances were low when exposure to television was low and they gradually increased until they reached the climax to the 3 daily hours of exposure and then dramatically reduced from the 4 hours on. As the relation between attention scores in the second test and exposure to television stimuli is concerned, data showed that the levels of attention of the students in the classroom decreased after one hour of exposure to television. The relation between the exposure to television and learning outcomes in the scientiic and humanistic disciplines showed a descending trend after just one hour of exposure. In short, more than 3 hours of television exposure were related to low sustained attention but already an exposure of more than an hour a day was related decreased levels of attention in the classroom and, as the amount of hours of exposure increased, school performance was worse and worse.

As far as computer is concerned, a decrease of attention corresponding to a frequent use failed to emerge. A signiicant drop of attention after one hour of computer use was found in the primary school, although higher school levels were comparatively unaffected by computer use. Computer use was not related to attention in the classroom (as assessed by the second test); a decrease appeared only over 4 hours of computer use. Relationships between computer use and performances in humanistic and scientiic disciplines were not signiicant. Briely, the use of the computer was related to worsening neither in attention nor in school outcomes. Only high rates of computer use (more than 4 hours a day) to play video games were associated to both an attention drop in the classroom and to low school performances. One should argue that the permanence in front of a screen with coloured images, sounds and words has no relation in itself with attention, unless it lasts for a consistent part of a young person’s day. Instead, if media produce a passive experience (as television does), or activate just ocular-motor relexes in a frantic way, a high exposure is related to low attention abilities; by contrast, if media engage the mind in an interactive and thoughtful cognitive activity, attention is not affected.

By moving from the effects of multimedia tools on general abilities (such as attention) to the effects produced on the processing of information, we can mention the study carried out by Fabio and colleagues (2003). In this study declarative, conditional and procedural knowledge acquisition and retention were examined in two groups of students: the experimental group used hypermedia learning environment and the control group was exposed to traditional instruction. The study was aimed at proving that information transmitted through a verbal and non verbal communication allows students to learn better than information transmitted only through the verbal communication. Both groups were given pre-, post- and retention tests. Post-test 53

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results indicated no signiicant differences between experimental and control groups in acquisition of declarative, conditional and procedural knowledge. However, a month later, retention tests showed that the experimental group retained information signiicantly better than did the control group.

A deeper analysis of the inluence of media in the learning process has been carried out by Antonietti and Cantoia (2000). It has been argued that virtual reality (VR) may play innovative roles in instruction because of its peculiar features. Since VR can produce a 3-dimensional representation of phenomena, it helps students both to experience directly some physical properties (shape, size, distance, and so on) of objects and events and to realise the actual implications of such properties. VR favours also the discovery of features which are often, in traditional educational tools, perceptually “hidden”, as it permits learner to look at elements which can not be seen, for instance, by inspecting a 2-dimensional picture and/or those words or other abstract symbols fail to describe adequately. Moreover, VR allows students changing their points of view in a continuous and lexible manner, going around (left and right, up and down, near and far) the objects, “jumping” inside/outside the environment and accessing new, unusual perspectives. Furthermore, VR permits students to do actions and transformations — which are impossible to do in the real world — so to test perceptually their effects or the effects of hypothetical or conceptual operations. In other words, VR may be a heuristic tool which prompts students to manipulate their mental models to realise what happens if things might work differently as usual. In sum, VR induces to explore phenomena according to a “what if” attitude that orientates both logical and creative thinking in peculiar directions. These remarks suggest that learning processes occurring in a VR environment should be structurally different from those elicited by traditional instructional settings. Consequently, different cognitive activities should be elicited by a VR experience as compared to an instructional experience based on usual tools that do not produce an immersive contact between the student and the content to be acquired. However, this hypothesis needs to be empirically tested, and the study by Antonietti and Cantoia (2000), in particular, focused on a speciic cognitive activity, making sense. Undergraduates were randomly assigned either to a VR condition or to a Relection condition. In the Relection condition, they were asked to inspect for 5 min a high-quality 2-dimensional reproduction of a painting. In the VR condition, participants sat down in front of a computer screen where they were shown a “virtual tour” inside the painting. We used a desktop VR software which allows users to “jump” into the painting and to “walk”, or also to “ly” inside it; it is possible to move inside the painting in a continuous way across the three dimensions and to change freely the point of view along the orthogonal axes. The virtual experience with the painting lasted 5 min. Afterwards, students of both groups were presented the same tasks to be responded in writing. The general aim of these tasks 54

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was to understand what the painting represents. More precisely, four tasks investigated the process of sense-making, each of them highlighting a particular aspect of the construction of the meaning of the painting. By this way, we could record four different converging dimensions of the making sense process. The four tasks were: to ind out a title to the painting; to describe what, according to one’s opinion, the painting meant; to list all the questions that the painting suggested; to write down a brief commentary about the painting.

The two different kinds of exposure to the painting manipulated in the experiment (relective inspection versus virtual immersion) produced different responses.

Firstly, it seems that only VR experience induced students to assume spontaneously a meta-perspective, namely, to think not to “what” they faced to, but to “why” or “how” something was in front of them. For instance, various answers given to the four written tasks by VR students showed an interest in the painter’s pictorial choices or in the representational technique he employed. Secondly, VR prompted students to conceptualise experience at an abstract level; undergraduates who were presented the virtual tour proposed more abstract titles, interpretations and comments as compared to the other subsample. Thirdly, VR experience tended to stimulate a free and imaginative elaboration of the inputs: participants evoked previous experiences in their real life or rehearsed associative links. On the contrary, the relection condition induced participants to underline cultural or inferential links and hinted at a speculative approach; in this condition students privileged the historical features of the painting and were interested in the life of the author and in his work. So, we can conclude that VR elicits thinking process different from those activated by a non-immersive, static, ixed perspective.

As long as the third kind of effect is concerned, we will make a few points on the conceptions of learning, namely, the convictions that people develop about the process of learning. It is interesting to highlight possible relationships between such conceptions and the general “intellectual climate” in which a person lives: such a climate is not irrelevant to the development of ideas about the goals and the modalities of learning, the elements that facilitate, support it or make it dificult, and so on.

Therefore, it is considered important to place the conceptions of learning within a framework that takes into account also the cultural relationships that persons develop out of school. In fact, the use of press publications, television and radio programs, Internet, multimedia software, and so on, puts people in contact with cultural “objects” that produce learning in different ways and with various degrees of intentionality. It can be hypothesised that a frequent experience and familiarity with particular types of these instruments can be associated with particular beliefs, emotions and attributions regarding the process of learning. To test such a hypothesis (Perez-Tello et al., 2005), three hundred and thirty-ive secondary school students were administered 55

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a questionnaire aimed at assessing their beliefs about cognitive, emotional and attributive aspects of learning and a questionnaire measuring the frequency of use of television, videorecorder, audiocassette and CD player, radio, computer, books, newspapers and journals, as well as museum, exhibitions, theatre performances, concerts and cinema attendance. Analyses showed signiicant links between some aspects of the conceptions of learning and the frequent use of speciic media. More precisely, some media (television, videocassettes, daily papers and sports papers, leisure magazines) were associated with the idea of learning as reception and imitation of an expert, whereas other media (books and audiocassettes) with the idea of learning as cultural production. Data regarding affective issues showed that there are media (for example books) whose frequent use was associated with the lack of negative emotions and with a plurality of positive emotions about learning; by contrast, other media (like television) were not accompanied by positive emotions related to learning. Finally, as far the attributive aspects were concerned, it appeared that some tools (books, audiobooks and audiocassettes to learn foreign languages) tended to be connected to internal attributions, whereas other tools (videorecorder, radio) to external attributions.

If we consider the media that exemplify various types of culture in a prototypical way, it is interesting to observe how the familiarity with the written culture (represented emblematically by books), with the secondary oral culture of a more passive order (represented by television) and with the culture that is between the former and the latter, but involving a more active attitude (represented by the computer) were correlated to speciic conigurations of conceptions of learning.

The reading activity, which implies the exercise of the relexive thought, was positively associated to cognitive, affective, and attributive factors that shape, as a whole, an optimistic picture of the learner. In the opinion of who reads frequently, the is an active person, able to produce culture, as someone who grows and expresses him/herself through learning activities, who manages actions of will, who feels pleasure and is comfortable both with him/herself and with others, who is able to observe him/herself critically and to recognize his/her own abilities and his/her own errors. Overall, it deals with a vision of learning that emphasises the subject as an individual, shaping him/her as a person who is “in expansion”. On the contrary, the use of television — implying higher levels of passivity in comparison to reading — is connected only with factors regarding the cognitive dimension of the conceptions of learning. Such factors lead to consider the latter type of learner to be more limited than the former. He/she who learns is, in the opinion of he/she who often watches television, a spectator, someone who observes or listens to what the others do or say. Nevertheless, it deals with a person that shows a certain degree of activity, since he/she is capable of evaluating his/her own actions and of recognising his/ 56

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her own intellectual skills when television watching is oriented towards cultural and scientiic programs and not towards iction. Moreover, this conception of learning is more relational than the previous one, since he/she who learns is seen mainly as engaged in interpersonal relationships, concentrated on hearing or observing others.

If reading books is connected with the picture of the learner as the protagonist of the learning scene, the use of television is connected with the picture of the learner as someone who shares the learning scene with any other. The computer should be associated to conceptions of learning according to which the learner should be seen as someone who is part of a distributed activity of knowledge. By contrast, the use of the computer was connected to the picture of the learner as being alien to culture.

In fact, the use of the computer was negatively correlated with learning seen as production of culture, that is, with the idea of a person inserted in a historical-cultural community, and it was positively associated with the idea of the learner as someone whose errors do not depend on him/her.

How should the use of multimedia tools be planned?

Multimedia can be used in many different ways. How can the most functional way be found? Let us discuss an example. In teaching technical subjects through information technologies, both VR experience and hypertextual knowledge acquisition could be oriented to lead students to construct in their mind an appropriate model of the machines they have to learn to use. This was the goal of the prototypal computersupported system investigated in a study by Antonietti and colleagues (2001). The VR environment was designed to enable students to learn about the architecture of a turning lathe (declarative knowledge) and its use (procedural knowledge) within a realistic situation, performing practical operations, both physical (i.e., piece positioning on machine tool and cutting tool movement) and conceptual (i.e., choice of cutting tool from the virtual store, choice of cutting speed). A virtual machine simulating a lathe and its functioning was planned to satisfy several requirements.

It was highly interactive because it could work only if students performed the appropriate operations; each performed operation was followed by feedback about its correctness. Furthermore, on-line assessment and direct evaluation were provided to students because learners were provided comments about each step of the procedure; comments concerned either of error messages and hints at consulting the relevant section of the manual or of prompts to carry out the next operation. Learning paths were personalised both since students were free to operate on the virtual machine according to different working styles and since they were allowed to begin from the exploration of the virtual prototype or from the navigation of a hypertext about the 57

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lathe functioning. This should also facilitate integration of practical and conceptual ways of learning.

As far as the hypertext wais concerned, this environment included only visual information closely related to the text and focused on speciic issues concerning the lathe structure and functioning. Such information was presented into a display in which it was easy to match and integrate textual and visual elements, which were always simultaneously available. The hypertext tried to reduce possible confusions by presenting a restricted set of information and providing students a map of the whole structure of the environment.

A critical question to be addressed was: is it better for students to begin the training by using the virtual lathe or by facing the hypertext? In fact, students could be trained according to one of the following two approaches. They could begin to inspect and to use the virtual lathe, without having received any previous systematic information about such an instrument, so that a preliminary set of notions could be acquired through a personal and direct exploration of the machine’s structure and functioning; then, they could amend, enrich, and/or “ill” this preliminary mental model of the lathe thanks to the knowledge that they could ind in the hypermedia. On the contrary, students could begin to learn verbal and visual information from the hypertext and then can try to “apply” the mental model that they have derived from such information to the virtual prototype so that they could emend, enrich, and/or “ill” the model on the basis of the feedback that they received while operating on the simulated machine.

Shortly, in the irst case learning proceeds from action to conceptualisation; in the second case from conceptualisation to action.

From a theoretical point of view, both the irst and the second approach show pros and cons. For instance, the free experience with the virtual tool gives at once students an overall idea of the machine and this might help them to make sense of the instructions successively provided by the hypertext; however, students might spend a lot of time in trying to understand how to make the lathe to work and some misconceptions might be induced by an incorrect use of the machine. On the other side, the previous analysis of the hypertext should permit students to acquire precise notions about the lathe so that then they can operate on the virtual machine appropriately; however, knowledge furnished by the hypertext might be dificult to be “converted” into adequate actions to be performed on the machine. Thus, it seems to be an empirical question to assess which approach actually produces the best learning outcomes.

To answer this question, two experiments were carried out by analysing a speciic learning situation, that is, the set up of the lathe. We expected that the VR-hypertext training sequence and the hypertext-VR sequence should produce different learning outcomes according to the students’ main need (i.e., to have an overall functional picture of the machine vs. to have precise conceptual notions).

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Experiments showed that the integration of VR and hypertext allowed students to understand the essential features of the lathe and to update or to restructure their initial cognitive representation of this machine. Furthermore, they suggested that in naive students learning is enhanced when the exploration of the virtual lathe precedes the presentation of hypertext information. Conversely, for expert students it is better to begin to inspect hypertext and then to navigate the virtual environment. Presumably in the irst case students lack any idea about the lathe. Thus, the concrete experience provided by the virtual machine gives them the opportunity to easily acquire a general conceptual sketch, which is useful to understand and to organise information subsequently given by the hypertext. If notions are provided without such a preliminary mental framework, it is dificult to make sense of them. In the second case learners already have in mind the model of the lathe and possess a basic knowledge: they do not need to acquire preliminary reference points; for these students learning requires linking abstract notions to real elements. For this reason they perform better when the interaction with the virtual lathe follows the information rehearsal-information application sequence: in this way, in fact, they can ind the parts mentioned in the text in the 3D-simulation of the machine and they can see how the operations described verbally can actually be applied.

How should the use of multimedia tools be assisted?

We discussed above the importance of identifying the most functional way of using a hypermedia tool. But that is not still enough. Metacognitive relection revealed to be a useful way to enhance the use of a multimedia tool in order to reach an adequate level of performance. As an example, in a study focused on the analyses of the strategies employed while playing Tetris (a video game requiring ocular-manual coordination) and aimed at relating such strategies to metacognitive awareness (Antonietti, Rasi & Underwood, 2002) undergraduates were asked retrospective questions about their awareness of the strategies followed and of the dificulties and abilities involved in the video game. Performance scores, as well as the moves carried out during the game, and eye movements were recorded. Consistent patterns of moves and eye movements emerged; in addition, he most functional patterns were associated to the highest performance scores. It was clear that undergraduates were aware of some strategic aspects of the game and such awareness differed according to performance level. Is increasing such awareness useful to improve performance?

Some evidence to this issue can be drawn from a previous study (Antonietti & Bartolomeo, 1999) in which expert video-game players were compared to novices.

Participants took part in three consecutive game sets of Tetris. The sample was di59

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vided in three groups. The control group (CC) had just to play the three game sets.

The off-line metacognitive group (MC off-line) had to answer — after the second game set and before starting the third one — to a few questions (e.g., «In your idea, is it better to rotate the piece and then to move it or irst move it and then to rotate it?») that invited to ind the best way to decide the moves to take. To the on-line metacognitive group (MC on-line) the questions were presented while participants were involved in the second game-set; in this last condition, at temporal ixed intervals the game was automatically interrupted and in a window on the screen appeared the question to which the student had to answer before keeping on the set. Differences between the score in the irst game and the score in the last one showed an improvement in the participants’ performance. Participants in the MC off-line group got better mean differences than players in the control group, but worse than players in the on-line MC group. In short, metacognitive relection on the mental processes involved in playing Tetris allowed people to improve performance; furthermore, beneits were higher when metacognitive relection took place during the game. It is interesting to consider the interaction between the metacognitive conditions and the players’ behaviour: novice players improved only in the MC on-line condition, whereas expert players got helped in both the two MC conditions. Probably, players in the irst group needed an actual contact with the situation on which they were asked to relect; on the contrary, players in the second group, who were familiar with video games, took an advantage even from uncontextualized metacognitive hints.

Data suggested that relection has a core role even in video games — such as Tetris — in which swiftness is important. Strategic elements are not automatized: in fact an intentional focusing on them — as metacognitive hints suggested — produced an improvement in the scores: the strategic component involved in the video games can be strengthened by developing attention for the way the mind works during the execution of the task.

Conclusions The multiple implications of the use of multimedia tools in learning processes have been discussed from the cognitive psychology point of view. Psychological research can give a contribution to multimedia education in two main ways. As far as knowledge is concerned, the studies showed that through multimedia tools people do not always reach different or even better results, anyway they do not in a spontaneous way. Educators have to make clear to the learners the possible paths and the potentialities of the tools they are about using. To personalize their own learning process, students have to develop a certain degree of metacognitive consciousness about the 60

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peculiar features of the tools and the environments in which they operate and about the more suitable strategies they can use.

Inluences of the use of multimedia tools have been discussed too. Research data showed that technologies do not affect attention skills in their own, it is more inluential the speciic activity that they encourage: attention decreases when one uses — even for a short while — tools that leave him/her passive; conversely, tools that activate the user do not affect attention skills, even after a long use.

The use of multimedia tools inluences processing and activates typical forms of thought (i.e., inferences, abstraction, creative thinking). Teachers must be careful to select technologies according to their educational aims and to choose adequately both the kind of stimulus and activities they propose to the students. It is important for the teachers to make their choices clear as well as to explain to the students the potentialities of the different functions which are activated by the tool.

As far as inluence on the beliefs is concerned, literature showed that the prevalent use of speciic typologies of multimedia tools affected the way people conceptualize learning experience and the role of the learner. It is important to increase the set of experiences according to a conscious attitude towards the different degree of activation of each tool.

The importance of metacognitive awareness is supported also by considering the assistance to the use of multimedia tools which is needed. Students with no previous experience in multimedia learning are favoured by the possibility to relect about strategies while they are operating with the tools and by the chance to explore in a free and active way the new learning environments in order to refer to mental models appropriate to the learning context.

References Antonietti, A. (2005). A Framework to Conceptualise Technology Enhanced Environments. In R. Carneiro, K. Steffens, & J. Underwood (Eds.), Self-Regulated Learning in Technology Enhanced Learning Environments (pp. 59-63). Aachen: Staker.

Antonietti, A., & Bartolomeo, A. (1999). I videogiochi insegnano a pensare? Informatica e Scuola, 7 (1), 6-7.

Antonietti, A., Calcaterra, A., Colombo, B., & Giorgetti, M. (2003). Attorno al computer.

Strumenti e ricerche su nuove tecnologie e apprendimento. Roma: Carocci.

Antonietti, A., & Cantoia, M. (2000). To See a Painting Versus to Walk in a Painting: An Experiment on Sense-Making through Virtual Reality. Computers and Education, 34, 213-223.

Antonietti, A., & Cantoia, M. (2001). Imparare con il computer. Come costruire contesti di apprendimento per il software. Trento: Erickson.

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Antonietti, A., & Colombo, B. (2008). Computer-Supported Learning Tools: A Bi-Circular Bi-Directional Framework. New Ideas in Psychology, 26, 120-142.

Antonietti, A., Imperio, E., Rasi, C., & Sacco, M. (2001). Virtual Reality and Hypermedia in Learning to Use a Turning Lathe. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 17, 142-155.

Antonietti, A., & Mellone, R. (2003). The Difference between Playing Games with and without the Computer: A Preliminary View. Journal of Psychology, 137, 133-144.

Antonietti, A., Rasi, C., & Underwood, J. (2002). I videogiochi: una palestra per il pensiero strategico? Ricerche di Psicologia, 25 (1), 125-144.

Calcaterra, A., Antonietti, A., & Underwood, J. (2005). Cognitive Style, Hypermedia Navigation and Learning. Computers and Education, 44, 441-457.

Fabio, R. A., Antonietti, A., & Balconi, M. (2004). Fruizione multimediale, processi attentivi e rendimento scolastico. Rassegna di Psicologia, 21 (3), 107-135.

Fabio, R.A., Hernandez, S., & Antonietti, A. (2003). Apprendimento con ipermedia e livelli di conoscenza: dichiarativa, condizionale e procedurale. Orientamenti Pedagogici, 50, 637-649.

Fiorina, L., Antonietti, A., Colombo, B., & Bartolomeo, A. (2007). Thinking Style, Browsing Primes and Hypermedia Navigation. Computer and Education, 49, 916-941.

Guarnieri, A., Fabio, R.A., & Antonietti, A. (2005). I media culturali e i giovani. Proili di uso. Roma: Carocci.

Perez-Tello, S., Antonietti, A., Liverta Sempio, O., & Marchetti, A. (2005). Conceptions of Learning and Use of Cultural Media. In A. Antonietti (Ed.), What Students and Teachers Think about Learning: Contextual Aspects. European Journal of School Psychology (Special issue), 2 (1-2), 127-148.

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eLearning PLEs perspectives Paolo Frignani

ABSTRACT

Department of Human Sciences, University of Ferrara, via Savonarola, 38 – 44100 Ferrara, Laboratory of Sciences and Technologies of Cognition and Learning Processes (CARIDlab), via dei Cappuccini, 4 – 44011, Argenta (FE). E-mail: paolo.frignani@unife.it

This article means, on one hand, to draw a mindful analysis of how technologies and methods interacted and mutually inluenced in the development of e-Learning and, on the other, to develop a critical relection on how this relationship should evolve.

The relationship between platforms and didactics will be brought in focus in the light of experiences deriving from research on degree courses in which blended models, didactic platforms and paradigms, repositories and personal paths construction were experimented: such dualities cannot but engender deep relections on and projects in training, in its broader sense and speciically in the higher education context.

We are therefore in a phase in which, following the enthusiasm of the irst meeting between technology and the process of teaching/learning, a knowing structuring of the relationship needs to be implemented, the alternative being summed up by the metaphor of a man with strong arms (technology) but a weak back (method), so that he can’t lift any weight.

Keywords: eLearning; web2.0; PLE; learning object; platform; learning environment.

Edizioni Erickson – Trento

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Introduction When a reality, be it a technological innovation, a technical improvement or a “simple” method, becomes a shared good without there being a strong manifest will for this to happen, we cannot but wonder on the reason for the “success”, without the need to call in cause Jean Cocteau1 and his say: of course sheer luck exists. How else could we explain the success of others?

Because of this, if we take stock of the gradual diffusion of digital infrastructures, informatic instruments and multimedia applications “attracting” the people’s attention, of youth but also of not so young, in both leisure and working, or teaching/ learning contexts, we cannot archive the phenomenon as a mere fashion, or just say, with Artur C. Clarke2: any suficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

This means dropping our difident scrutiny which implies that, just as for magic, there is no connection between cause and effect, especially if the technology and the methods “guiding” it in its course are used in teaching/learning contexts.

It could be objected that the diffusion of tools and technologies is not motive enough to stimulate a relection on their use and eficacy; and yet, when we are faced with technologies — such as learning platforms or even better, environments, showing a strong interaction with what we could call the sphere of communication, in the broadest sense, and of didactic communication in its stricter sense, suggesting a scenario in which the normal culture-induced gap is overlaid by a new form of division known as “digital divide” — we can no longer ignore all the themes and the problems that technology created and is creating in the complex system of human relations and in the even more complex and diverse world of pedagogical relationships.

In this context, with Johann Wolfgang Goethe we could then say: «If we would act along the principles of pedagogy, the elders should not forbid a young what makes him happy while having nothing else to offer him in exchange».

I believe eLearning is moving in this mare magnum full of problems, and it often had to navigate on sight; therefore we should constantly feed a relection upon use eficacy of such technologies and related instruments, especially those which allow the on-line sharing of knowledge, and upon the usage of multimedia as part of the learning process. eLearning has actually used the tools and the methods of web communication following two main lines: the irst is characterized by processes inalized to the design, 1

2

Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau (1889-1963): poet, novelist, playwright, designer, director, scriptwriter and actor.

Arthur Charles Clarke: science fiction author and inventor, the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

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implementation and use of Learning Objects, and the second, complementing the irst, is centred on processes whose purpose is the implementation of those functionalities needed at a higher level of interactivity in the fruition of contents and along the paths of learning processes (igure 1).

The different objectives of the interactive functionalities aimed at organization, and the ones with didactic inalities, are self-evident (even if, in the context of traceability of a path, the two kinds of function tend to converge in terms of both qualitative and quantitative measurement), but it is not possible to distinguish with equal precision between the management functionalities of Learning Objects, and the functionalities supporting a synchronous or asynchronous dialogue between the actors of the process, the collaboration activities, the ways for assessing learning and quality of the process, and more generally all those functionalities which make richer the didactic process.

The Laboratorio di Scienze e Tecnologie dei Processi cognitivi e dell’apprendimento – CARIDlab (Laboratory of Sciences and Technologies of Cognition and Learning Processes) carried out a research in this sense, developing a taxonomic framework to be applied to Learning Objects. Such a research shows the existence and the diffusion of structural models, connected to diverse didactic strategies, which go beyond the boundaries between univocal deliver of knowledge (in which the information low is essentially mono-directional and the interaction is limited to those options offered by suring technologies implemented in the HTML protocol) and the two-way exchange of information and documentation between user and structure, or among members of a community in a context of collaborative use of Learning Objects (such as those Learning Objects tied to Problem Solving, Simulation, Virtual Role Playing, Web Quest, Collaborative Concept Map models).

eLearning

Web Communication Implementation

Design

Functionalities

Implementation Interactivity Use Contents

Learning Processes

LEARNING OBJECTS

Figure 1 eLearning and web communication.

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The families of functionalities that one inds implemented can be classiied by connecting them with two main groups formed, the irst, by those instruments and functions which we might call, on one hand, organization-oriented, and on the other, administration-oriented (the management of the time-windows for resource use, or the enrolling in an exam), and the second by more speciically didactic functionalities (such as forums) governed or at least inspired by different pedagogical paradigms.

It is not hard inding functionalities inspired by or enacting strategies that are typical of “traditional” pedagogical paradigms, oriented towards a constructivist paradigm, and also functionalities in which are easily found the main lines of the social constructivism — in which traits from Mead’s (1913) and Vygotskij’s (1978) interactionism are assimilated — that is the rich soil from which sprouted and developed the communities of practice (Wenger, 1998), showing how relationships between eLearning and knowledge management are irst structural and then functional.

The theory of Piaget which we can consider, being a theory of development, in its effects on the education side, and Vygotskij’s socio-cultural approach lead us to two fundamental problems: in school, and even more in university or in lifelong training, do we intend to teach behaviours or mental skills? What relation exists between cognitive development and learning?

The irst problem is expressed in the long standing debate, and still present in school, between behaviourist approach, describing learning in terms of behaviours to be acquired, and the cognitivist approach, stressing the need for school to promote the development of mental skills required to learn.

The second question refers back to the confrontation with the piagetian perspective, holding the student learns when his cognitive development, that is the natural evolution of his skills, allows him to. The child, states Piaget, goes through a series of development phases and each phase has its own structuring making him qualitatively, and not only quantitatively, different from the earlier phase. Intelligence, in fact, develops itself on a practical basis, through action. It is through action that the subject gets in touch with the object, with external reality.

The great turning point of cognitivism is summarized by Piaget (1923, p. 68): «it is clear that an education aimed at an active discovery of true is superior to an education consisting in training the individuals to will through pre-constituted wills, and to know through truths simply accepted as such». The turning point echoes Vygotskij’s theory, underscoring how learning stimulated by the teacher can promote the cognitive development of the individual.

Without getting into the scientiic theories, I simply wish to stress how the studies of these great scholars produced functionalities in which it is easy to ind the lines of evolution of the cognitive/constructivist paradigm into a “constructionist” paradigm, 66

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seen as a bridge between Piaget’s theory and didactics through new technologies. This paradigm, described by Seymour Papert (1980), one of Piaget’s co-workers, states that the knowledge construction is easier, and therefore more eficient, the more it is based not just on the mental fact, but supported by a parallel reality construction, congruent with one’s own reasoning style.

Such paradigmatic evolution of cognitivism, connected with the socio-constructivism, makes possible to privilege the approach to multimediality and at same time to build a fertile ground in which the practice communities were born and grew, showing how the relations between eLearning and knowledge management are structural before being functional.

Finally, last but not least, I would mention, referring to the cognitivist paradigm, an European pilot Project: TIC and Cognitivism3, whose stated objective was «favouring an approach to multimedia», considered as an «apparatus of new knowledge and cognitive development», thus an epistemic tool belonging to the social cognitivism paradigm.

All these paradigms are, each in different measure, the basis for what is called “learning platforms”, a deinition slowly falling out of favour for reasons that go beyond the mere terminological question, leading to the adoption of the expression «Learning Environment» which today, in my opinion, is well connected with the concept of «Personal Learning Environment» (PLE) irst introduced by James Farmer (2004; 2006)4. This concept presents some interesting perspectives both in relation with lifelong learning and, given Farmer’s origin, with the use of the blogosphere in the view of the teaching/learning process; but not forgetting its implementation at University, where the organization and the optimization of times, modes and tools for learning is a critical point in the relationship with students.

The question whether the virtual teaching — to which often the term eLearning is associated, not necessarily in the only meaning of on-line — equals the real learning is important especially when technology provides so many diverse tools, increasingly sophisticated and more and more related to methodological issues.

Quantitative and qualitative growth of methods and technologies — both informatic and multimedial — does not pose questions about the development of eficient tools, but rather about how to make them effective in educative contexts.

Tools for software design and complex use environments — in which problem solving or simulation games are carried out — can now be simulated. The basic question therefore becomes: «how this acquisition of skills and knowledge can be or become an acquisition of competencies?».

3 4

European Project Leonardo: TIC e Cognitivismo (http://www.cognitivemedia.org).

Founder of Edublogs (http://edublogs.org/).

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Personal Learning Environment These observations lead us to question ourselves, as already Oleg Liber5, Scott Wilson6 et al. (2006) did in Britain, about an approach to Personal Learning Environments which evolves the concept of platform or, even better, allows learning environments to evolve following a strong modular logic — in some ways suggesting an a la carte training (and this subject should require a separate discussion) — which not only should punctually meet the training needs of each person, but also reduce the current waste of resources. It is in fact strange noticing the phenomenon of increase in “equal” resources in the world of shared information.

Why there isn’t a solid effort in using the resources provided by the web? What is the sense of interoperability, if also knowledge is not shared, if what others have produced cannot be re-used? It seems that interoperability did not defeat the concept of “closed” platform — comparable to old “proprietary software” concept — and also the great success of “open” learning environments (Moodle could be an example).

It seems to me that sometimes interoperability comes close to the deinition of standard, such that of Andrew S. Tanenbaum7 — «The nice thing about standards is that there are so many among which to choose» — or that of Niklaus Wirth8: «The camel … a horse designed by a standards commission».

In this context, some questions from Stephen Downes9 can be useful to relect on the concept of Learning Environment and of Personal Learning Environment, leading us to reason on E-learning 2.0: «What happens when online learning ceases to be like a medium, and becomes more like a platform? What happens when online learning software ceases to be a type of content-consumption tool, where learning is “delivered”, and becomes more like a content-authoring tool, where learning is created?» (Downes, 2005).

The answer lies in the concept of web 2.0.

«The model of eLearning as being a type of content produced by publishers, organized and structured into courses, and consumed by students is turned on its head.

Insofar as there is content, it is used rather than read — and is, in any case, more likely to be produced by students than courseware authors. And insofar as there is structure, it is more likely to resemble a language or a conversation rather than a book or a manual» (Downes, 2005).

5 6 7 8 9

Director of CETIS-Centre for Educational Technology and Interoperability Standards, University of Bolton (UK).

Assistant Director of CETIS-Centre for Educational Technology and Interoperability Standards.

Informatics Professor, Vrije University, Amsterdam.

Swiss computer scientist, the father of the Pascal language.

Institute for Information Technology. E-Learning Research Group, Moncton, New Brunswick (Canada).

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Personal learning environments «would give the learner greater control over their learning experience (managing their resources, the work they have produced, the activities they participate in) and would constitute their own personal learning environment, which they could use to interact with institutional systems to access content, assessment, libraries and the like» (Downes, 2006).

The basic idea behind PLEs is the migration of the learning system from the institution to the learner.

PLEs connect to a number of remote systems, some teaching-oriented and Figure 2 Centralized approach (above) and distributed others not (igure 2). approach (below). (Source: Downes, 2006) eLearning 2.0 shows interesting promises: «The experience of eLearning for many has been no more than a hand-out published online, coupled with a simple multiple-choice quiz … . But by using these new web services, eLearning has the potential to become far more personal, social and lexible» (O’Hear, 2005)10.

And Stephen O’Hear also writes (2006): «The traditional approach to eLearning has been to employ the use of a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), software that is often cumbersome and expensive — and which tends to be structured around courses, timetables, and testing. That is an approach that is too often driven by the needs of the institution rather than the individual learner. In contrast, eLearning 2.0 (as coined by Stephen Downes) takes a “small pieces, loosely joined” approach that combines the use of discrete but complementary tools and web services — such as blogs, wikis, and other social software — to support the creation of ad-hoc learning communities». eLearning 2.0 is based on a fundamental premise: the existence of learning networks. If, following Downes (2004), we use a metaphor to speak of learning networks, the correct metaphor is «ecosystem, a collection of different entities related in a single environment that interact with each other». These decentralized learning networks are made of conversations that represent «ourselves, our blog posts, our publications and speeches, our thoughts in real-time».

10

Steve O’Hear published a number of articles in The Guardian, from which his words are quoted in text (http://browse. guardian.co.uk/search?search=O%27Hear&sitesearch-radio=guardian&go-guardian=Search).

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Downes (2006) deines 8 points about networks, which can be usefully re-proposed by replacing the word network with the word eLearning: – effective eLearning is decentralized; – effective eLearning is distributed; – effective eLearning is disintermediated; – in effective eLearning, contents and services are disaggregated; – in effective eLearning, contents and services are dis-integrated (that is to say, entities in an eLearning are not “components” of one another); – effective eLearning is democratic; – effective eLearning is dynamic; – effective eLearning is desegregated; e.g., learning is not thought of as a Separate Domain.

Now, starting from the premise that eLearning as we know it never really maintained its promises, it might be a good thing to see new web 2.0 platforms being born, more focused on the real needs of a learning community, rather than on just a provision of pedagogical content. But it is clear that this will happen only through a real experience of the user, that should, in my opinion, be much more game-oriented than in the past (and I do not want to touch upon the concept of video game…).

This kind of experience has been studied in cognitive psychology through the «low theory», which stresses the personal well-being each one can obtain from a certain situation, getting in an optimal psychological state, i.e. by jointly appealing to four of our cognitive components: control, attention, curiosity and intrinsic interest (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990)11. In his more recent works, Csikszentmihalyi holds that Personal Learning Environments (PLE) should give to the learner a higher control on his learning experience in a personal environment capable of interacting with the diverse systems that allow him to access contents.

The digitalization of the Globe causes deep changes in the education of our society, but eLearning should not only follow these phenomena, it should provide teachers and students with tools for sharing knowledge in a creative and playful way.

In plain words, we could close stating: technologies exist and their economic potential is real; maybe we had to wait for web 2.0 to free the web, we might need a true eLearning 2.0 to free education!

11

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, born in 1934 and Professor of Psychology at Claremont Graduate University and University of Chicago, president of the American Psychological Association and father of Christopher Csíkszentmihályi of MIT Media Lab.

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E-learning

References* Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper and Row. Downes, D. (2004). The Buntine Oration: Learning Networks. (http://www.downes.ca/cgibin/page.cgi?post=20).

Downes, S. (2005). E-Learning 2.0. (http://www.elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=artic les&article=29-1) Downes, S. (2006). Learning Networks and Connective Knowledge. (http://it.coe.uga.edu/ itforum/paper92/paper92.html).

Farmer, J. (2004). Communication Dynamics: Discussion Boards, Weblogs and the Development of Communities of Inquiry in Online Learning Environments. In R. Atkinson, C. McBeath, D. Jonas-Dwyer, & R. Phillips (Eds.), Beyond the Comfort Zone: Proceedings of the 21st ASCILITE Conference (pp. 274-283). Perth, WA: University of Western Australia. (http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/perth04/procs/farmer.html).

Farmer, J. (2006). The Inevitable Personal Learning Environment Post. (http://incsub.org/ blog/2006/the-inevitable-personallearning-environment-post).

La Vecchia, L., Pedroni, M., & Poletti, G. (2006). Dal forum strutturato all’ambiente di strutturazione della conoscenza. Atti del Convegno Progettare e-learning: processi, materiali, connettività, interoperabilità e strategie. Macerata, 7-9 giugno 2006.

Mead, G.H. (1913). The Social Self. Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientiic Methods, 10, 374-380.

O’Hear, S. (2005). Seconds Out, Round Two. The Guardian, Tuesday 15 November. (http:// www.guardian.co.uk/education/2005/nov/15/elearning.technology3).

O’Hear, S. (2006). E-Learning 2.0 – How Web Technologies Are Shaping Education. (http:// www.readwriteweb.com/archives/e-learning_20.php).

Papert, S. (1980). Mindstorms. Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas. New York: Basic Books. (Papert, S., Mindstorms. Bambini, computer e creatività. Milano: Emme, 1984).

Papert, S. (1996). Connected Family: Bridging the Digital Generation Gap. Atlanta: Longstreet Press. (Papert, S., Connected family. Come aiutare genitori e bambini a comprendersi nell’era di Internet. Milano: Mimesis, 2006).

Piaget, J. (1923). Le langage et la pensée chez l’enfant. Neuchâtel: Delachaux et Niestlé. (Piaget, J., Il linguaggio e il pensiero del fanciullo. Firenze: Editrice Universitaria, 1955).

Piaget, J. (1926). La représentation du monde chez l’enfant. Paris: Alcan. (Piaget, J., La rappresentazione del mondo nel fanciullo. Torino: Boringhieri, 1966).

Piaget, J. (1936). La naissance de l’intelligence chez l’enfant. Neuchâtel: Delachaux et Niestlé.

(Piaget, J., La nascita dell’intelligenza del bambino. Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1968).

Piaget, J. (1945). La formation du symbol chez l’enfant. Neuchâtel: Delachaux et Niestlé.

(Piaget, J., La formazione del simbolo nel bambino. Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1971).

Vygotskij, L.S. (1962). Thought and Language. Cambridge: MIT Press. (Vygotskij, L.S., Pensiero e linguaggio. Firenze: Giunti-Barbera, 1966). * All references to online resources in this paper and in the bibliography were verified at May 2009.

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Vygotskij, L.S. (1978). Mind in Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. (Vygotskij, L.S., Il processo cognitivo. Torino: Boringhieri, 1980).

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice. Learning, Meaning, and Identity. New York: Cambridge University Press. (Wenger, E., Comunità di pratica. Apprendimento, signiicato, identità. Milano: Raffaello Cortina, 2006).

Wilson, S., Liber, O., Johnson, M., Beauvoir, P., Sharples, P., & Milligan, C. (2006). Personal Learning Environments: Challenging the Dominant Design of Educational Systems. (http:// dspace.ou.nl/dspace/bitstream/1820/727/1/sw_ectel.pdf).

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Professional profiles in e-Learning Lorenzo Cantoni

ABSTRACT

NewMinE – New Media in Education Laboratory, University of Italian Switzerland, via Buffi, 13 – 6900 Lugano (Svizzera). E-mail: lorenzo.cantoni@lu.unisi.ch

The article presents some inquires about the various job titles used in the ield of e-Learning; due to its being quite young, this ield has seen many different terminologies, and very few common elements.

Three strategies are then offered to guide further research: moving from formal description of involved professions, from training curricula designed to prepare e-Learning professionals, from the ways e-Learning professionals use to describe their activities in social networks.

Two different directions are singled out: on one side a “professionalizing” trend, required by the industrialization (and division of labor) in the training field, which calls for eLearning professionals; on the other side, a “socializing” trend, according to which all educators/trainers should have some basic competence in the e-Learning domain, even if they do not make an extensive use of ICT in their teaching practice.

Keywords: e-Learning; employability; professions; knowledge society; tutor.

Introduction In this paper I will present results of some studies on the professional proiles linked to the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in LearnEdizioni Erickson – Trento

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ing, indicate some particularly promising lines of research, and draw few general conclusions.

First of all it may be useful to explain how the term e-Learning will be interpreted herein. The word e-Learning is undeniably (ab)used in a whole range of contexts and with meanings which at times differ greatly. In the author’s opinion (Cantoni et al., 2007), e-Learning can be interpreted as a context in which the learning/teaching experience occurs and which is characterized by the decisive role and pervasive presence of ICT and, as a strategy for the effective incorporation of ICT in the learning/teaching experience. The term will be used with the second meaning in this paper.

The names of the professions/roles linked to e-Learning Some data From 2002 to 2005 I was involved in projects (Cantoni & Succi, 2003; Cantoni et al., 2003; Cantoni, Lepori & Succi, 2003; Cantoni & Esposito, 2004; Succi & Cantoni, 2005), studying the declared quality of e-Learning at Swiss, Italian and other European universities. On these occasions the job titles attributed by the various support centres to their workers were gathered in order to better understand how e-Learning activities were organized in the various universities/nations.

The result was a wide assortment of titles with few elements in common.

In the 2002 research project, which studied the Swiss universities and those of the four regions comprising the “Four Motors” of Europe (Lombardy, Baden Württenberg, Catalunya and Rhône-Alpes), 29 terms indicating the job titles of the people employed in the universities’ support centres were identiied (Table 1).

These job titles can be grouped into four macro-categories:

a) people who deal with content. The absence of the Subject Matter Expert (SME) is surprising but this professional igure was probably introduced in Europe at a later date; in any case, the respondees’ point of view – and that of the e-Learning development support centres – was that this igure was generally external; b) people who deal with the medium; that is, with technological aspects: from the infrastructure to the implementation of multimedia content; c) people who deal with the relationship between content, medium and learners and who hold an instructional design role; d) people who deal with people, above all offering assistance to learners. The people who help learners and teachers solve technical problems fall into categories b and

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Job title

#

Online tutor

9

Planner

3

Instructional designer

3

Coordinator

2

Director

2

Editor of multimedia

2

Technical support

2

Content developer

2

Academic director; Classroom tutor; Counsellor; Didactical support; e-Learning assistant; e-Learning manager; Evaluator; Facilitator; Graphics developer; Illustrator; IT manager; Media development; Programmer; Project manager; Research assistant; Teaching assistant; Technical director; Tutor for student; Tutor for teacher; Web designer; Web tutor.

1

Table 1

Names used to indicate the activities carried out by the people employed in university eLearning support centres (adapted from Cantoni & Succi, 2003, p. 14). More than one answer was possible.

c. A ifth category that pulls together the professional igures and coordinates the activities can be identiied: e) management/policy/quality managers.

The same study, extended to all the Italian universities (Cantoni et al., 2004, p.

21), gave the following quantitative panorama which is fully in line with the previous study and with the identiication of the ields of activity: – instructional designers: 37%; – systems analysts: 8%; – tutors: 47%; – instructional managers: 8%.

Naturally, an e-Learning development support centre tends to see SMEs as “external”, while clearly testifying the importance of the igures of category c, those of categories b and d and some igures of category e.

A 2005 study (Cantoni & Rezzonico 2006; Rezzonico, 2006), set up to determine the importance of the players involved in the development of quality e-Learning projects, studied e-Learning project managers in Swiss (Swiss Virtual Campus), Dutch (SURF programme) and Swedish (Net University programme) universities, and presented the classiication in Table 2 (maximum value: 3).

As it can be seen, in this case the respondents acknowledged that even researchers play a small role…

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Professional figure/role

Importance in the success of an e-Learning project

Subject Matter Expert

2.6

Tutor

2.0

Technologist

1.8

Instructional designer

1.7

Administrator

1.6

Web developer

1.5

Quality controller

1.4

Graphic designer

1.1

Researcher

1.0

Table 2

Importance of the professional igures / roles in the success of an e-Learning project in universities (adapted from Rezzonico, 2006, p. 174). Values from -3 to +3.

Some further research lines As outlined above, one of the effects of digital technology in the world of education is that it contributes to the creation of new professional proiles / activities named in sundry and creative ways.

Besides identifying these new proiles, it is also important to investigate their real “content”, irrespective of their job title, by asking the following questions: what do these people actually do / what do they have to know / what skills do they need / how do they behave?

How should this study be tackled? There are three possible approaches.

First of all, we could start from the formal descriptions of the professional igures.

In Italy, the deinition of know-how/skills in e-Learning professions has recently taken a step forward. In the Thesaurus of Professional Figures, managed by the Borsa Nazionale del Lavoro (http://www.borsalavoro.it), six professions in the Instruction and Education area refer to the ield discussed in this paper while at least two others are closely linked to it as can be seen in Table 3.

The deinitions of some descriptors were conceived by the ASFOR ICT working group in collaboration with Italialavoro.

In general, and this is the second proposal, the training paths aimed at preparing professional igures for the world of e-Learning can be investigated. Italy offers many opportunities, above all at master’s level; a table of master’s degrees — LM-93: 76

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Thesaurus of Professional Figures: list of descriptors 351. e-Learning platform administrator 353. e-Learning platform architect 357. Instructional designer 360. e-Learning system managers (Distance learning manager) 362. Help-desk technician (e-Learning) 364. On-line tutor (content) 365. On-line tutor (process) 366. Virtual Community Manager

Table 3

Thesaurus of Professional Figures: list of descriptors for the e-Learning sector. (www.borsalavoro.it/wps/documenti/bin/C_12_Documento_460_ile.pdf)

Theory and Methodology of E-learning and of Media Education — is envisaged by Ministerial Decree 270/04. According to Ministry data (http://cercauniversita.cineca. it), three universities introduced this course in academic year 2008-2009: Bologna, Calabria and Padua.

On an international level, of the many on offer it gives me great pleasure to mention the course run by the University of British Columbia in Canada: the Graduate Certiicate In Technology-Based Distributed Learning (TBDL) (http://met.ubc.ca/ program/certiicate_options.htm), perhaps the “oldest” online course in the sector and which as an alumnus I am particularly proud of…

A third line of study could be to investigate how the job titles are actually used in the world of e-Learning based on the self-descriptions given by people in their professional proiles, studying their educational background, their career and the work opportunities in the sector. The world of the social networks appears particularly suitable for this purpose. Just think, for example, that in Facebook there are several hundred groups whose description includes the words e-Learning or eLearning and that two of these have more than two thousand members: “e-learning professionals” (2,698) and “e-Learning in Developing and Developed Countries” (2,179). A study of this type could be carried out proitably in Linkedin in terms of the groups, individuals and job offers.

Conclusions In a certain sense, the topic discussed here could be considered an effect of the industrialization of the education sector (Bates, 1999), which requires greater distribution of work with the ensuing advent of new specializations and professions.

This process must also be seen together with that of the socialization of production skills (Cantoni & Tardini, 2008), a process linked to all technologies of the word (Ong, 77

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2002). Indeed, on one hand the arrival on the education “market” of a new technology of the word leads to the need for new skills and, therefore, for new professionals, new scribes able to manage the technology. On the other hand, with the diffusion and socialization of the technology, production skills are also socialized and required for a growing group of people, under penalty of marginalization.

We are obviously not talking here of getting rid of all the specialists/scribes but of expanding the competence of those who have some know-how of the new technologies (think, for example, of the diffusion of desk top publishing: today most teachers and researchers have to be able to produce a text with a fairly good graphic layout but this does not mean that graphic artists and typographers are no longer needed).

The world of e-Learning is subject to both dynamics: on the one hand there is a demand for specialists in the various skills as outlined in the two paragraphs above and, on the other, there is the need for improved know-how and skills that have to be shared by everyone who operates in the education sector. Forman’s proposal (2002) goes in this direction, identifying skills that will enable professional igures (or people in education) to join the e-Learning world with some degree of expertise (Table 4).

Going back to the two deinitions given at the beginning of this paper, we have to consider the emergence of new professional proiles for people who work in ICT in the education sector and the enhancement of the skills of all educational operators in the knowledge society, whether they use ICT in their teaching or not.

Entrants

Existing skills

Recommendations

Trainers

Teaching and presentation skills

Develop a technical skill set

Teachers

Teaching and presentation skills

Develop a technical skill set Develop business awareness

Graduate school students

Learning theory and instructional design

Develop a technical skill set Develop business awareness Be able to work in practical, real world contexts Be able to work on projects from design through development and implementation

Software engineers

Software tools and technology

Develop instructional design skills Develop graphic and multimedia skills

Creative media designers

Graphic and creative design

Develop a technical skill set Develop instructional design skills Be able to work in practical, real world contexts

HR professionals

Business and consulting experience

Develop a technical skill set Develop instructional design skills

Table 4

Skills that the various proiles have to learn. (adapted from Forman, 2002)

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An example taken from an intentionally distant sector as that of driving may help here. Here we have a clearly deined professional igure; think, for example, of bus and taxi drivers and together a signiicant socialization of the basic skill of “knowing how to drive”. Indeed, whoever doesn’t possess this skill is potentially penalized and thus subject to a sort of driving divide and reduction in the level of employability (in other words, conditions between equal, people holding a driving license are preferred to those who don’t). Nowadays, thinking of driving as being a specialist skill, just like thinking that everyone must know how to drive a bus, would be ingenuous…

In e-Learning , as in driving, there are two factors in dynamic equilibrium that require attention and sensitivity if we are to avoid hyper-professionalism (the risk of who was once a scribe and doesn’t want to see competitors in a sector he considers his own) or hyper-socialization, confusing e-Learning as a context (in which everyone has to know how to operate) with e-Learning as an educational strategy and thus transforming it into a potentially undigested platter of education…

References* Bates, A.W. (1999). Managing Technological Change: Strategies for College and University Leaders, San Francisco (Ca): Jossey Bass.

Cantoni, L., Botturi, L., Succi, Ch., & New MinE Lab (2007). E-Learning. Capire, progettare, comunicare, Milano: Franco Angeli.

Cantoni, L., & Esposito, A. (Eds.) (2004). La qualità nella gestione dei progetti di e-Learning nelle università italiane, Milano: Università degli Studi di Milano.

Cantoni, L., Inglese, T., Lepori, B., & Succi, Ch. (2003). Quality and Management of eLearning in European Universities. In F. Malpica, A. Tremante, & N. Sala (Eds.), Education and Information Systems: Technologies and Application (pp. 277-282). Proceedings of Eista03 Conference, Orlando, Florida, USA. Cantoni, L., Lepori, B., & Succi, Ch. (2003). European Universities Managing Quality in e-Learning. In A. Szücs, & E. Wagner (Eds.). The Quality Dialogue. Integrating Quality Cultures in Flexible, Distance and e-Learning (pp. 291-298). Proceedings of the 2003 EDEN (European Distance Education Network) Annual Conference, Rhodes, 15-18 June 2003.

Cantoni, L., & Rezzonico, S. (2006). Conditions for e-Learning Projects’ Implementation – The Project Manager View. In Research into Online Distance Education and e-Learning: Making the Difference. Fourth EDEN Research Workshop, Castelldefels, Spain, 25-28 October, 2006.

Cantoni, L., & Succi, Ch. (2003). Gestione dei processi di e-Learning nelle università svizzere ed europee. In A. Andronico, G. Dettori, L. Ferlino, & G. Olimpo (Eds.), Didamatica * All references to online resources in this paper and in the bibliography were verified at September 2008.

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2003. Informatica per la didattica (pp. 9-16). Atti del Convegno, Genova, 27-28 febbraio 2003.

Cantoni, L., & Tardini, S. (2008). Communicating in the Information Society: New Tools for New Practices. In P.C. Rivoltella (Ed.), Digital Literacy: Tools and Methodologies for Information Society (pp. 26-44). Hershey (PA): IGI Publishing.

Forman, D.C. (2002). Careers in e-Learning: Taking the Next Step. Learning Circuits, November 2002. (www.learningcircuits.org/2002/nov2002/forman.html).

Ong, W.J. (2002). Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word. London (UK) – New York (NY): Routledge.

Rezzonico, S. (2006). Fattori rilevanti nei progetti di e-Learning in università. Il caso dei programmi nazionali di Svizzera, Olanda e Svezia. Tesi di laurea di Sibilla Rezzonico (Direttore di tesi: Prof. Lorenzo Cantoni), Facoltà di Scienze della Comunicazione, Università della Svizzera italiana. (http://doc.rero.ch/lm.php?url=1000,40,6,2006072517365 8-UY/2006COM001.pdf).

Succi, Ch., & Cantoni, L. (2005). Quality Benchmarking for e-Learning in European Universities. In P. Kommers, & G. Richards (Eds.), Proceedings of ED-MEDIA 2005 – World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia & Telecommunications (pp. 116123). (June 27 – July 2, 2005; Montréal, Canada). Norfolk (Va): Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE).

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School and media curriculum Nicola Paparella

ABSTRACT

Department of Pedagogy, Psychology and Teaching, University of Salento, via Stampacchia, 45 – 73100 Lecce. E-mail: nicola@studiopaparella.it

This article supports the thesis that there is a close connection between curricular model, the theory of school learning and the impact of the school with the media. We aim at carrying out a reconnaissance of the main curricular models, by using the methodology of the ontological analysis, which draws a classiication of the curricular models proposed by the scientiic research. This classiication doesn’t matter how to use the curriculum or what the curriculum allows: it wonders what is the curriculum. We identiied ive classes of models, that can be summarized as follows: curriculum as cultural container, curriculum as set of rules, curriculum intended as organizational guide, curriculum designed as a criterion for selecting projects, and inally curriculum as hermeneutic scheme and functional mediator.

Keywords: curriculum; curricular models.

The problem There is a close correlation between the idea of curriculum, the idea of school and the impact of the school with the media.

We can not intervene to guide the relationship between school and media, without taking into account the interference caused by the curriculum or by theories that explain and justify the idea of school as well as interpreted in practice.

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We will try to show that the most popular curriculum model can not be totally helpful for a correct and productive relationship between school and media. This model, which reductively conceives the curriculum as a simple cultural container, is related to an idea of school as an institution merely responsible for literacy and cultural transmission, and fails to think about media only as facilitation tools, without considering the great opportunities of media and the development of scientiic research in this ield.

The notion of curriculum The notion of curriculum (the irst indication is by J. Bobbitt in 1918) is quite controversial. In order to come out from any risk of ambiguity, even of semantic vagueness, we can now take advantage of the irst major achievements/outcomes of the research activity conducted by some university groups that are studying the ontological facilities in didactics1.

The speciicity of this survey is given by the same perspective of the study. The ontological survey priority considers what is the curriculum, before assessing how it works and what it makes possible, and examines and considers its place within an epistemological framework in relation to speciic theories of education and therefore also in reference to speciic teaching theories.

Working in this direction, we have identiied at least ive distinct models, each of which referred to a different theoretical framework.

The first model: curriculum as cultural container The most widespread model in Italy (and perhaps more easily explained by a part of the scientiic literature) suggests the curriculum as a cultural container. The word curriculum is, in this case, used to identify a study path or, more speciically, all of the contents or basic options that characterize the educational experience. It is what Frabboni (2005, p. 31) calls the «curriculum of Sunday», something that clearly is associated to the Italian POF (Educational Offer Plan), to all the initiatives conducted to ensure the literacy and social education. This argument is very frequent in the language and in the common attitudes, but scarcely supported in theory, if not for implicit references. In parallel, the school is considered as an insti1

We refer to the various contributions from the research team nationally coordinated by prof. L. Galliani in a PRIN (Research Project of National Interest) concerning the «Construction of ontologies, learning objects and communities of practice in multicultural and multilingual contexts and for specific subject areas (simulation, design and communication education)». The concept of curriculum was studied, in particular, by Paparella (2007, p. 113 et seq.); see also: Paparella (1990; 1991; 1992 and 19982, p. 112 et seq.).

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School and media curriculum

tution responsible for the literacy, and the media are regarded as mere instruments to facilitate education.

The second model: the curriculum as a set of rules A second model assumes the curriculum as a general set of the issues that arise when teaching processes interface with learning processes. This model includes different perspectives of analysis based on the objectives or on contents, from taxonomies of B.S. Bloom (Bloom et al., 1956; Krathwohl, Bloom & Masia, 1964; Harrow, 1972) up to the most recent taxonomies focused on communication tools (Bruce, 1995), passing through A. and H. Nicholls (1972), G. and V. De Landsheere (1975), and others.

Among them, we might ind the curriculum based on activities, on procedures (activity curriculum, Dodge et al., 1988), on skills or on more complex approaches, such as the structural one, already proposed by J.S. Bruner (1960; 1966; Bruner, Olver & Greenield, 1966). In such a case, we recognize a very precise theory of education, according to Bruner (1966), or a theory of school learning as Italian theorists prefer to say (Damiano, 1984).

Despite its glaring internal differences, this model focuses on the organizational modalities and functional structures of the school. The curriculum is a tool designed to bring order and logical sequence to a series of activities and therefore also to a variety of learning processes, which are expected to provide skills, knowledge, social and methodological abilities to be used independently and responsibly. More synthetically, you might say that the curriculum is a procedural device that allows you to regulate the educational task, by giving it educational eficiency and effectiveness.

Precisely for this reason, the curriculum runs parallel to a theory of education and, conversely, any theory of education (or any theory of the school) refers, in an implicit or explicit way, to a precise curriculum model considered as a set of rules and criteria which confer rationality, eficiency and effectiveness to the educational activities.

In this context, the presence and the use of multimedial technologies are inscribed in a kind of instrumental logic, with implies very well characterized and sometimes even sophisticated fruitions; think about the role of certain media instruments in a lot of experiences of “planned education�, think about how the technologies can be usefully used in rationally designed teaching schemes (Maragliano, 1994), or consider the different aspects of the so-called collaborative writing and hypermedial cooperative learning (Colazzo, 2005).

The third model: the curriculum as organizational guide In the third group of curriculum models, the focus is shifted from the teaching processes to their organization and management, with a closer approximation of the 83

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concept of curriculum to that of programming. It is here that many useful proposals to education germinate, in particular: the one proposed by De Bartolomeis (1989), related to the so-called system of laboratories (Pontecorvo, Aiello & Zucchermaglio, 1995), the curriculum organized with conceptual maps.

In this model (curriculum frameworks), the concepts (the contents of knowledge) set up, within their boundaries and in the relations between them, more or less dense structures, also known as maps or networks. Teaching allows students to build the design of the subject to learn (Ausubel, Novak & Hanesian, 1978; Novak & Gowin, 1984; Novak, 1988; Damiano, 1995; Loschi, 1995; Guastavigna & Gineprini, 2004).

In any case, even in this third group of curriculum models, we have to consider, more or less directly, the theories proposed by J.S. Bruner, especially his contributions to the activation of thought and the structuring of mind (Bruner, 1986; 1990).

Above all, it implies an idea of school that is very dynamic and very attentive to the processes activated by the student. A dynamic school which uses multimedial resources in accordance with procedures which may also be complex and go beyond the mere use of a tool.

Technologies (the media) are not only tools and beneits, but they are functional mediators of education: they occupy, describe, deine the operational context of the school and provide, operate, move a lot of situations which determine reticular learning, interdisciplinary connections, operating procedures of research, and claim abductive thought, that guides multimedial exploration (Novak, 2002) and internet navigation.

In this group we have to consider those scholars who suggest a technological curriculum, aimed at the technological features of the education system (like Glaser, 1962), those who are studying particular processes of invidualization (like Rogers, 1969, and its curriculum for self-actualizing) and those that point to social change (i.e. the curriculum for social reconstruction of Apple, 1979; 1987; 1995).

The fourth model: the curriculum as a criterion for selecting projects The fourth model of curriculum broadens the discussion and considers the dimension of time and the issue related to quality. The idea of curriculum is not limited to its contents (however understood and interpreted), nor considers only the processes that are activated in/by the subject: it takes into consideration all this in a diachronic perspective that considers the growth of person, the development of situations, the dynamic management of processes and thus also their monitoring and evaluation.

This model comes directly from an idea of school organized through projects and goes beyond, considering the school as a whole system, embedded in a time, in a historical context, in a culture, in a social group.

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We put in this class of curriculum models, several proposals, such as the one considering the alternation between school and work, which has found interesting ields of application in the context of professional training, and the one usually associated with the so-called modular curriculum (Valle, 1997; 2002).

The alternation between school and work is a teaching modality which aims at the acquisition of skills usefull for the person and also employable in the labour market (Bocca, 1984; Aa.Vv. 1987; Brigida, Degli Esposti & Lombardo, 1992; Chiari 2003; Bozzi et al., 2005); it is designed, implemented and evaluated by the school in cooperation with business companies and foresees moments in classroom and moments of experience on the ield. The teaching paths consequently attach importance to the skills and consider the world of work as a truly learning environment2.

The modular organization of the curriculum, which can not be identiied, reductively, with the application of the legal formula of “modules”, requires a profound rethinking of the disciplines and of the contents (to be organized into semantic clusters and units of meaning), the choice of methods and techniques, a deep organizational change. Above all it requires to rethink times and places of education, the teaching modalities (in addition to the frontal teaching, it includes laboratories, research activities, the presence of a tutor) and, consequently, the ways of education management.

The most obvious sign of modular teaching is the kind of organization of didactic units that are focused on cross-cutting skills (referred to different disciplines), and then on a didactic organization that breaks up the disciplinary structures in order to aggregate them again in educational paths characterized by explorative approaches and research activities (Aa.Vv., 1986; Watkins, 1987; Warwick, 1987; 1988; Dell’Aquila, 1989; Domenici, 1989; Filograsso, 1995; Margiotta, 1997; Moon, 1998; Margiotta, 2003).

The taxonomic organization of the objectives is thus replaced by a procedural and systemic organization of the cognitive problems and exploratory processes.

In this context, the school has a strategic role, not only in terms of cultural transmission, or of cultural development, but especially in terms of socio-cultural development of the territory. Both in the alternation between school and work, and in modular reorganization, the school can be seen as a system which takes place in the intersection of a complex network of functional relationships and which, for this operation, requires a particularly lexible management, always oriented to innovation.

The same public institutions, private companies, businesses that agree to talk with the school are involved in very dynamic processes which always aim at social and cultural development (and not just economic).

2

In the alternation between school and work, the experience on the field is quite different from what we call “stage” where, at best, there is a sort of putting into practice the knowledge and the skills learned in the classroom. In this case, however, the work place is itself productive and fully enters into the curricular organization.

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Innovation, development of human resources, inter-institutional dialogue and great attention to technological development are the best preconditions for a broad and extensive use of technology that reaches out to the construction of hypermedia products. The new media should not be considered devices that improve teaching.

They themselves are the content of relection and the objective of action.

The fifth model: the curriculum as a hermeneutic scheme and functional mediator According to this ifth model, curriculum is considered as an hermeneutic scheme and a functional mediator, to be used to interpret, understand, select, explain, choose, compose, organize the whole range of issues concerning the didactic aims, objectives and tools in a coordinated way, in accordance with procedures for participation. The question is, in parallel, to conceive the school as a school of community, a school of autonomy, a school able to establish, build and manage its own curriculum and thus, consequently, able to deine and manage its own projects.

This model does not boast many explicit theoretical references. It is linked to more or less explicit references to neo-constructivist theories and is supported by a formal proposal which is contained in the Orientamenti (Guidelines) adopted in Italy for the Scuola dell’Infanzia (Pre-primary education) in 1991 (Paparella, 1991), and well characterized in the international ield (Epstein, Schweinhart & McAdoo, 1996; Gofin, 2000). The didactic act is focused on three main issues: culture, values and development, and the theory of the school is open to the idea of new citizenship, participation and interculturality.

Even beyond the Scuola dell’Infanzia, this model is very useful. When today people are just navigating in cyberspace through new technologies, navigation problems are far beyond those of the human-computer interaction: there is also a social interface which should be taken into consideration (Tosoni, 2004), and an interface between people and cyberculture, and another one between different cultures. And all this not only is not foreign to the teaching context, but it represents the educational context and the curricular area (Paparella & Palomba, 2008).

Many times we have discussed about “learning environments”. We also referred to this category when we have studied technology, but inally we have limited ourselves to observe and analyze facts, circumstances, contents, tools, according to a logic where the context is considered as a space that contains, or, at most, as a container that attends to the person. Not yet as an “agora”, where meetings and processes develop, not yet as an area in which relationships and identity development play a central role (Paparella, 2009).

It is now time to take one step further, with courage and determination. Because only then we will realize what really the technological universe is, and which is the new role of the education in technologically advanced contexts.

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It is time to analyze the technologies much more deeply, not only according to performance criteria that take into consideration the instrumental aspects, but above all according to their eficiency and to the interference produced on the identity of the person.

Research perspectives The comparison between curriculum theory and the analysis of curricular models would not close the speech, but they should rather open up new inquiry perspectives, in at least four different directions of research that here are barely mentioned.

Firstly, it is still useful to compare the different curricular models, in order to consider the most important relections which have been developed on this theme along a century. And, at this regard, it might be useful to reread the essay written by Frey (1971) and then, in Italy, the works by Pontecorvo (1981), Scurati (1976; 1978; 1989), Vertecchi (1994), and the pages written by Semeraro (1999).

Secondly, we might analyze the relationship between curriculum and multimedia installations, and more generally the relationship that can be established between technologies and curricular models (Pantò & Petrucco, 1998).

A third richest direction of research concerns the technologies as learning environments. In this regard, as Palomba says, the question is not if virtual world can embed experience, but how to build reality, or rather a perception of it, in the mediated environments of virtual reality (Palomba, 2006).

Starting from these issues, we can access the fourth consideration. It might be “evaluated” in relation to the idea of identity, the idea of participation and the prospect of a new citizenship, in a richer perception of democracy.

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Media Education as pre-service and in-service training for teachers Floriana Falcinelli

ABSTRACT

Department of Human Sciences and Education, University of Perugia, piazza Ermini, 1 – 06123 Perugia. E-mail: floriana@unipg.it

The technological evolution of the last decades is characterized by the creation and the widespread use of digital languages as well as the development of the Internet. All this has entailed a radical change in the way of organizing and communicating knowledge. These changes, in turn, have introduced inevitable consequences in the educational process, especially in the teaching/learning processes practiced in schools.

It is therefore essential that media education becomes a fundamental aspect of school curricula, so as to enable students to become proicient critical, creative and effective users of productive ITC tools, as well as informed, responsible and contributing citizens.

Since teachers are responsible for helping students to develop these skills, it is imperative that all teachers be adequately trained to provide their students with these competencies.

Standards and resources within the UNESCO project ICT Competency Standards for Teachers (ICT-CST) provided speciic guidelines for planning teacher education programs. Also other international institutions pressed the European member States to promote comprehensive teacher training programs.

Italy has mainly organized courses for the European Computer Driving Licence. However, today’s in-service and preservice teachers need to be prepared to use ICT and know how that technology can support student learning and empower students with the advantages it can provide.

Keywords: teacher training; media education; ICT competency.

Edizioni Erickson – Trento

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Information and Communication Technologies and new learning environments In the last decades, the technological evolution has been strongly affected by the creation and the widespread use of digital language and by the development of the Internet. These changes have introduced a radical transformation in the way culture is organized and communicated.

The convergence to digital creates a totally new level of integration among diverse codes. It creates a new way of working on how information is stored, elaborated, organized and transmitted by means of telecommunication systems. The notion of multimedia, hypertext and interactivity, therefore, has irmly established along with that of technological hybridization.

The net is seen as a cyberspace: the horizon of a virtual world that is alive, dynamic, in continuous evolution, open, heterogeneous and build with the contribution of each user thanks to the interactivity afforded by digitization. We can therefore speak of a cyberculture that imposes new paradigms for interpreting education processes (LĂŠvy, 1997).

The wide spread of the net has also introduced a new way of understanding distance learning stimulating the creation of e-Learning. In this perspective, the student is placed at the center of the learning process and, thanks to the electronic devices at his/her disposal, he/she can design his own learning path in an intentionally programmed environment that provides not only a wide range of lexible resources open to active research, but also allows to constantly monitor the teaching/learning process (Falcinelli, 2005).

We speak, thus, of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) that has a deep impact on two key aspects of any didactic process: the access to knowledge and culture, and the communication.

These technologies characterize the ever-increasing experience of new generations who directly access to information and communication in the WEB which has now become a great shared social space (web 2.0) (Laici, 2007).

The importance of Media Education It is evident that media education should become an indispensable and essential part of the overall educational project, playing a key role in educating students to become responsible citizens. This is an experience that should not be considered as temporary or separate from other activities, but congruent with the general education goals, and integrated within the overall educational project. A media education 92

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project entails the elaboration of didactic paths that, while working on media and with media, allow students to experience them in creative and sound ways reaching a media competency.

Media education can also become the object of an educational planning shared among the various training agencies such as family and local institutions.

In this scenario, teachers should think of themselves as critical-hermeneutical players who seek to attribute meaning to their own didactic performance and to the complex system where it takes place. They should approach the new media as new teaching/learning contexts/environments that provide resources for the genuine act of teaching and, at the same time, allow them to grasp the elements of diversity that are being introduced into the traditional didactic relation. In this way, the learning process makes use of multidimensional experiences; it increasingly becomes constructive, net-shaped and socially shared; it experiments with the dimensions of play, imagery and emotional expressiveness; and, it is nourished by informal communicative events (Ferri, 2008).

At the same time, the widespread experience that young people live with media makes them question the sacredness of traditional culture transmitted by school in the past; they are brought closer to the culture as a system of symbols which is dynamic and open to social construction, and well placed within the logic of universality.

School, therefore, has to adopt a “cultured� approach towards media and new technologies if it wants to respond adequately to young people’s need for knowledge, expression and communication. Young people today are increasingly characterized by the eagerness to live connected and to share personal and involving experiences totally integrated with the different media (Rivoltella, 2006).

We are in the age that has been appropriately called the mobile generation, constantly experimenting with a sort of intermediality where users can access various media simultaneously integrated with each other through multitasking procedures (Morcellini, 2005).

School should be aware of this widely spread practice among young people and help them to organize, relect and give meaning to it. Schools should mainly guide young people towards a new ecology of media providing a right integration of media and technology along with the multiple experiences of other languages and other ways of approaching reality. Furthermore, schools should champion the non-passive use of technological tools and always include them in an educational and didactic planning that should be clear, rigorous and capable of transforming technology into an authentic training instrument rather than viewing it as an intrusive and disorienting element.

Much has been said about didactic ergonomics as an approach to research that should support the design of learning environments in which different technological 93

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mediators can develop their true potential in terms of expressiveness, human growth, social and cooperative building of knowledge (Calvani, 2007).

Everyone hopes for a new media education as a ground for citizenship education, raising individuals’ awareness and foster their participation in building a civilized human society (Ardizzone & Rivoltella, 2008).

Therefore, ICT competency have been deemed a key Competency (European Commission, 2004) aimed to create high-quality training in schools; training that prepares young people toward real integration within the European knowledge society. In particular, schools should make certain that young people are not trained to merely use technological tools, but learn to select, analyze and evaluate the amount of information that technology can transmit to them. By using these tools, they should also learn how to solve problems; make decisions; express one’s own creativity; communicate and cooperate in the building of signiicant and original products; and, ultimately, become informed, responsible and active citizens.

The need for training teachers to new technologies In order to implement a program that successfully satisies the aforementioned objectives, we need to adequately prepare and train our teachers.

Our aim is to improve the knowledge of the various media, of their different languages, and of their related technical devices, developing a critical interpretation of the messages they suggest, and the opportunity to actively use these tools in order to make classroom communication more effective. In this way, teachers can above all help their students become more aware of their experiences with media, that are becoming increasingly widespread, although can be sometimes fragmented and supericial.

We are not interested in providing our teachers with a technical knowledge, but rather in activating an even playful process of discovery of the various media together with their students. In this way, teachers can exploit the educational potential of media and build a new didactic approach to knowledge, able to provide an intelligent integration of the available technologies.

Therefore, teachers should be required to master media and to reach a technological competency. They should acquire a level of digital literacy that allows them to manage the on-line learning environments; design and create hypertext and multimedia products; and, be familiar with the basic concepts of computer programming.

These skills, albeit important, are however insuficient if not combined with a new cultural approach — which implies having an awareness of the changes introduced by the new media both in education and in teaching/learning processes — and a new 94

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approach to the teaching/learning processes that requires the ability to use the new media as resources in didactic communication.

More speciically, we can refer to digital competency as the ability to have a friendly relationship with ICTs and to know how to explore, evaluate and adapt them to didactic contexts. In particular, it requires a basic structural knowledge of information technology, and the ability to “read”, use and adapt the various technologies to different contexts and intersect these skills with the other key skills proper to teachers.

The international context Within this framework UNESCO has proposed some standards regarding the ICT competencies that teachers should possess (ICT-CST Policy Framework; ICT-CST Competency Standards Modules, 2008) along with guidelines that should provide a higher quality of worldwide education. The guidelines clearly explain that the mastering of ICT skills should be combined with a renewed pedagogical-didactic, curricular and organizational culture of the school. Reaching such standards will allow teachers to improve their teaching methods, foster greater cooperation with colleagues and help them to better participate in the innovations that are taking place in their schools.

The irst aim of the project is not only to improve didactic practices, but also contribute to the overall enhancement of the quality of the scholastic systems so that schools can train citizens that are better informed and better equipped to take on the challenges of labour market and, therefore, ultimately increase the social and economic development of the various countries.

The speciic objectives are the following: – to constitute a common set of guidelines that teachers educators can use to identify, develop and evaluate subjects and programs for ITC training; – to provide a basic set of quality indicators that allows teachers to integrate ICT into their teaching and learning practices, to improve their professional performances and to advance student learning; – to extend teachers’ professional development so as to advance their pedagogical approach to teaching, collaboration and school innovation capacities using ICT; – to harmonize different views and vocabulary regarding the uses of ICT in teacher education.

The standards are based on three reformation objectives that respond to the need to renew education; improve the path to professional development for teachers; and produce an economic development of the training systems. The three objectives are: 95

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– increasing the ITC knowledge including technological literacy in the curriculum (technology literacy); – increasing teachers’ ability to use such knowledge in order to solve complex, realworld problems (knowledge deepening); – increasing teachers’ ability to innovate and produce innovation and new knowledge (knowledge creation).

It is important to note that these standards do not merely focus on acquisition of ICT skills. They include ICT skills as a part of the different dimensions pertaining teacher education and comprising: policy, curriculum and assessment, pedagogy, use of technology, school organization and administration, and teacher professional development.

Crossing these six components with the three objectives mentioned, we can obtain a complex matrix in which each matrix cell represents a module of the structure of the educational model proposed by UNESCO, and the single modules contain speciic curricular goals and skills that teachers need to develop.

Europe has also examined the problem of teacher training in new technologies.

In the White Paper on Education and Training Teaching and Learning. Towards the Learning Society, the European Commission (1995) placed training in the use of technology among the most urgent priorities in a society that is characterized by widespread of ICT. Subsequent documents, of minor importance, have tried to express in practical terms the training objectives speciied by the Commission. This is the case presented in the Conclusions of the European Union Council dated September 22, 1997 regarding Education, Information and Communication Technologies and Teachers Training for the Future.

The memorandum issued by the Council of Lisbon in March 2000, representing the framework within which all subsequent EU actions will be carried out, opens a century that recognizes the fundamental role of education and training in European social and economic growth (Consiglio d’Europa, 2002).

This framework gives the utmost importance to teacher education by emphasizing that it should be characterized by two main aspects: the ability to learn and the opportunity to be trained on the use of information and communication technologies (Grion, 2008).

ICT skills well fall within the fundamental professional requirements of teachers as deined by the OCSE/CERI (2005).

The Italian context In Italy, teacher training in new technologies has sharply increased in recent years, especially for teachers in force. The National Plan for Teacher Training on Informa96

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tion and Communication Technologies (FOR TIC) was implemented in 2002 according to the Ministerial Memorandum no. 55, and a new edition was organized in the period 2005/2008.

So far, the plan involved approximately 190,000 teachers, in over 8,000 courses of 120 hours structured in 10 modules. The modules included classroom training, self-study with tutor supervision and assistance, and on-line activities using the platform PuntoEdu. Three types of training paths were devised: the irst was a basic path (A); the second path (B) aimed to create a “consultant” teacher, expert in ICT methodologies and teaching resources; and the third path (C1 and C2) aimed to provide individuals with the necessary skills to become “responsible” teacher of the technological equipment of their school and of school network.

The aspect that characterized the entire project, and which is still today being discussed, is the fact that the Plan, albeit with lots of mediation, was built around the ECDL certiication pathway (European Computer Driving License). The irst 7 modules of the ECDL course were adopted and used in their entirety. Then, 7 more modules were added on the didactic use of ICTs and the related typical scholastic problems. It was within these 7+7 modules that the course participants could choose the 10 modules they wished to follow.

We must remember that an agreement between the MIUR (Ministry of Education, University and Research) and AICA (Italian Association for Computer Science and Automated Computation) — signed on June 5, 2003 — provided a cost reduction to teachers from Italian schools attending ECDL courses.

However, despite this effort and the several initiatives taken by the General Management for Information Systems of the Ministry of Education (such as DIGIScuola; Edid@blog; @pprendere digitale; HSH@Network; Innovascuola, etc.) with the aim of supporting technological innovation, many studies and reports underline that teachers use technologies only as a mere support for their traditional teaching methods; they do not use ICT as a tool to improve and change their didactic approach (Biondi, 2007).

The task, therefore, is to change the teachers’ cultural attitude towards a new idea of innovative education system: a vision which, as demonstrated by a study commissioned in 2002 by the American government, Vision 2020, should focus on new learning environments, contents, languages, and approaches to reality characterizing ICTs.

Pre-service and in-service training Teachers’ professional development should begin at university level and then continue during in-service training. In particular, university curricula, along with 97

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general computer science courses, should contain speciic subjects linked to pedagogy and didactic methodology (such as Technologies of Teaching and Learning, and Multimedia Didactics) that would allow future teachers to conceive ICTs as part of a complex learning system, and to develop new approaches to knowledge and educational communication.

For this reason, it is probably more appropriate to use the term media education to mean a complex training path that integrates different subject matters and by which we can promote a mature approach in future teachers, aware of the complex world of media and technology that today characterizes the society of knowledge. Media skills, digital skills, a critical approach to knowledge and to the technological culture, creative capacity of didactic innovation, pedagogical sensibility oriented toward the student — these are the main and integrated features of media education.

The methodology that is adopted to create the pathways to media education is of the utmost signiicance. It is in fact important that future teachers be allowed to approach the learning process irsthand. They should learn the new ICTs and actively explore and compare them; and they should cooperate and work together. Laboratory activities, therefore, must be considered as top priority. By working in small groups, teachers can ind new paths and explore the various media and design and create small “products” combining different languages and technological devices. By performing these activities, teachers learn to manage and understand the fears, anxieties and defense mechanisms that can emerge even among graduated people who, often, have got accustomed, in our educational institutions, to becoming increasingly purely literate.

The laboratories can be realized either in an adequately equipped face-to face environment or they can be created on-line by sharing an e-Learning environment that can be implemented on an LCMS where it would also be possible to use various approaches to the net, produce multimedia and hypertext materials, and sharing them. This is what we have experimenting at the SSIS (Scuola di Specializzazione per l’Insegnamento Secondario — School of Specialization in Secondary Education) based in the University of Perugia (Italy) through MOODLE platform which is designed according to the logic of social constructivism.

However, in-service teacher training may also be more complex because it has to do away with the pre-existing prejudices and consolidated habits that school culture has nurtured.

It is for these reasons, therefore, that I believe that in-service teachers’ professional training should include the analysis of the didactic practices allowing teachers to understand and relect on the multimedia experiences of young people and on how it might be possible — moving from these experiences — to design signiicant and culturally relevant didactic activities. The knowledge and understanding of the dif98

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ferent media and technologies must therefore be combined with psycho-pedagogic and didactic competency.

We should also explore the possibility to use local multimedia facilities and local laboratories, supporting school activities, in order to reinforce our teachers’ efforts to understand media and technologies, particularly their technical features.

Finally, we should encourage the opening of didactic nets for teachers, that can also be connected with universities, in order to allow teachers to share their experiences, look for new research paths, relect on own practices with the aim to verify and validate their effectiveness and to make them a real element of school innovation.

References* Ardizzone, P., & Rivoltella, P.C. (2008). Media e tecnologie per la didattica. Milano: Vita e Pensiero.

Biondi, G. (2007). La scuola dopo le nuove tecnologie. Milano: Apogeo.

Calvani, A. (Ed.) (2007). Tecnologia, scuola, processi cognitivi. Milano: Franco Angeli.

Consiglio d’Europa (2002). Programma di lavoro dettagliato sul follow-up circa gli obiettivi dei sistemi di istruzione e formazione in Europa (GU C 142 del 14.6.2002). (http://ue.eu. int/newsroom/related.asp?BID=75&GRP=4280&LANG=1).

European Commission (2004). Key competencies for lifelong learning. A European reference framework. (http://ec.europa.eu/education/policies/2010/doc/basicframe.pdf).

Falcinelli, F. (Ed.) (2005). E-Learning. Aspetti pedagogici e didattici. Perugia: Morlacchi.

Ferri, P. (2008). La scuola digitale. Come le nuove tecnologie cambiano la formazione. Milano: Bruno Mondadori.

Grion, V. (2008). Insegnanti e formazione: realtà e prospettive. Roma: Carocci.

Laici, C. (2007). Nuovi ambienti di apprendimento per l’e-Learning. Perugia: Morlacchi.

Lévy, P. (1997). Cyberculture. Rapport au Conseil de l’Europe. Paris: Odile Jacob. (Lévy, P., Cybercultura. Gli usi sociali delle nuove tecnologie. Milano: Feltrinelli, 1999).

Morcellini, M. (Ed.) (2005). Il Mediaevo italiano. Roma: Carocci.

OCSE/CERI (2005). Attracting, developing and retaining effective teachers. (http:// www. oecd/edu/teacherpolicy).

Rivoltella, P.C. (2006). Screen generation. Gli adolescenti e le prospettive dell’educazione nell’età dei media digitali. Milano: Vita e Pensiero.

* All references to online resources in this paper and in the bibliography were verified at September 2008.

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The evaluation of media programmes and products Formative and participatory research Laura Messina

ABSTRACT

Department of Education Sciences, University of Padua, via Beato Pellegrino, 28 – 35137 Padova. E-mail: laura.messina@unipd.it

The primary aim of this article is to contribute to the delineation of a ield of empirical research, not yet fully developed in Italy, that focuses on the evaluation of media programmes and products. Particularly the article touches three fundamental aspects: the cultural meaning of evaluation, which aspects to study, and the opportunity to promote, together with the evaluative research on programmes and products that have already been conducted, formative and participatory research aimed at evaluation of future programmes and products through collaborative processes between producers and users.

Keywords: media programmes and products; evaluation; formative research; participatory research.

About the cultural meaning of evaluation Italian researchers have long been interested in the evaluation of media programmes and products, although to a lesser extent than other international researchers. In our context the researchers have predominantly employed a theoretical and speculative approach — that can be deined as critical evaluation — shared by the semiotic, philosophical and pedagogical perspective in the study of media (Galliani, 2007).

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This article addresses empirical research aimed at evaluating quality and eficacy of media programmes and products, which in Italian context is normally dealt with sporadically.

It is not by chance that only a few years ago, one of the most important Italian semiologists provocatively labelled as «heretical» his «idea of quantifying the quality of media», wondering if it was possible to attain «a construction by approximation of a quantitative model of quality», in this case mainly referring to television (Bettetini, 2003, p. 59, p. 64)1.

Bettetini’s proposal was provocative because it called into question a speciic entity — the State broadcaster, more accustomed to calculating the share rather than investigating the quality — highlighting a key aspect for development in this area of investigation: the role of producers, whose contribution is necessary for the improvement of evaluative research.

The dificulty of the evaluation of programmes and products in many ways consists in the ampleness of media artefacts and in the breadth of the quality category — segmented in relation to media, genres, audience and so on (Lasagni & Richeri, 1996; Sartori, 1993) — and also in «judgment systems» adopted by the «court judges» (Colombo, 1994). Moreover, the implementation of evaluation assumes very different values depending on whether the objectives and operational criteria are purely academic or are coming from a joint elaboration or a negotiation with the specialists in the ield, which, in theory, should feel the need to ensure the quality and/or eficacy of production or distribution. From this perspective, one of the crucial questions of evaluative research on the media primarily consists in the involvement of the producers of media “objects”, referring to an enormous range of diverse programmes and products.

But there is another category of actors whose participation is essential for growth of evaluative research on the media: the “consumers”, also considering the modiication of the relationship between them and the cultural industry and of their role — from «push» to «pull»- determined by the digital «convergence/divergence» (Ferri, 2004, p. 58, p. 14) that pervades our society.

Evaluative research, then, faces a challenge not only from the conceptual breadth of the media environment — an «ecosystem», «an integrated and inseparable combination of biotic communities and communicative habitats, an unitary structure, in which both physical and psychological relationships intermingle» (Galliani, 1993, p. 127) — but also from the complexity of the communication models instantiated in the same ecosystem.

1

This is a proposal that Gianfranco Bettetini presented to Consulta della Qualità (Council for Quality) of RAI-Radiotelevisione Italiana, then chaired by Jader Jacobelli, and that is entitled «Heretical hypothesis for a quantification of the media quality (particularly of the television)», to which he refers in the second chapter of a his own volume (Bettetini, 2003).

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In this landscape, the deep cultural meaning that evaluative research may take is to encourage an «educationally orientated»2 production and is related to the recognition of the inextricable link between communication and education (Galliani, 1998), as the media of communication always «educate» even when they «dis-educate» (Bettetini, 2003, p. 62)3. To witness the signiicance of this view you can draw on some “commissioned” research, on the television schedule (Bertolini, 2002), or on television programmes broadcasted by RAI — such as L’albero azzurro (The blue tree) (Farné & Gherardi, 1994), Melevisione (Melevision) (Coggi, 2002; 2003), Eppur si muove! (And yet it moves!) (Messina, 2005) — conducted with the «oficial» advice of «pedagogically qualiied» bodies, as a rule quoted in the «closing credits» (Bertolini, 1994, p. 103).

Elements of evaluation If television programmes are the ground on which evaluative research mainly converges, it begins to manifest an interest in the products generated by new media, albeit lukewarm and with considerable delay compared to the efforts in other areas of investigation on them, such as learning.

In the constructive spirit of this article, I tried to summarise, in Figure 1, areas, parameters, objects, phases and types to which the evaluative research on the media refers, also using the data from a survey developed by me in February 20084 in order 2

3

4

With «educationally oriented» production, here I refer not so much to programmes or products turned to offer curricular contents in the form of entertainment, i.e. edu-tainment dealt later on, but rather to programmes or products made with awareness of their formative potential (Messina, 2005).

The strict link between education and communication is enclosed in the Greek etymon of communicate, in its meaning to inform someone involving him/her, joining to a community, and, therefore, activating a «dynamic process», which implies an intentional act by a transmitter, a «response», whatever that is, by the recipient, a finalisation of the process itself to take «social relationships», which involve the whole person (Galliani, 1998). In this sense, it seems difficult that the educational can be entrusted only to specific programmes or products and to escape the obligation to consider the educative — or dis-educative — potential of the media in their complex. The media, as communication media, inevitably educate, even if this is not in their declared intentions (Galliani & Messina, 2003).

The survey was conducted in February 2008, sending, via email, a request for co-operation to 161 Italian scholars who deal with media and education, also with the intention of launching a thematic registry of research on evaluation of media programmes and products. The scholars were identified by using a previous review of literature produced in Italian universities on the relationship between media, education and training (Galliani, 2007; Galliani & Messina, 2006).

The scholars were asked, with reference to evaluative research on media programming or programmes or products (old and new media), to compile a file in which it was required to indicate: Author(s) of research; institution/company which carried out the search; when the research was initiated and concluded; research title and objects. They also were required to provide a brief summary of research (objectives, procedure, results) and to indicate whether the report was published (book, journal), or available (site, archive), or not available, leaving space for comments/notes. The responses to my request for co-operation were not numerically exciting: there were only 24 replies, whose only 11 were “productive”. In respect of the remaining 13, some promised the arrival of a file never arrived; in some I was informed of publications generally related to the media, available through national or international bibliographical archives. To the 11 productive replies I added my one, and, whereas three scholars have sent two cards, the answers are total of 15. Presumably, the low number of answers may be ascribed to the fact that my request was referring to empirical research, and we know that, in our context, there are not many scholars interested in a such kind of research.

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to compose an update of studies conducted in the ield in our country5 and to ind any reports of “commissioned” research that often exist as unpublished works (Cohen, 2001) and are unlikely to be found through canonical bibliographical channels6.

In Figure 1 elements of research both proposed and already carried out are ranged in an “animated” way to emphasize the dificulty of clearly demarcating the categorical boundaries among them and clearly attributing them to either of the two overriding areas identiied: the edu-entertainment and the educational-instructional.

Here I will take into consideration not the individual elements, but some wider issues, which should be useful in deining the research ield.

The irst issue concerns the area of investigation that I wanted to call (edu)entertainment, putting the “edu” in brackets to try to problematize the view, widespread especially in the ield of education, that the radius of action in this area could, or should be conined to object designed, besides the “canonical” ones, to inform and to have a cultural function; for example and referring to Tv, programmes such as Quark or La grande storia (The great history), leaving aside iction or variety, or, going on the web, contents posted on MySpace7. The question that arises is whether this view is consistent with the multidisciplinary approach advocated in this journal8 and with the axiom of the educative/dis-educative media potential, whatever “object” we consider.

Another key question concerns the parameters that should guide evaluative research — quality and eficacy — and that affect both areas9, raising several issues: 5

6

7

8

9

In this second paragraph of the article I preferred, for “economical” reasons, to refer mainly to the scientific production of Italian researchers. I will dedicate, in the next numbers of this journal, a specific review of international literature, which instead I “necessarily” will touch in the third paragraph.

I am referring both to research aimed at assessing programmes — for example, my research on a food education programme “commissioned” by Veneto Agricoltura, which was after published in the version of final report (Messina, 2007a) — and to research designed to survey judgements of programmes by consumers (for example, Ottaviano, 2002); in this case, a research carried out for the Autorità per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni (Authority for Guarantees in Communication).

In the research, the dichotomy between entertainment and education reserves the former term to programmes or products that raise pleasure, sympathy, fun and so on (Tannenbaum, 1980) — less studied among the “effects” of the media (Bryant & Miron, 2002). The latter term refers to «programmes of both formal and informal education» (Singhal & Rogers, 1999, p. 10), in this last case considering their positive aspects, namely that such programmes have the potential «to develop skills aimed at a particular purpose, by strengthening the mental, moral or physical abilities of individual» (Singhal & Rogers, 1999, p. 10). This means a trend now almost half a century to push production to adopt strategies of “edu-tainment”, “info-tainment”, “enter-education”, more and more focused, in the case of production for children, on the development of curricular skills or on taking positive values and, in general, dealing with relevant social themes.

See, in this respect, the Editorial of Luciano Galliani in this number of REM-Research on Education and Media. Regarding the multidisciplinary approach, I think we need only mention as for semiologists and communication sociologists the pure entertainment is “one’s daily bread”.

Even if the parameter efficacy, unlike the omnipresent quality, is usually favoured in the educational-instructional area, actually it is also important in the entertainment area; just think Art. 3 of the contract of service 2007-2009 of the RAI: «Qualità dell’offerta e valore pubblico» (Offer quality and public value) (http://www.comunicazioni.it/binary/ min_comunicazioni/televisione_rai/contratto_servizio_5_aprile_2007.pdf), where, in addition to prescribing indications to measure the quality of programming, it also reaffirms the need to monitor the formative and educational efficacy of the company — from which derives a project aimed at establishing «a model that defines the field of meaning as in the category of quality and transform it into an operational process functional to a measure» (Sangiorgi et al., 2007,

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Areas Parameters

(Edu)-Entertainment Quality

Educational-Instructional Efficacy

Objects

Multimedia Products Tv Programming Didactic Software Edu-Entertaining Tv Prototypes Software Classroom Products Tv Programmes Web Sites

Phases

Production

Distribution

Formative Research Types

Monitoring Summative Evaluation

Application Validation

Action-Research

Figure 1 Areas, parameters, objects, phases and types of evaluative research on media.

the exhaustiveness of these two parameters compared to the wide variety of objects/ media; the explanation of what the parameters contain (Bourlot et al., 2002)10; their characterization in relation to different media; the risk of automatically connecting them to a “metrological calibration”11, while research in this area, because of its recency and complexity, primarily should beneit from exploratory qualitative investigations.

Considering the objects of evaluation, as I have mentioned above, traditional media are privileged12: Tv programming (Bettetini, 2003; Losito, 2002), Tv prototypes (Messina et al., 2008; Personeni et al., 2008), single Tv programme (Coggi, 2000,

10

11 12

p. 30). I think that Gianfranco Bettetini could be pleased that after about 10 years since his proposal we are trying to approach to “measuring” of quality.

The classification of parameters varies in respect to media and actors covered. For example, in relation to the Tv and quality, Bourlot and colleagues (2002) distinguish between technical-linguistic, aesthetics, mimetic-metonimic, institutional quality of the apparatus, of the service, of the relationships; always referring to this medium and the quality, different classifications are proposed depending on the actors involved, for example, parents or experts (Nikken & Van Der Voort, 1999), or children (Pereira, 2005); for web sites, alongside usability, quality of content, aesthetics, and interactivity increasingly becomes “qualitative” parameters (De Angeli, Sutcliffe & Hartmann, 2006), and so on.

We should also consider that trade media programmes and products, as such, cannot escape to the market laws, related to progressive changes of the concept of quality, in its various components, that the researchers should take into account when want co-operate with the producing company and verify the quality of what it produces, taking into account, for example, fitness for use — and we could add “fitness for target” — and adequacy of the realised products with the objectives (Conti & De Risi, 2001).

This risk in the «heretic» proposal of Bettetini is mentioned at the beginning of this paper.

The “traditional”, referred to television, is in quotation marks to underscore how this medium, in progressive transformation and now “portable”, maintains a strong centrality into the system of the media (Scaglioni & Sfardini, 2008) and, referring to children and youth, shows a growing vitality with, today, 22 “targeted” channels: the Kid. Tv (see, at this proposal, the article written by Scaglioni on Corriere della Sera, 09-17-2008, p. 9).

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2002, 2003; Parola & Trinchero, 2006a), also presenting research on multimedia products — that can be understood as results of «digital divergence» (Ferri, 2004) and as «works-to-many-media» (Parascandolo, 2000) — on web sites and on edu-entertaining software. It must be said that, even at international level, research on these objects — for example, video games — relate more to issues of art (Bittanti, 2008)13, their inluence on attitudes and behaviours of children and young people, primarily related to violence (Cicchirillo & Chory-Assad, 2005, Funk et al., 2003), or to learning (Oliver & Pelletier, 2006), or to training (Watson, 2007), also considering their expansion rate towards the instructional (Cangià, 2003; Limone, 2006; Miglino & Di Ferdinando, 2007)14. Similarly the case for web sites, mainly evaluated for usability and their communicative potential (Cantoni, Di Blas & Bolchini, 2003; Lazzari, s.d.; Polillo, 2004; Mich & Franch, 2000; Martelli, 2003), whereas to a lesser extent for the expectations of «homo ludens» (Huizinga, 1939), which for example carries YouTube, in search of «freedom», «play», «self-expression» (Silva & Dix, 2007).

Quite different is the matter about the didactic software that involves another area, media and learning15, especially when evaluation is primarily designed to ascertain/ verify, through application, the software functionality/utility with respect to learning (Antonietti & Cantoia, 2000; 2003; Carbotti, s.d.). On this question in our context there is a long tradition of research aimed at evaluating, together with the eficacy, the «signiicance» (Galliani, 1983) or the didactic quality of technological devices (Costa & Gerosa, 1999)16.

For overall educational research on media it might be useful the draft of a repertoire of objects, since their proliferation and mingling, and one of the important issues that they raise concerns the demarcation of the boundaries of our investigation ield, that is exempliied in Figure 1 with classroom products, which I think could be included in educational-instructional area when they leave the classroom, real or virtual, removing from teaching to arrive at public events, such as festivals17, and so 13 14

15 16

17

Amongst other things, in this case, the research takes the characterisation of critical evaluation.

See, for example and among the various conferences in the field, the proceedings of the annual conferences of Future Play, which dedicates a session to educational (http://portalparts.acm.org /1330000/1328202/fm/frontmatter.pdf).

I refer to SIREM section: Media and learning.

In this respect, see also and for example the «Project for the quality of educational multimedia resources — Evaluation of educational software», which ended in 2007, developed by MIUR (Ministry of Education, University and Research) with the co-operation of a committee of experts (http://www.indire.it/software); see also Montedoro & Infante (2003).

In this respect, we can mention: Ciak Junior, designed by the Alcuni Group, in Treviso, that from the 1989 involves the children in the lower secondary school and primary school in the implementation of short films (http://www.alcuni.it/ ciakjindex.aspx?sez=3&lang=&title=home%20ciak%20junior); Sottodiciotto Film-festival, in Turin, where are presented the audio-visual products made by students, from infancy to the upper secondary, made at school and also in the extracurricular contexts (http://www.sottodiciottofilmfestival.it/); Future Film Kids, in Bologna, with the laboratories of production for kids (http://www.futurefilmfestival.org /it/chisiamo/future-FILM-kids/); Associazione Cinema Ragazzi, in Pisa, which collects the 30th legacy of the Biennale del Cinema dei Ragazzi, with its reviews of cinema, video and in the last years of multimedia products, realised by children (http://www.cineragazzi.it/xvi.htm); PinAC, in Rezzato, “gallery” opened recently to “electronic brushes” and to animation (http://www.pinac.it); Kids For Kids Festival, in Naples, which annually presents the films for and by the children (http://www.kidsforkidsfestival.org/).

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becoming “autonomous” and “independent”. It is true that the products — results — of media education require assessment (Magro, 2007; Parola & Trinchero, 2006b; Parola et al., 2007), but considered in this perspective they should be included, strictly speaking, in another context: that one of didactic research, where the assessment of products made during the educational practices in the network and delivered through platforms should also be included (Galliani & Costa, 2003)18.

As regard the question of ield boundaries, we must also consider the “media use”, which certainly implies an evaluation of some kind of enjoyed object, but in the manner in which it is normally studied it could be more appropriately placed in «cultural consumption» (De Sanctis, s.d.)19, also when it relates to the «perceived quality», usually understood as «appreciation» (Valkenburg & Janssen, 1999), unless the aim is to investigate the dimensions of the quality construct (Losito, 2002)20.

With respect to the phases of evaluation, production and distribution, which seem to adequately cover the inquiry ield, and the types of evaluation, if the application (also shown in italics in Figure 1) may revive the problems of area boundaries, given its tendency towards learning (e.g., Antonietti & Cantoia, 2000), the more relevant question I would suggest concerns the absence of a evaluative perspective, except for “formative” research (Messina, 2007b)21, related to the pre-production and production.

Indeed, validation (Messina, 2007a), monitoring, summative evaluation (Coggi, 2002; 2003) and action research (Parola & Trinchero, 2006a) are conducted on programmes and products that have already been realized, providing, at best, «mechanisms of users’ feedback». In this case the most promising trend is the attempt to create a «common ground of exchange» or, in other words, a social «co-design», characterized by the convergence or aggregation of judgements on the basis of «common criteria» (Trinchero, 2006, pp. 85-86). This is one of the most systematic attempts to try to «better deine the quality of products — translating it into indicators related to various aspects: technical components, elements of enjoinment, educational features, outcomes of learning» (Coggi, 2006, p. 13) — and to put users, educators and producers in “dialogue”. Anyhow, such an approach still connotes the evaluation as a retroactive function and not, as would be desirable, as proactive.

18

19 20

21

Nerworked educational practices are increasingly making problematic the distinction between product and process, making plausible that the process itself constitutes a product; I am referring, in this case, to the “documentation” of experience, where a training path becomes itself a useful product (e.g., De Rossi, 2007; Petrucco, 2007).

Also in this case, there is a specific section SIREM: Analysis of the media consumption.

I refer to the research of Losito on the «perceived quality», carried out on the basis of assumption, in reference to the Tv, but extensible to the media in general, that «the definition of television quality and the initiatives to implement it in the programming should refer to the public, to its expectations, to its needs assessed for that they really are» (Losito, 2002, p. 47).

This type of research is shown here in quotation marks because the works related to it, by myself and my research group presented as “formative research” (Messina et al., 2008; Personeni et. al., 2008), are based on it, but do not respect canonically all phases. These works are essentially about pre-production.

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Research Perspectives Preliminarily it is necessary to clarify that what is referred to in the following is commercial media production22 and that the proposals here presented are addressed to promote research aimed at evaluating «the development of objects», that Rivoltella includes in «pragmatic research», stressing how this type of research, together the «evaluative research» for the purpose of «optimisation» in Italy is «relatively new» (Rivoltella, 2005, pp. 37-38; 2006).

At this point it is necessary to refer to the international literature and in particular to two related approaches: formative research (Palmer, 1974), also known as formative evaluation (Flagg, 1990)23, and participatory research, with particular reference to participatory design methods (Druin et al., 1999). Such two approaches in my opinion are the most promising for the development of the evaluation of media programmes and products.

Formative research, following the terminology of Scriven (1961), or formative evaluation, is clearly distinct from «summative research» (Palmer, 1974, p. 303) or «summative evaluation» (Flagg, 1990, p. 6) that concerns a «follow-up test» to determine «the effects of new products or practices when they are already in effective use» (Palmer, 1974, p. 303). Formative research, developed through co-operation between media communication companies and researchers, aims to make “better” the programmes and products, starting from the early stages of product development and increasing the likelihood that the product reaches the ultimate objective it was conceived for. In this case the term research or evaluation relates to the «systematic collection of information in order to guide the design choices and improve the product», while the term formative indicates that «the information is collected while the product is being formed so that effective revisions can be made» (Flagg, 1990, pp. 1-2).

Here, I choose a compromise formula, which consists of using the syntagm formative research to denote the study perspective, as a whole, and formative evaluation to denote the phases of evaluation.

The models that describe formative research are different and the terminology used to deine the phases is not unique, although conceptually similar; here it is preferable to use a model, which comprehends four phases of developing a product and, in 22

23

Taking into account the paradigm of the convergence: «If the digital revolution paradigm presumed that new media would displace old media, the emerging convergence paradigm assumes that old and new media will interact in even more complex ways» (Jenkins, 2006, p. 6). This interaction is extensively discussed by Ferri (2004), whose provocative statement of the «end of media» does not tend to declare their “death”, but to illustrate the changes produced by this phenomenon.

Formative research and formative evaluation are syntagms used with similar meanings in literature, although choosing one or another leads scholars to engage in providing the necessary justifications for choice, which obviously differ (e.g., Flagg, 1990, pp. 3-4).

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parallel, four phases of evaluation (Table 1), including the needs assessment, which is not always the case24 and that, in my opinion, is essential.

After having identiied the target, the irst phase of development — planning — consists in outlining objectives, content, context of use of a programme or a product, and parallely in ascertaining their correspondence to the needs of the target (needs assessment), which is usually executed through a front-end-analysis.

The second phase of development — design — corresponds to the pre-production and consists in the elaboration of the so-called «writer’s notebook» (Palmer, 1974, p. 311), namely detailing the objectives, content, characteristics of the target, and the “design” of the programme or product, for example, drafting the screenplay and/or storyboard.

Formative evaluation (pre-production formative evaluation), at this stage, consists in the gathering of information about the target: interests, beliefs, knowledge, habits, which may be accompanied by detecting “answers” for similar products or programmes already in existence (Mielke, 1983), in order to “adjust” them before the production.

In the third phase of development — production — when it comes to implementing the programme or product, the formative evaluation (production formative evaluation) is to recognize its quality and/or eficacy, using for example a pilot study, a prototype or another “piece” is deemed appropriate to consider the object in full, or aspects of the object considered complex, dificult, risky, and so on25, in order to determine any weaknesses and to correct them before the inal composition.

The last phase of programme and product development — implementation — consists in a “controlled launch” of the inished product or programme to an appropriate target group and the evaluation stage (formative evaluation of implementation) conPhases of programme/product development

Phases of evaluation

1

Planning

Needs assessment

2

Design

Pre-production formative evaluation

3

Production

Production formative evaluation

4

Implementation

Implementation formative evaluation Summative evaluation

Table 1

24

25

The development and evaluation phases of a program or a product. (adapted from Flagg, 1990, p. 4, pp. 33-45)

Not only the need assessment is not always covered by research design, but even, for some of the scholars, it coincides with «formative research», that becomes confined in the process of collecting initial information preliminarily to design (Ströh & Leonard, 1999, p. 4).

For example, in research conducted by our group we used a video-storyboard specially realised, that was prefiguring a episode of a cartoon to test any complexity in understanding the difference between fantasy and reality that could give the mixed technique (animation and live action) adopted by the producers (Messina et al., 2008).

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sists in check its eficacy in conditions as similar as possible to routine use, taking into account that the possibility of inluence at this point is minimal, also considering matters of cost.

Once the programme or product is launched it is possible to examine its impact on the public by a summative evaluation, or «summative evaluation research» (Palmer, 1974, p. 310), which can be conducted, as normally it occurs, regardless of formative research and that can certainly provide improvement, but with respect to future products, such as a series, where it can assume a «formative function» (Palmer, 1974, p. 311), using data collected for subsequent adjustments to the series.

Usually formative research on media is associated with edu-entertainment — also pure entertainment (Cohen, 2001) — and in particular with Sesame Street26 (Palmer, 1974; 1981); in fact the direction taken by the Children’s Television Workshop has progressively marked the role of formative research on television but it has also branched out in the development of different products, including the instructional ones (Sanders & Cunningham, 1973), affecting several media, including the interactive media (Fisch & Truglio, 2001), video games (Watson, 2007), or the design of virtual learning environments (Chen, 2007), and inding wide applications in advertising and in public communication (Atkin & Freimuth, 1989; Moriarty & Rohe, 2004).

I believe that this perspective, if one really wants to affect the media environment, should be promoted and enhanced through the involvement of large and small production companies and that the current coniguration of the media requires a broadening of research staff including, in addition to producers and different experts, the “consumers”, as it happens in participatory research, based on the assumption of reducing the gap between research and real-life activities or between researcher and «researched» (Foth & Axup, 2006).

As regard consumers, participatory research increasingly seeks to involve children and and young people, considering them as independent individuals with their own strong opinions, needs, preferences, and differences related to their age — those involved are also of pre-school age (Clark, 2005) — to different race, ethnicity, and special needs.

The participatory research I refer to here is inherent in participatory design (Schuler & Namioka, 1993)27, but particularly it concerns attempts to develop and reine 26

27

Sesame Street, the television programme aimed to pleasantly propose literacy curricular content, represents a pioneering start-up of joint research, which began in 1967 by a group of producers, designers, researchers, pedagogists, psychologists, musicians, that opened the way to the construct of educational entertainment. See in this regard, the report of thirty years of research edited by Fisch & Truglio (2001).

Among the methods of participatory design, that lead to user-centered design of Norman and Draper (1986), are also covered: the interaction design (Nakakoji, Yamamoto & Aoki, 2002) and the learner-centered design (Soloway, Guzdial & Hay, 1994). Widely documented use of these methods can be found in proceedings of the conferences IDC-Interaction Design and Children, annually carried out from 2003 (http://www.interaction-design.org/references/ conferences/).

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new methods able to give voice to the children in the processes of development and evaluation of technologies (Druin et al., 1999).

Even if the old technology is not disregarded (Fish, 2004), the primary object of research is centred on technological innovation (e.g., software, video games, online games, mobile phones, simulations, “smart” materials, authoring/programming tools) and on the impact they have on the lives of teenagers: at school, at home and in public places.

The role of children and teenagers in this kind of research is very different compared to traditional evaluative research, and in this respect I would recall a model (Druin, 2002) that shows how their inluence on the inal product increases in relation to the degree of involvement in the production cycle (Figure 2).

When children are simply user they do not have any inluence on the development process of a product, because they come into contact with the product already built.

When children are involved as testers they are required to comment on the prototypes/demo or to try/test the products. Children who act as informants have greater involvement in the evaluation of a product, because they become stakeholders in each of stages of the production. Finally, in the role of design partners, «the children are considered as stakeholders throughout the design process of a technology. As a partner, children contribute to the process through methods that are appropriate both for them and for the process itself» (Druin, 2002, p. 3).

Involving the participation of children — as well as that one of adults — clariies the conceptual inseparability of elaboration, development and evaluation processes of a product, as shown by studies that found that when children provide «options» at same time they adopt «criteria» to evaluate the same options that they are producing (Sluis-Thiescheffer, Bekker & Eggen, 2007)28.

It is not possible to examine in great detail this kind of research29 — it is referred to here mainly to emphasize the importance to involve the “consumer” in formative 28

29

Such research makes reference to studies on «design rationale», in particular those of MacLean et al. (1996) and of Olson et al. (1996). The first study, aimed at representing reasoning and argumentation which justify the design of a specific artefact — a kind of “protocol” of the design — proposes a model centred on four elements: questions, options, criteria, and assessment. Each design is based on key questions and the options provide the possible answers to these questions. To choose among the various possible options, it is necessary to make a series of considerations, to support one or the other, guided by reasoning, that are organised through criteria, which correspond to properties/qualities of an artefact and to the requirements that must possess — moreover, the clear explanation of the criteria allows to clearly define the objectives of a project. The evaluation lies in verifying if a certain option satisfies or less a particular criterion (MacLean et al., 1996, pp. 58-63). The study of Olson et al. (1996), in line with the previous one, and based on the analysis of the record of different sessions of design carried out by different team on different projects, shows that in all cases taken into account the 40% of the time is used in the production of «alternative», namely solutions or proposals on object in course of design, and in contemporary evaluation of the ideas themselves through «criteria»: «reasons, arguments, or opinions which evaluate an alternative solution or proposal» (Olson et al., 1996, p. 222).

Amongst other things, the size of the field is widening if we consider the use of participatory design also in the classroom, for example for the generation of ideas (Moraveji et al. 2007), as well as outside of school (e.g., Read, Horton & Mazzone, 2005), as, for example, the museum (Taxén, 2004), with implications which now cover the pedagogical theorisation (Resnick, 2007). See also the projects of Lifelong Kindergarten (http://llk.media.mit.edu/projects.php).

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the child as...

user tester informant design partner

Figure 2 The four roles that children may have in the design of new technologies. (source: Druin, 2002, p. 3)

research starting from the design of a programme30 or product — on which I have only a few points.

The irst point concerns the assumption that each of the roles covered by the children can «shape the design process of technologies and impact on the technologies created» (Druin, 2002, p. 3). In this sense, notwithstanding the legality of “employing” children in the roles of user, tester and informant, for the purposes of research, their involvement as partner in formative research supports the “proactive” function of evaluation and perhaps could limit retrospective “saving” investigations, since quality and eficacy — the educative range — of a media programme or product, for whatever medium, are beginning to be conigured at the «conceptual» stage (Cohen, 2001).

As regard the second point, the involvement in formative and participatory research of consumer, now more and more referred to as «prosumer» (Fabris, 2008; Tofler, 1981), it is almost an imperative for the media communication industry to assure — to employ Ferri’s powerful metaphor — «the quality and clarity of the water» that lows in the digital «aqueduct», or, in other terms, to offer «qualitatively tailored to the needs of the chosen target» and «effective» contents (Ferri, 2004, pp.

68-69)31.

30

31

Here I am referring to both technologies or interactive design environments, such as Scratch (http://llk.media.mit. edu/projects.php?id=783), and inter-media and cross-media programmes (Ballico, 2008; Ferri, 2004; Parascandolo, 2000).

The industrial production is well aware about, since it often involves users — for example, Nintendo — to test products in the various passages of production, also receiving ameliorative suggestions, or it invites users to produce, such

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In addition, formative research and participatory design have not only “commercial” purposes but, providing a perspective of research on cognitive procedures (creative and evaluative), on attitudes, on cognitive development, also serves to understand the “weight” covered by the media on such psychological aspects (e.g., Joly, 2007); which should be a strong incentive to promote it.

Finally, si licet, the conjugation of the two perspectives — participatory formative research — could provide academic research, in the eyes of the producers, with a “inviting appeal”, that could encourage the funding32 of the research process, and I do not think that this term is “scandalous”, given the grey era in which we live.

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32 I think that the collaborative spirit of SIREM may encourage the creation of a group of multidisciplinary research that could promote activities which needs sophisticated laboratories to study/evaluate media programmes and products. * All references to online resources in this paper and in the bibliography were verified at September 2008.

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The analysis of media consumption The active role of the “audience” Gianni Losito

ABSTRACT

Department of Psycology of Development and Socialization Processes, Sapienza University of Rome, via dei Marsi, 78 – 00185 Roma.

E-mail: gianni.losito@uniroma1.it

Analyzing the media consumption implies not only the evaluation of its quantitative trends, but also the media reception processes deepening. Widely accepted is the hypothesis that considers the media consumption as an intentional act and each user as an reactive subject of his/her relationship with mass media. However, reviewing the literature in the ield, it is still not well explained how such activity takes place during the reception practices. In this article, three dimensions regarding the users activity in their relationship with media texts will be highlighted. Users activity is, irst of all, selectivity. Selective are the media reception processes and, in particular, the cognitive processes involved in the fruition, such as attention, perception and memory. In addition, activity is semantic autonomy referring to the negotiated meaning production which characterizes the relationship with mass media texts: meanings emerged in this relationship are not those in the text, but those which the media users discover and resigniied in and with the text itself. At the end, activity is social re-interpretation of those same meanings, when they become conversation and discussion subjects and ways and pretexts for social interactions.

Keywords: media consumption; reactive audience; making sense of media texts.

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Introduction The analysis of media consumption can not be restricted to a mere collection of data relating to the quantitative trends of media exposure. In fact, the interest in the reception of media texts based on a perspective that considers the protagonists of media consumption as active subjects is constantly increasing, even though it needs further strengthening. As neatly stated by Sonia Livingstone (1990), the production of meaning deriving from the texts/users interaction is a negotiating between two semi-powerful sources, each one with its inadequacies and its interests. The task of social research is to show the actual ways through which media consumption reveals itself, by specifying what we mean with the active role of the user. In fact, if it is almost obvious to state that the role of the audience is an active one, the nature of this activity and its actual manifestation are still to be explained. In welcoming the suggestions of several scholars for an in-depth examination of the question (Silverstone, 1994), the present article will indicate what I consider to be the three main dimensions that substantiate the activity of the user in his/her relationship with media texts, by briely making reference to some points I have already made in a book dealing with this issue (Losito, 2002).

In the irst place, activity is equivalent to selectivity. The exposure to media is selective, just like the ways, explicitly or implicitly motivated, through which each member of the audience traces its daily pattern of media consumption. The cognitive processes involved in the reception are selective too: attention, perception, memory and knowledge. Secondly, activity is equivalent to semantic autonomy in the negotiated production of meaning characterizing the relationship with media texts: the meanings produced by this relationship are not those ones inscribed in the text itself, but the ones the user inds out and re-elaborates in and with the text. Thirdly, activity is equivalent to the social re-interpretation of those meanings, when they become objects of conversation and discussion, occasion and source of social interaction.

Selectivity Social research has been investigating for long the ways and, above all the motivations of the selective exposure to media, by attempting to individuate the factors that orientate the choices of the audience. The research approach that has so far proved to be more valid is the one making reference to the «uses and gratiication» theory, a functionalism-inspired theory originally developed in the United States and in Great Britain in the 1960s. Its basic assumption is well known and can be summed up in this way: social situations bring about some speciic individual needs; media 122

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can satisfy some of these needs and they are therefore «used»; media «use», when it proves to be effective, produces «gratiications» that help to face social situations and the conditions of social unease they can cause; hence, the increasing people’s inclination to expose to mass communication. Obviously, the exposure to a speciic media text can result from some different and overlapping motivations that can have reference to some needs not only belonging to the individual sphere but also to the social one. The user is aware of some of these needs (such as the need for information, fun, amusement), but his other needs, which are also more interesting as objects of study, are latent (such as the needs relating to personal identity and social integration).

A number of researches in this ield deal with the uses of television, not only for its long time hegemony in the media system, but also because television consumption is considered the most complex one, as for the factors that orientate it, the contexts that characterize it and the consequences that it brings on the audience. Most of these researches have singled out two forms of television use with relation to the motivations that can induce it: a «ritualistic» use and an «instrumental» use. The former refers to a consumption style centered on the medium rather than on what it actually offers; a speciic television program is not chosen; television is “watched” by tuning in to whatever program the television can offer on its different channels at the time.

This kind of use is typical of heavy viewers who are motivated mainly by the need to spend their time easily and immediately, in the absence of more pleasing alternatives. On the contrary, the instrumental use refers to a television consumption style centered on the contents rather than on the medium: one chooses, from time to time, a speciic program on the basis of different motivations. These two uses can obviously coexist and alternate in the same subject, even though in any case one of them generally tends to prevail over the other.

A second noteworthy approach of research on the motivations and the modes of media consumption is the ethnographic one, which originated within the ield of Cultural Studies in the early 1980s. Through some qualitative researches, carried out with completely different theoretical assumptions and methodologies from the quantitative researches of the «uses and gratiications» approach, this ield has privileged the study of domestic consumption of television and has characterized itself for two main tendencies.

The irst tendency consists of making reference to the functions of television in the daily lives of the viewers; it has an evident assonance with the «uses and gratiications» theory in spite of some concerning recurring polemical afirmations of distinction. The researches of James Lull (1980; 1990) epitomize this tendency.

They have singled out two main domestic uses of television: a «structural» use and a «relational» use. With a «structural» use, the viewers use television the same way 123

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they use the other elements that deine the domestic setting and characterize daily life.

In this case, television is considered as a resource that people can use along with the other domestic activities and as a regulating, and often binding, element of people’s behavior that participates in the organization of domestic time by articulating the course of the common daily activities (awakening, housework, food preparing, lunch, dinner, and so on). On the contrary, a «relational» use implies the involvement of television in the interpersonal relationships. In this case, television can play either a stimulating or an inhibitory function of interaction between the family members, or it can facilitate communication as an occasion or an object of conversation. Nevertheless, it can also stimulate discussion and competition when, for instance, there is no agreement on the choice of the programs. This aspect has been investigated systematically for the irst time by a research of David Morley (1986) whose aim was to detect the causes, the dynamics and the outcomes of the actual conlicts raised by television in the family relationships, especially couples relationships. On the basis of the results of this research, the respective positions of men and women towards television is different not only with respect to the choice of the programs but also with the actual ways of exposure: for men, “watching television” is almost always an exclusive activity to be performed in a quiet and relaxed way, whereas for women it is a secondary activity that goes along with housework or some other activities.

Hence, a “deviant” use of television by women in situations of solitary exposure derives, when watching television is, at last, an exclusive and not subordinate activity that they are generally allowed to perform during the pauses of their housework or in their spare time. Moving from the veriication of the inequalities between men and women in the use of television to some feminist-inspired approaches of research has been a short step. In fact, a second tendency emerging from the ethnographic approach, especially during the 1980s, is that of dealing with female audiences and looking for a speciic female quality in the media consumption. So, it is possible to ind out that for “secluded” housewives who have to cope with a tiring and solitary work, radio and television are fundamental points of reference, their main chances to get in touch with the external world, a remedy to the frustrations deriving from domestic isolation, a support to organize the daily routine and to give shape to daily life (Hobson, 1980). It is also possible to ind out that women’s choices are oriented to those television genres which they consider to be closer to their sensibility and to their inclination to revise reality imaginarily (so, iction and, in particular, the serial one), rejecting the expressly male-oriented genres, such as information and sport.

Hence, the hypothesis that two separate television worlds exist (again Hobson, 1980): a female one and a male one opposing each other in the same way as, in the real world, men’s and women’s status and role oppose each other. As in the real world, where male status enjoys a higher regard than the female one, in the television world too 124

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“male” genres, in particular information, enjoy a regard and a respectability that, on the contrary, are generally denied to “female” genres, in particular to serial iction.

Starting from the statement of a female-speciic media consumption, it is possible to individuate a female-speciic media offer too, by asserting the need for a revaluation of some popular products, such as soap operas. A speciic female quality can emerge from the fact that soap operas propose and stimulate in the daily life some female-speciic discourse patterns that activate and facilitate communication: a female communication that promotes complicity, integration and solidarity among women in their collective re-elaboration of an imaginary world of which they would be the only capable explorers (Ang, 1985).

Given the theoretical and methodological differences between the different lines of research we have so far mentioned, the fact remains that they all show how media exposure is selective and how the use of media materializes in some paths of media consumption that each user creates prompted by some multiple and different motivations.

Besides exposure, selectivity also characterizes the cognitive processes involved in the fruition of the media texts. Attention and perception are selective and, as a consequence, the differences among the subjects in the attentive and perceptive processes are the rule and not the exception. If we refer all this to the reception of a media text, we can state that the user puts inevitably into action a process of reduction of the complexity of the text itself: since it is not always possible, even in the case of a quite simple and unsophisticated text, to achieve a comprehensive attention toward all its elements, its perception will be partial and it will involve some of these elements and not the others. Moreover, the user will attribute a different salience to the textual elements with reference, on the one side, to his/her perceptive predispositions, motivations, interests and, on the other, to his/her capability of bringing them back to the context they arise from and of judging them essential or inessential, relevant or irrelevant with relation to it.

Like attention and perception, memory too is a dynamic and selective process in which a fundamental role is played by the schemata. Schemata are some conceptual structures organized into memory, that is some integrated sets of concepts and categories, acquired through experience, that allow us to represent the existing objects and events and the relations occurring between them. Obviously, schemata also orientate the activity of reception of media texts. Given their characteristics and modes of functioning, they appear as elements that legitimate the attribution of an active role to the readers, the listeners and the audience: each user of every media text becomes, with reference to them, the protagonist of some speciic processes of understanding and interpretation, on the basis of one’s individual, cultural and social personal experience.

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Semantic autonomy The early acquisitions of psychology on the selectivity of attention, perception, memory and knowledge, constitute the premises for the attribution of an active role to the audience in view of the semantic work entailed by the reception of the media texts. In spite of this, the idea of understanding as research of meanings and the idea of interpretation as production of sense have emerged and afirmed late in the mass communication research. A long-term prevailing trend has been that to either overlap or to match understanding and interpretation and to consider the correspondence between the source coding and the user decoding as the expected outcome of these processes. So, communication has long been considered as a mere transmission of information the user receives and elaborates through some modalities that, as a matter of fact, imply an essentially passive process of learning. A turning point occurred in the late 1960s, when, at irst in literary studies and then in social sciences, some new tendencies emerged that were entirely oriented toward a more marked interest in the «function of construction — or deconstruction — of the text played by the act of reading, seen as the eficient and necessary condition of the very realization of the text as such. The underlying assertion to each of these tendencies is: the functioning of a text (and of a non-verbal text too) can be explained by taking into account, besides the generative moment, the role played by the addressee in its understanding, actualization, interpretation, as well as the way in which the text itself preigures this participation» (Eco, 1990, p. 16). It is obvious that these remarks are also valid for every kind of text and so for a television programme, a ilm, a newspaper article an advertisement, and so on.

In the social sciences, some of the most signiicant contributions to the attempt of investigating in a new way the processes of understanding are, once again, the researches carried out within the ield of the Cultural Studies. The researchers of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies of the University of Birmingham, though considering that media can propose «preferential meanings» and, in this way, stimulate some privileged modalities of decoding, have showed how each member of the audience is able to negotiate and, if necessary, to reject the interpretation suggested by the text, by involving in the reception his/her speciic cultural and social proile deriving from the social class and all the competences associated to it. Moreover, Stuart Hall, the main exponent of the Cultural Studies, proposed, in the early 1970s, a model of the encoding/decoding process that aimed at taking into account the necessary semiotic work to generate the text and to make use of it as well; a work that, in the two cases in point, can take different paths, problematizing in this way the correspondence between encoding and decoding (Hall, 1973).

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Cultural Studies have undoubtedly attested the active role of the user even though they have focused only on the way in which it either accepts or rejects the points of view asserted in the media texts and the treatment of some speciic themes. Actually, the preliminary semiotic work assumed by the mentioned acceptance or rejection has only been enunciated but not also investigated in detail. My research activity — which I have carried out at irst on the reception of advertising communication (De Rosa & Losito, 1996) and successively on television iction too — has been for many years aimed at providing a contribution to this issue. The outcomes I have so far achieved have allowed me to set up a model of the process of reception that is based on the distinction between understanding and interpretation. The former is seen as an analytic process of syntactic and semantic “reading”, the latter as a synthetic process of attribution of a unitary sense to the text seen in its wholeness (Losito, 2002).

Since attention, perception and memory are selective activities, an implicit process of selective individuation and grading of the signs is preliminary to understanding: in the same media text, each user can detect some signs and not others; and he can give a major or minor relevance to the presence of each of these signs in relation to all the others. So, understanding depends in the irst place on how many and what kind of signs are detected in the text and on the different saliency attributed to each of them. Given this premise, we can consider understanding as an integrated whole of acts of semantic charge of the selected signs. More precisely, we can consider understanding as the outcome of a process in which it is possible to single out two different modalities of semantic charge: on the one side, the recognition on the part of the user of the denotative or connotative meanings ascribed to some signs in the text; on the other, the autonomous attribution of denotative or connotative meanings, which do not coincide with the ones attributed in the text, to some other signs. The meanings we identify in the text through both modalities are then put into relation with each other, so that to give form to a new text deriving from the original one but not coincident with it: the outcome of this reconstruction is a “meta-text” that reduces the complexity of the original text and that can detach itself from it up to turn into an entirely autonomous text. So, in every communication act, the outcome of the process of understanding is located within an ideal continuum that stretches between the maximum and minimum poles of correspondence between the meanings of the text and the ones of the user, or rather, from the maximum incidence in the mode of recognition to the maximum incidence of the autonomous attribution of meanings.

In this model, interpretation is considered a global and synthetic process of sense attribution to the “meta-text” constituted by the relationships established between the multiple meanings recognized and/or autonomously attributed and reorganized in the process of understanding. So, understanding is an essential requirement for the interpretation as it has so far been intended, and does not superimpose onto it: the 127

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process of semantic charge provides for the meanings that constitute the “material” creating interpretation. These meanings are as well the points of reference for the user in the possible attempt of inding out a message in the text as it has been understood.

However, the discovery of a message does not necessarily mean to look for and to ind out an actually traceable message in the text since the texts do not always possess this characteristic. The discovery of a message means instead to look for and to ind out what we suppose the text “wants to say on the whole”, when we think that a text “wants or has to say something”, even though it does not actually happen. Moreover, in case a message is found out in the text, a further active action is required to the user if it responds to it by accepting it or rejecting it.

So, in interpretation, the process of attribution of meaning may confer to the text a unity, a discourse consistency and a inalism that can take form as a fragment of world vision, a life lesson, an existential balance, a judgment or a precept with a general value, a rule in terms of having to be, and what we have at our disposal as emblematic representation of a particular aspect of life with some strong emotional, affective, moral and ideological implications. In other words, the user can suppose that it is possible to infer a “deep meaning” from the text, a “message”, that corresponds to a “moral” somewhat close to his/her way of feeling and thinking. The user can or can not share this “moral”, can accept it or reject it, being affected by it or, on the contrary, being completely indifferent to it. The result is that understanding and interpretation are crucial factors among those which contribute to mediating the effects of media texts. In fact, in spite of those who still insist in supporting the powerful media hypothesis, a possible effect will not be determined by such-and-such a text in itself. At the most, it will be determined by the immaterial “metatext”, the outcome of the understanding process, by the whole meaning attributed to it in the process of interpretation, and by the “message” the user possibly inds out in it.

The collective re-interpretation of media texts In understanding and interpreting, the users can ind a support and a conirmation in the others by re-elaborating the meanings and the overall sense of the media texts in the narration, the conversation and the deriving comparison, by “iltering” them with relation to some opinions, attitudes, models of behaviour, shared social values and representations. Among the empirical researches that have showed the relevance of these social processes of re-elaboration and re-interpretation, it is particularly interesting the one carried out by E. Katz and T. Liebes (Katz & Liebes, 1984, 1987; Liebes & Katz, 1990) on the reception of Dallas, a television series that does not need any introduction. In their research, the authors wonder how it is possible that a lot of 128

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television ictions produced in the U.S.A. receive such an enthusiastic reception in different countries whose cultural and social conditions vary notably; moreover, they wonder what are the reasons of the planetary and trans-cultural success of a product of iction that deals with typically American stories and characters, set in a typically American background.

The research has been carried out in Israel with the focus-group technique, by involving some subjects with similar characteristics of social-economical status (the middle-lower one) and literacy level (not beyond a high school level). Each group was formed by some couples tied together by friendship relations and an ethnic origin that was different from the one of those who belonged to other groups. So, the cultural proiles of the different groups were very different: the participants were Arab-Israeli, recent Russian immigrants to Israel, irst or second generation Moroccans immigrants, American members of some kibbutzes. The results of the research outcomes show the existence of substantial differences, among the different ethnic groups, in the processes of attribution of meaning and the evident collective value of the same processes: the members of each group support each other in understanding and interpretation, both when they put into act some decodings that could be considered “correct”, and, above all, when they single out some different meanings and attribute an autonomous sense to the message. In this second case, the collective value is even more evident when the re-elaboration of the text is dictated by the need to make a segment of the story, dealing with a central theme for the viewer, consistent with the models of behaviour and the already familiar, that is typical of the cultural afiliation, value orientations. Another interesting result deals with the differences among groups with reference to the major or minor critical distance from the proposed issues. Within some groups, these issues are discussed by relating them exclusively to the stories of Dallas and so to the iction, without overstepping reality. Within other groups, on the contrary, they are approached with reference to real life, both general and personal.

In the irst case, the discussion moves from the protagonists of the programme to American people, businessmen and women, while, in the second case, to oneself, to one’s family, friends and acquaintances. Moreover, Katz and Liebes underline the high level of competence the “common” audience shows when coping with the programme. They are able to single out and focus on most of the issues it contains (family, success, loyalty, honour, money, sexuality, and so on), but they are strongly selective in giving importance to each of them, in putting them at the centre of their attention, in interpreting and valuing them. Besides, the same issues are represented as having a lot of different facets, some often ambivalent moral connotations, some substantial doses of “untold” elements and so with some textual “openings” that leave a great margin for interpretation. One of the central themes of Dallas, richness and its, not only economical, advantages, is, for example, read in different ways; the text 129

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is “open” on this theme because it is constantly balanced between some different and conlicting modes of representation and implied judgment.

Some (provisional) conclusions So, beside the power of the media, we must consider the power of the audience, a power that user shows in its being active in its relationship with media texts. Moreover, I must make the point that my recurring use of the term “audience” does not indicate that I share the idea that a general entity, more or less undifferentiated within it, that actually corresponds to it can be singled out. I made reference neither to “audience” nor to “audiences” but to the single users who put into act the modes of media consumption orientated by each social experience, daily built within the afiliated culture and social group. Moreover, some different styles of media reception can show some analogies that can be traced to some more general trends. Social research can point out and describe these trends, by recurring to some both quantitative and qualitative procedures, choosing them alternatively in function of the speciic fulilments to be achieved and of the speciic empirical circumstances that delineate the ield of enquiry. In both cases, the fundamental hypothesis that requires a further empirical support is that media consumption as meaningful action has to be studied by starting from the individual behaviours.

This does not mean to state that each member of the audience is always and in any case “aware”. It is in the direction of an awareness of reception — based on the acknowledging of the “active” role of the user, but going beyond it — that we can delineate some paths of research to develop or to start ex novo about media education.

References Ang, I. (1985). Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination. London: Methuen.

Blumler, J.G., & Katz, E. (Eds.) (1974). The Uses of Mass Communications: Current Perspectives on Gratiications Research. London: Sage.

Brundson, C. (1981). “Crossroads”: Notes on Soap Opera. Screen, 4, 32-37.

De Rosa, A.S., & Losito, G. (1996). È bianca o nera? Interpretazioni e atteggiamenti nei confronti della comunicazione pubblicitaria Benetton. Rassegna di Psicologia, 2, 75-115.

Eco, U. (1990). I limiti dell’interpretazione. Milano: Bompiani.

Hall, S. (1973). Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse. Occasional Papers, 7. Birmingham: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Also in: Hall S., Hobson D., Lower A., & Willis P. (Eds.) (1980). Culture, Media, Language (pp. 128-138). London: Hutchinson.

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Hobson, D. (1980). Housewives and the Mass Media. In S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe, & P. Willis (Eds.), Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies 1972-1979 (pp. 105-114). London: Hutchinson.

Katz, E., & Liebes, T. (1984). Decoding Dallas: Notes from a Cross-cultural Study. Intermedia, 3. Also in: H. Newcomb (Ed.) (1987). Television: The Critical View (pp. 419-432). New York: Oxford University Press.

Liebes, T., & Katz, E. (1990). The Export of Meaning: Cross-Cultural Readings of “Dallas”.

New York: Oxford University Press.

Livingstone, S.M. (1990). Making Sense of Television. The Psychology of Audience Interpretation. Oxford: Pergamon Press.

Losito, G. (2002). Il potere del pubblico. Roma: Carocci.

Lull, J. (1980). The Social Uses of Television. Human Communication Research, 6, 197209.

Lull, J. (1990). Inside Family Viewing: Ethnographic Research on Television’s Audiences.

London: Routledge.

Moores, S. (1993). Interpreting Audiences: The Ethnography of Media Consumption. London: Sage. (Moores, S., Il consumo dei media. Un approccio etnograico. Bologna: il Mulino, 1998).

Morley, D. (1986), Family Television: Cultural Power and Domestic Leisure. London: Comedia.

Rosengren, K. E., Wenner, L. A., & Palmgreen, P. (Eds.) (1985). Media Gratiications Research. London: Sage.

Silverstone, R. (1994). Television and everyday life, London: Routledge. (Silverstone, R., Televisione e vita quotidiana. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000).

Zillman, D., & Bryant, J. (Eds.) (1985). Selective Exposure to Communication. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

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Media and animation in the community Scenarios of participatory design Pierpaolo Limone

ABSTRACT

ERID Lab – Department of Human Sciences, University of Foggia, via Arpi 155 – 71100 Foggia. E-mail: p.limone@unifg.it

The following essay puts forward three possible readings of the relationship between media and sociocultural animation.

Starting from a review of previous studies on the relationship between means of communication, environment and education, it discusses the possibility of following new paths of research involving a closer collaboration between academic research and industrial research leading to the development of models and initiatives through the shared design of technologies and social services.

Keywords: participatory design; media; community.

Physical area and community The experiences of sociocultural animation, i.e. the sum of educational initiatives outside the school system, since the 1970s have been undergoing steady development in many European countries and in Latin America. The rediscovery of popular education in cities and rural communities revives pedagogical topics which have a long tradition but have recently been re-read in the context of new organizations of work and social relationships.

Edizioni Erickson – Trento

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Contemporary questions such as the growing demand for life-long learning, democratic access to culture, the spread of free time, the fear of anonymity and social solitude, lie at the heart of relections and educational practices which come under the label of sociocultural animation. The threat to the value of koinè in the post-industrial society and the new deinitions of “knowledge” and “culture” nourish a transnational movement which inds heterogeneous and interdisciplinary theoretical references.

In Italy, France and Spain, in particular, there are numerous testimonies of social experiences on a large scale which propose new educational models aimed at supporting the fulilment of the potential of groups of individuals bound by mutual interests or activities.

Sociocultural animation has taken root in western cultures where it has become a profession; it expresses itself through the exploration of languages, expressive forms and highly heterogeneous activities such as visits to a museum or natural park, community theatres, local social centres, diffusion of neighbourhood radio or television.

The media have always played a fundamental role in the various models of animation because technologies pervade, inluence and redeine geographical area and the community by updating the very nature of educational initiatives. The concept of community itself, even though it is one of the most elusive among sociological concepts, is particularly useful in our analysis.

The relections on the erosion of social capital and the growth of individualism, studied in depth by Robert D. Putnam in American society, clarify how the mass media are taking the place of civic and social institutions, crushing traditional communities into small family or even personal islands. Time spent on activities for amusement through the media seems to be, unfortunately, taken away from the time used to build communities: fewer petitions are signed, fewer clubs are joined, less voluntary work is done and, Putnam (2001) writes, one ends up “bowing alone”.

As we shall see later, many scholars respond to this analysis by suggesting that digital media are a possible antidote to individualization because they offer instruments which favour the building of new networks and communities (Wellman & Gullia, 1999; Resnick, 2001), and they open the way to proper educational initiatives.

The relationship between information technologies and the community is, therefore, a fertile ground full of fascinating points of departure which have been widely investigated since the beginning of the last century. Here, it will not be possible to follow the development of such studies (Jankowski, 2002), and yet it is important to place this tradition of research in its proper context as marked out since the 1920s by authors such as Robert Park (1922), who carried out empirical research on the role of the “community press” in the forming of identity among groups of immigrants and investigated the concepts of social network, identity and citizenship. Even today 134

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these topics are of great interest as shown by the great number of studies on the social effects of Internet (McRar, 1997; Myers, 1987; Stone, 1995; Turkle, 1995).

The rapid growth of Internet, together with the economic boom of the so-called “new economy�, has recently increased the intensity of the debates on the new communities, those consisting of people linked by digital instruments and telematics.

The development of a new model of community, characterized by the absence of a reference geographical area and by the overcoming of one of the most deep-rooted anthropological taboos which often linked identity, community and geographical area has been widely debated.

Authors such as Rheingold (1993) and Jones (1995; 1997; 1998) have studied the notion of virtual community and cybersociety, as representing the opportunities given by the new technologies in order to revive the values of traditional communities in networks of people connected to the Internet and linked by elective afinities more than by geographical ties, and proposing new models of meeting and socialization.

David Harvey (1990) afirms that the cultural transformations of our society would interdepend with the radical transformation of the organization of space, which has marked the evolution of the western geopolitics by throwing into crisis the concept of local communities. The perception of space, since the dawning of modernity, deined inexorably the speciic identity dimension of a community. The industrial revolution and, later, the digital revolution have fragmented identities producing multiple and ephemeral ontology which are no longer bound to any one geographical area.

Digital communities and education As with the spreading of radio, television and community printing, also the development of Internet creates opposite and contrasting positions in relation to social initiatives. In addition to those who applaud this innovation, there are those who feel uncomfortable, show concern and consider the spread of the new technology a social danger which can drive its users into a state of passiveness, isolation and progressively lowering levels of literacy (Slouka, 1995).

Informing this vivid debate on the role and the ontology of the digital media, there are numerous examples of cultural animation which intermingle with the wider tradition of media education and research.

The present experiences of education, in relation to the means of communication, can be broadly divided into two classical macro categories: education with the media and to the media. Further on a third category will also be mentioned, which could be considered as education of the media. The irst category includes animation through newspapers, radio, television and public Internet networks. This model of educational 135

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initiatives develops within communities which can be linked to a physical area, such as a neighbourhood, a suburb, a small town or, it can be a-spatial communities as in the case of networks such as Facebook, MySpace and YouTube.

From a purely technological point of view, there are few differences between purely online communities and online/physical communities. Both types develop from an initial exchange of e-mails to the so-called “persistent worlds” of Second Life or massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), leaving behind popular applications no longer up-to-date such as: Bullettin Board System (BBS), Multi-User Dungeons (MUD), Newsgroup, Internet Relay Chat (IRC).

Pausing to analyse more closely the social use of the digital media it can be noticed that because of their techno-relational properties they are widespread and pervasive, allowing easy and quick access to many subjects, the shortening of spacetime distances and the offering of an ideal ground for carrying out social and cultural animation initiatives.

The cultural and economic requirements for access to the online communities are set to diminish with the simpliication and progressive evolution of the technologies. This phenomenon, together with the exercise of a more accessible vocabulary and language, guarantees its spread even among the most disadvantaged sections of society.

By the seventies, the development of the low cost technologies for audio-video recording had already opened the way to revolutionary social initiatives for groups of the counterculture, political movements and localized intervention and animation groups, which wanted to mothball the cyclostyle and the printing of self-produced newspapers in order to produce neighbourhood television channels.

The so-called “community media” broadcasted products crafted on the premises by groups of producers/consumers (“pro-sumers”) which broadcast made-to-measure information by the community for the community.

Even though many of those pioneering experiences gradually died a natural death due to the dificulties of management and administration, short-sighted planning and overvaluing of the need for self-produced communication by the communities, some features of that social Utopia have been resurrected with the spread of digital media (Jankowski, 2002).

The processes of media convergence and the growing demand for social participation support the constant development of relational technologies and encourage the spreading of software based on friend networks, mutual-help networks and selfeducation networks. The Internet, within this model of sociocultural animation, is used like the central square of a city or like any other educational meeting place. Its communicative links certainly model some speciic formative options, but no more than the traditional places of education do. Everywhere formative projects take place 136

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have to be considered social contexts which are the setting and building blocks of the didactic experience. A school, a square, a church, for instance, offers many opportunities for developing formative initiatives, even though the range of choices which the educator has at his/her disposal is not endless having to be negotiated with architectural, social and cultural limits which can inluence didactic decisions (Callejo Pèrez, Fain & Slater, 2004).

In the same way digital media and the virtual spaces offer a precise environment for didactic action because they usually are within the reach of everyone, having speciic linguistic characteristics which overcome space-temporal bonds and which are dynamic, allowing the interaction of numerous subjects without hierarchies.

Among the various existing virtual communities the most interesting, from a pedagogical point of view, is without doubt the category of community which is usually deined as “community of practice” (CoP): «A community of practice is not just a Web site, a database, or a collection of best practices. It is a group of people who interact, learn together, build relationships, and in the process develop a sense of belonging and mutual commitment. Having others who share your overall view of the domain and yet bring their individual perspectives on any given problem creates a social learning system that goes beyond the sum of its parts» (Wenger, McDermott & Snyder, 2002, p. 34).

Animation initiatives can be carried out both in the exclusively online communities or in the online communities which have a geographical base.

The geographical communities which also have a virtual equivalent are made up by users who also have a territorial link. They develop particularly through Public Education Network (PEN), public network or civic network which often start thanks to public funds, or the will of a city council, rather than to spontaneous communities or to commercial needs.

The City of Bologna, for example, has been experimenting with a free civic network known as “Iperbole” since 1995. It gives access and wireless to many town services. Recently this community has created participatory experiences through telematic means. Citizens can discuss town planning, such as «The plan for the location of radio base stations of telephones» and experience dialogue and direct control by talking to companies, communities and associations.

Not every digital community should be considered as “community of practice”, however, some only allow the sharing of one speciic interest (Ducheneaut & Moore, 2004), for example the communities of video game enthusiasts, like also those of cooking, cars, gardening which are often spontaneous communities, free and based on the exchange of hints, advice, success stories and feedback from enthusiasts.

The communities of practice, on the contrary, are particularly suited to the development of educational initiatives because, contrary to “interest” or “geographic” 137

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communities, they facilitate the sharing of experiences, allow the development of situated learning and activate cognitive apprenticeship.

The users not only exchange interests, but also interact and collaborate in order to reach a common goal, as can be noticed, for example, in those multiplayer game communities which allow interaction with other players within the Internet.

Relection on communities of practice updates a theoretical-didactic repertoire which goes back to the experiences of sociocultural animation of the seventies. In fact, adapting a synthesis by Guglielmo Trentin (2002) to the discussion, it can be said that the community of practice is based on speciic pedagogical assumptions which hark back to, with a different language, traditional theories on sociocultural animation (Boal, 1974; Limbos, 1971; Moreno; 1972): – learning is a social phenomenon; – knowledge is integrated into the life of the community which shares values, beliefs, languages and practices; – learning process and belonging to the community are inseparable; – knowledge is inseparable from practice; – the opportunity to contribute to the community and the empowerment of the participants creates the conditions which produce learning.

It is interesting to note some similarities with what Henry Morris, one of the British pioneers of pedagogical studies, wrote in the twenties, on informal education: «We should break down the didactic conception of education as having only to do with instruction and discourse, by associating the economic, political, recreative and liberal side of adult life with education. We should then see education, not as a specialized process conined to one aspect of life, but as the process whereby the community organizes itself to secure for all its members the best kind of life in every direction.

There would be no department of life in which the constructive energy of education would not be brought to bear» (Morris, 1984, p. 42).

This beautiful deinition of the educative community is put forward once again in the description of Internet as an alternative to the scholastic “didactic funnels”, opportunities for socialization, new humanism and a new system for relating (Rivoltella, 2003).

Some technological myths seem to show that these a-spatial communities, by going beyond the limitations of geographical area, become democratic laboratories, virtual meeting places where one can participate in democratic life, cities with no walls where one can come and go freely, whilst always enjoying new and stimulating experiences.

This is the image of the new “virtual pedagogy” which operates in a virtual society, or rather in virtual communities which require great care and attention. Many of the 138

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initiatives for cultural animation which are today on the web — such as free online magazines, virtual museums, digital encyclopaedias — come into the category of education with the media. The technologies offer the opportunity to spread active learning in digital environments which are rich in resources, allowing access to collaborative groups and sometimes expert users who offer their support and help. The methods of animation with the media can also provide for more or less formalized learning including the offer of real sessions of e-learning. Usually these involve interest groups or communities of practice which discuss real problems in a virtual context.

Teaching people to switch off television Another possible declination of the relationship between media and sociocultural animation provides for educational initiatives to the media in speciic geographical areas. The experiences of the Fifth Dimension after-school programs developed by Michael Cole (2006) or the Lula government Hot Spot project widespread in Brazil, are two paradigmatic cases in a tradition which dates back at least to the seventies, but which has only developed in the last few years, thanks also to the reduced cost of access to multimedia technologies.

Michael Cole summarizes his method underlining that the after school model of Fifth Dimension is one of the rare cases of animation in a geographical area which provides explicitly for a close dialogue between academic research and local area.

Moreover, it is one of the very few cases of success which has kept on working and developing unceasingly over at least twenty years.

Cole’s project and Distributed Literacy Consortium project have become a truly international model, with experiences which have been recorded all over the world.

Every experience is remodelled depending on the context, but each displays at least the following characteristics: didactic planning based on problem-solving, centrality of communicative practices, voluntary adhesion by the students, continuous assessment and evaluation, centrality of the context and use of computers and videogames as instruments of mediation.

Hot Spot, on the contrary, is part of a wider Brazilian program of education to the media and social animation which consists in a net of didactic laboratories distributed throughout the nation and characterized by a system of spill-over education and by the collaborative planning of initiatives.

The laboratories, connected to the Internet and furnished with decommissioned computers donated by public ofices and by private companies, are coordinated by the community itself. Groups of students learn to use the technology and, then, they transfer their knowledge and skill to younger colleagues.

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The two aforementioned examples certainly have different approaches and develop in contexts geographically and culturally far from each other, but they share similar motivations. In both cases, the emphasis on the process of teaching and learning is placed on the process and not on the media products created by the students. The ability to read and write multimedia languages, the capacity to access the Internet and consciously use its resources, are more important than the technical abilities acquired.

Educational initiatives in the local area which aim at promoting literacy to the media languages can contribute to the reduction in the digital divide, facilitating access by disadvantaged or barely represented groups (de Block et al., 2004; Goodman, 2003) to the Internet and to the conscious exercise of the democratic rights of citizenship.

The educational initiatives to the media in the local area can empower the community, by increasing the autonomy of its learners and by broadening the potentiality of personal and community development.

Planning an underground transport system with a mobile phone When educational research meets the new technologies of communication it usually strives to study them and to discover their didactic applications. Rarely, however, it is possible to modify the actual media or to guide their evolutionary trajectory, because the economic and technological opportunities exert a greater inluence.

To put side by side to the traditional processes of education to the media and with the media a perspective of “education of the media� would mean, on the contrary, working with companies in order to develop educational technologies, with clearly didactic content, entertainment with pedagogical aims and systems of innovative distribution. Moreover, the media could be instruments to fully assert our rights as global citizens, contributing to the collaborative design of numerous aspects of social life.

The knowledge accumulated by research on media cultures, on the models of manmachine interaction, on the cognitive strategies of media users, offers valid tools for creating a program of pedagogy of the media which could guide the production of new educational technologies encouraging the personal development and the horizontal empowerment of the community.

Future technologies for social communication could arise from the encounter between educational and industrial research in the ield of technological innovation and interaction design.

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Why is the potential of videogames only used for entertainment purposes? Why is a sophisticated device, such as the I-Phone, still mainly considered a trendy telephone?

Consider, for example, the relational and technological potentialities of a mobile phone of the latest generation, it is clear that the manufacturing industries have created extraordinary machines, but they have underestimated their potential for social and educational initiatives. These innovative media, on the contrary, could provide key access to an educative community which also uses the technologies of communication to share decision-making processes and to plan innovation.

This paper has discussed how educational research on the media and animation in the local communities has been enriched, in the last few years, by a new notion of geographical area and community. However, a real discontinuity is possible only if invisible authority of the designer of the technological project is questioned and challenged.

The technological project could overcome its technocentricism, and pedagogy can play a decisive role in the research and development of innovative anthropocentric technologies.

There are still many unexplored lines of research on the pedagogical roles of communication technologies, on educational strategies and social initiatives which can be effected in the community in order to enlarge the public sphere, by designing instruments of access to the political debate which increase the participation of citizens.

This research can have different applications: for example it is possible to study how technologies inluence urban planning choices or how citizens can use the media to take part in public decisions on investments or strategies for development of the community.

New mobile phones could be employed in the participative design process of deciding together the route of an underground transport system or the organisation of a concert season.

Digital media offer an opportunity to transform the tradition of socio-cultural animation into an occasion for community “learning by design” processes, and probably the most fruitful test ield of such initiatives of shared design would be the videogame.

For some years groups of developers and institutions have been meeting to share projects and knowledge in initiatives known as “serious games” and “games for a change”, which promote non-violent and socially productive games.

Every year the conferences on Serious Games at GDC in San Francisco are attended more and more by a heterogeneous audience made up of companies, institutions, associations safeguarding children and universities. The companies look for 141

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opportunities for proits in investing in the educational ield and multiplying collaborations, exchanging outcomes of research and specialized publications.

Brenda Laurel reminds us, in her essay Computer as Theatre (1993), that the most interesting potential of computers is not based on their extraordinary capacity for calculating, but on the opportunity presented by programmes which help people to interact.

The possibility of action and interaction, typical of expressive forms such as theatre, transforms the computer into a narrative-interactive machine, a technology of dialogue.

The effort which the computer demands from its reader-player is not banal and requires active participation in the narration, as exactly is the case with videogames which require a serious physical as well as cognitive involvement in order to be played.

Gonzalo Frasca puts forward some similarities between the methods of the theatre of the oppressed developed by Augusto Boal and what he deines as «the digital game of the oppressed», re-interpreting videogames as devices for social animation of community-minded inspiration.

Experiences of using online multiplayer videogames or ARG (Alternate Reality Game) to plan shared social initiatives are already well known; moreover these spontaneous actions go side by side with critical scientiic production which is ever more numerous.

Interactive and relational software such as videogames, together with digital media characterized by faster computing and progressive miniaturization, are available on the market. Educational research, in this context, inds the opportunity to play a leading role in an evolutive discontinuity, a step forward made together with the users, to plan the communication technologies of the future. A deep collaboration with the industries would allow the start of a process of “education of the media” in order to transform the instruments of communication into devices which support a project of technological anthropocentric innovation. The lines of research opened by the possibility of simulation, interaction and social networking which characterise new media could lead us towards scenarios of social animation which support the development of a mature digital citizenship.

References Boal, A. (1974). Teatro del oprimido. Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Flor. (Boal, A., Il teatro degli oppressi. Milano: Feltrinelli, 1977).

Callejo-Pèrez, D.M., Fain, S.M., & Slater, J.J. (2004). Pedagogy of Place. Seeing Space as Cultural Education. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

Cole, M. (Ed.) (2006). The Fifth Dimension. An after School Program Built on Diversity. New York: The Russell Sage Foundation.

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De Block, L., Buckingham, D., Holzwarth, P., & Niestyo, H. (2004). Visions across Cultures.

Migrant Children Using Visual Images to Communicate. Report for EC-funded project CHICAM (Children In Communication About Migration).

Ducheneaut, N., & Moore, R.J. (2004). The Social Side of Gaming: A Study of Interaction Patterns in a Massively Multiplayer Online Game. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2004) (pp. 360-369), 2004 November 6-10, Chicago IL, USA. Frasca, G. (2004). Videogames of the Oppressed: Critical Thinking, Education, Tolerance and Other Trivial Issues. In N. Wardrip-Fruin, & P. Harrigan (Eds.), In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (pp. 85-94). Cambridge: MIT Press.

Goodman, S. (2003). Teaching Youth Media. New York: Teachers College Press.

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Pedagogy, social citizenship and ethics of (mediated) communication Salvatore Colazzo

ABSTRACT

Department of Pedagogy, Psychology and Teaching, University of Salento, via Stampacchia, 45 – 73100 Lecce. E-mail: salvatorecolazzo@gmail.com

The media today delineate the multiplanar space of a sphere that allows to avoid the constraints of a total control of the conscience. In this semiosphere both an ethics of communication and an ethics of recognition can take shape.

Keywords: semiosphere; ethics; paideia; ediication.

… ethical relation – by which I mean to indicate the aspiration to a non-violent relationship to the Other, and to Otherness more generally, that assumes responsibility to guard the Other against appropriation that would deny her difference and singularity.

(Cornell, 1992, p. 62)

Inhabiting the media The media predominate in postmodernity, and have become a real “way of life”.

They are no longer instruments as the word itself might suggest, but the word articulates a world. As Berardi Bifo (2000, p. 125) suggests, «the web is not an instrument Edizioni Erickson – Trento

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but a sphere», because it is, in fact, the habitat where we live and develop our actions, where we experiment our compulsions and attempt our acts of freedom. Interactive media have marked a turn which we may qualify as «a genuine anthropo-political mutation» (Abruzzese, 2000, p. 156).

Pedagogy cannot disregard this. It needs to relect on its role and raison d’être, which is to contribute to education of each citizen, who has joined this pervasive communication space, this semiosphere, which we swim in like ish in water.

The semiosphere habitat does not operate in a single direction, nor is it cohesive.

It is characterised by its multiplicity.

Postmodernity does not accept the sovereignty of language that dictates the universal. Instead it emphasizes the plural. Hence, it imposes on each and everyone of us the need to ind the sense through the negotiation of meanings, through the attempt to put together communalities/communities of discourse, mutual recognition based on the search for afinity. Internet allows a multiplicity of levels of communication and existence, the effect of which is to emancipate and liberate. From this point of view internet is a form of social empowering.

Today, if there is a perspective of freedom, it is in «the capacity to construct recombining mechanisms in the virtual sphere and, at the same time, to project their determination on the territory that we have access to» (Berardi Bifo, 2000, p. 136).

And it is actually in the semiosphere that an ethics of communication can begin to form (a way of living the communication); and at same time an ethics of recognition, or rather, a way of feeling the “us”, the “you” and the “I”. If this is the horizon of postmodernity, then education has a new responsibility, unknown before, and pedagogy has an epistemological task of enormous signiicance.

«The end of these great universalistic paradigms, whether aesthetic, social, or political, have basically allowed negotiation to emerge, which takes us back to a greater local and localised presence of the individual and hence of the interaction between me and you, between the person and the Other» (Abruzzese, 2000, pp. 158-159).

Postmodern media are strongly interactive and are likely to determine the vanquishing of writing as a form of communication. All this has an extremely precise meaning: the renunciation of a mechanism governing the emotions, the “cognitivisation” of the relationship between man and reality, and the critical reconstruction of the world. Up to today, the school had been the agency which has allowed experience to be mapped through the controlling schemata of reading, writing and relection.

Modern thinking has tried to reduce the fact, the possible, the irrational and the desire itself to the rational government of will, through science and technology. Inside the paradigm of modernity the school was a machine aimed at reducing the series of facts, of episodes, and at preventing an ininite expansion of reality to break in on the theatre of experience. It was a ilter device mainly based on writing.

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A matter of visibility In postmodernity, the need to crystallize the emotive magma through writing and schooling, whose very raison d’être is based on writing, is less strongly felt. Instead, following Abruzzese (2000, p. 162) we have «an ever increasing somatization and experiencing of language and communication». Modern rationality had left many of life’s experiences and existences in the shadows, conining them to casualness of a background, hardly worth noting or rationally developed, due to the intrinsic dificulties in translating them into measured written form. In fact, «the visibility of subjects and bodies which in Western history writing had demeaned» (Abruzzese, 2000, p.

162) now with the advent of media could be shown rather than described. Media have allowed subjects to experiment with auto-representation, which have gone beyond the written form, and hence beyond «the historical universes of communication» (Abruzzese, 2000, p. 163), also reaching a language able to talk them and let them evolve. Examples include reference to experiences from women, the gay community, children, disabled people. All of these remained on the sidelines of a writing which tried to rationally circumscribe the world. These experiences were (and still are) in permanent conlict between their actual bodily sense of belonging and their historical background, between their real essence, or rather their actual lived lives, and their non-essence in the world of the institutions and power. Internet today offers a great promise: the acknowledgement of the corporeity of these marginalized individuals and «the possibility to re-elaborate, connect, ad reorganise the subordinate subjects» (Abruzzese, 2000, pp.162-163).

Through interactive media, these individuals can ind a totally new visibility that they can control themselves, and no longer limited within the dominion of the nonobservable. Of course, the media have no problems in producing distortions in the visibility. Mubi Brighenti (2008, pp. 91-113) reminds us of Patrick Champagne’s observation, who noted that today the game is played according to one’s capacity to control how the media represents you, in particular through the TV, which still exerts a considerable power.

The dominated groups unable to gain any visibility are also unrecognised. Even if they are able to share a visible space and they create a community, this is not enough.

It is essential for them to go beyond the ghetto and meet a real open public dimension.

Exclusion and invisibility are one and the same thing. At other times minorities can be exploited through media overexposure. When foreigners, Rumanians for example, are represented as criminals, the group as a whole becomes hyper-visible and this can paralyze the individual members.

According to Mubi Brighenti (2008, p. 98) «the positioning of a subject over or under the threshold of a correct visibility leads to the problem of managing his social 147

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image, and in particular of the degree of control of that management. A distorted visibility leads to a distortion in the social representation and to distortions through the visibility itself». The key problem of visibility is that of access. Who decides the access to speciic spaces? And for whom? Visibility raises an ethical (and naturally political) problem, due to the fact that you can «both bestow power and take it away».

As Brighenti continues (2008, p. 100), visibility «can be just as much a source of empowerment as of disempowerment».

The web too, if we think about it, raises problems of visibility. I may well inhabit the web, but if the search engines do not pick me up and do not let me head results lists, then I am invisible. Organisations such as Google have turned people’s interests in becoming visible into a staggering business — selling search list positions.

To face the crisis of educational institutions, consequence of this overwhelming communication, there are two possible ways. The irst conirms the need to reason in systemic terms and consider the school as equilibrating the media. In this scenario, the school has the speciic function of compensating and integrating the implicit curriculum followed by the media. In the second alternative, the school can accept the challenge of postmodernity and abandon its modern rationality ethos. In this perspective, it measures with the emotive, the bodily and the material. It should be able to do this through language, although not through the default abstract strategies of the written word. The irst scenario has been eminently exempliied by Neil Postman (1979), while the more radical approach can be found in a recent publication by Roberto Maragliano (2008), which also, at times, resembles what Angelo Semeraro (2007) has stated in his book. Franco Cambi, between the two extremes, in same ways follows Postman’s critical approach, but shows himself open to the idea that school can work with the media, informing the media of the values it has always carried out (Cambi & Toschi, 2006).

Empowering opportunities of the new media Pedagogy today is accepting the challenge of postmodernity and is allowing education to take on a regulatory function in a society aimed to openness and pluralism, polycentricity and without a preconceived order and meaning. It is though, constantly bent towards order and meaning, but collectively, through dialogue and democracy.

This parallels the regulating function of someone who lives in anxiety and in a search for an identity that is open in its ininite tension to the form.

Education can discover that its deepest vocation is to orient people working to ind some sense in relation to the world and to themselves. Individuals and society have open and problematic statutes. They look for rules of behaviour and look to education as a point of reference that will help to ind their own speciicity in the world, to make 148

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their own active contribution and to make it more attuned to their own ideals. All this is within an ethical frame which calls for reciprocity and the equal right that every man and woman has to live life their own way, giving full sense to their own search for sense.

Education today aims to measure itself with society, and to orient it according to future perspectives, preiguring an ideal for man which aspires towards an active and creative relationship with the world, which follows a fullness of being, which is vitality and is made of an enlarging capacity of his faculties. Hence education today can only be media education, or rather education to the media, with the media, through the media, and so on.

It will have to catch the implicit ethical weight that the media possess. There is a positive dimension that personal media brings with them, which education can embrace and make valuable. It is a form of communication which can empower people, and can put them on an equal footing. It overturns the hierarchy around which communication has always been constituted, based on the principle of authority: in the family, at school and between citizens and State. This type of communication was part of an authoritarian culture whose function was to conirm the asymmetrical status quo.

Today, ethically correct communication refers to the individual as «based on the relation, and hence open to alterity, understanding it, interiorising it and making it as an “ally” within one’s own ego» (Cambi & Toschi, 2006, p. 63).

Pedagogy can aid and accompany the individual in acquiring communication as a vehicle of reciprocity. So, the key task of education is to “form” the individual to ethically manage the communicative processes, and to be concerned with the context, with the others and with oneself. From an ethical point of view it basically means: recognition of the other and putting oneself in such a condition that communication does not breakdown.

Hence, objectives for education may be proposed on several levels: a) individual, which facilitates the integration of self; b) social, which allows the individual to fully integrate into society. This does not mean conforming, but actively contributing to the development of society; c) interpersonal, whereby diversity is recognised. Here, we have the ability to relate to diversity, to accept and take the opportunity of learning from it to develop the individual; d) institutional, where we recognise the importance of the institutions and fully perceive the meaning of “one’s rights and one’s obligations”. Here, relations with the authorities, at school, just as in the family and at work are consciously within this remit; e) cultural, recognising the patrimony of previous generations, where we identify with our community and its values. Hence we are able to contribute our own creativity, innovating the past and consolidating and enriching the present.

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These targets are not easy to reach because communication today has become all-pervasive, and through its technical imposition it risks to be an all-encompassing apparatus to be accepted rather than modiied. Communication today “allows itself to be managed and piloted by organisations of communication, resulting in the submission to power and to systems”. Work needs to be carried out in inding a way to iniltrate creativity, making the established systems less sure of themselves and at the same time reclaiming a communication system that works according to human relations, rendering them non-alienated, complete, satisied and joyful.

The question is: does such a communication exist? One that can meet the deep needs of Homo Sapiens?

For an answer we can turn to individual and social psychology. This discipline can offer a number of criteria useful for pedagogy: a) transparency and non-manipulation are considered positive values. Although there is awareness of the shadow implied in the communication, a positive connotation is attributed to the aspiration towards a horizontal, balanced and democratic communication; b) authentic communication aims at introducing empathy where there is conlict; c) desiderable communication should generate community, sharing, collaboration and solidarity while at the same time it maintains distinctions between “self” and “other”. Confusion is not a value. The individual is openness to other, and the “otherness” becomes an element for the development of the self.

These three positive dimensions of communication must be not only recognised in pedagogy, but nurtured and emphasized. We should be aiming our educational design to prepare individuals for lives characterised by interpersonal dialogue and empathy, with a capacity to manage their own emotions while keen to maintain communication open — and aware that communication is life.

The ethical purpose that pedagogy should subscribe to in this era of pervasive communication is to «strengthen/correct/cultivate communication itself, beginning with oneself. He or she should, if communication is to be genuine, communicate with “oneself”, read “oneself” and become conscious of one’s own boundaries, models and structures in a process of internal reorganisation of one’s own subjectivity; as identity, as personal lifestyle and as objective» (Cambi & Toschi, 2006, pp. 72-73).

Communication as a common good The media are not intrinsically emancipating. They offer a number of opportunities that originate from a particular view of the world, but can rapidly be perverted and 150

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subject to other perspectives. But what really count, as always, are the values and the dialogue between cultures, where they take stock of each other with the aim of imposing one way (rather than another) of inhabiting the media, learning (or not) new ways of relating to others. The media can be educated in the sense that we can work to encourage some practices rather than those we consider less in keeping with a certain idea of the world. Media ethics is nothing but a vision of the practices we believe to be valid for the communicative/living space by media represented. It consequently carries a responsibility towards fulilling the conscious objectives regarding one’s own personal and social actions, those aimed at the essential social improvements to be pursued together, and with joy. This is not a model imposed from outside, but a concrete strategy through the media to mould it to the values and ideas that can be shared by others. From this perspective, then, pedagogy should be oriented towards the ideals of paideia, the classical Greek training for liberty (freedom) and nobility (the beautiful), developed by the German Bildung and in Richard Rorty’s ediication. We need to try and keep communication and education together, as this is the only way to really have an effect on the polis, our unity of political organization. Its overriding importance is working to ind the ways to raise awareness of the idea of society it carries, which means giving support to individual expression, so that meetings between individuals and understanding of others can be enriching. The media, as noted, are pervasive and have created a particular way of inhabiting the space they have created. Hence, education today must suggest us a way of living those interrelations created by the media.

In fact, it is through a return to a rich relationship with communication that a relaunch of education and its accompanying institutions is possible today. This may be conceived as an instrument of dialogue, to talk about “difference” and to establish social relations with the objective of creating a real community. We can ind signs within the semiosphere which relate to our ideas of what is desirable in terms of civility, democracy, economy, social life, and personal and intercommunity relations, aware of the power of communication «to accelerate or slow down the autonomy of individuals and society, which can nourish or lose our faith in the processes of transformation» (Cambi & Toschi, 2006, p. 16).

Unfortunately, pedagogy still appears to be slow in realising the socio-political role of education to and with the media, and it is unable to give an adequate response to the needs that the new generations have to interact consciously and creatively with communication. And yet communication is «a fundamental and absolutely indispensable good. It is the ifth element, after air, earth, water and ire, that naturally belongs to us, but it needs to be culturally defended, through new educational competencies able to support the speciic characteristics of communication: the desire to reach and be reached for mutual recognition» (Cambi & Toschi, 2006, p. 17).

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Pedagogy has a historic task: to accept how far communication has gone off the tracks and to make itself ready to meet the challenge of uncertainty and risk, to explore new tracks moving through a plethora of possibilities, betting on, and guessing rightly, those paths which will serve humanity.

This means taking action, namely approaching communication, no longer as suffering subjects but as active users who believe in the possibilities offered by the present system to promote the capacity to reconsider people’s real and vital emotions.

These emotions are, at the best of times, not purely expressive, but have a dialogical aspect, and hence are attentive to the world of others. In this way, education is relation: relation with self and relation with the other, it is relation with itself if it is relation with the other.

Hence, what is important in communication is the pursuit of rapport and convergence. If we accept this idea then we can abandon the rules of discourse and treat language creatively.

We can welcome a new reader ethics, which no longer sees a text as «an object to analyse, but as a subject with whom we can relate, in the pursuit of that common human truth that both the author and his critic equally and with equal dignity aspire to» (Cambi & Toschi, 2006, p. 31). Every form of expression is an attempt to create an exchange between individuals.

«It is the spectator that makes the show, the reader rewrites the book. And the event is everything that we allow ourselves to be caught up with in the movement, developing in turn new movement» (Cambi & Toschi, 2006, p. 31). In the event the body is also involved, which is consequently energy, and spreads: «As Encyclopaedist have written a body in movement installs acceleration on another body» (Cambi & Toschi, 2006, p. 32).

Ezio Raimondi takes on the topic of the new reader ethics. His excellent volume is an extraordinary clear overview of the subject. In a universe uncertain of its own complexity, a multitude of traditions coexist, forming a cultural system «structurally open and luctuating». In order to work, it needs «an authentic pluralism, founded on the agonising scruple of a constant return to its own particular view. Its own identity is not, then, abandoned but is rather used to confront “the other”. Relationships are unprejudiced and are also enriched through dissent» (Raimondi, 2007, p. 44). According to Raimondi, reading more than ever before is today an experience of openness towards the otherness. Reading is «a multiple and steep landscape, of voices and of intentions, of relations and differences, of conlicts and, maybe, of aporias. This deinitively cancels the idealistic hypothesis of a harmonious and retrospectively unanimous whole» (Raimondi, 2007, p. 45). In fact, following Bachtin, reading is an experience of the boundary, through which a relationship is opened and which discovers the impossibility of convergence. The reader’s ethics is «the freeing ethos 152

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and responsible for the extra-locality» (Raimondi, 2007, p. 38). Bachtin teaches that every act of comprehension is a co-creation, and is also a battle because you «test your energy to compare and to invent in the words of another. The more creative and vital they are, the more respectful of the inviolable sign of diversity» (Raimondi, 2007, p. 38). For this reason a text is a potential which increases to ininity with time as a result of the unpredictable contacts with the readership and «with their compound histories of relationships, of contacts, of concerns and interests, and of desires» (Raimondi, 2007, p. 39). In this way the text becomes a screen for a never accomplished confrontation «among reasons differently based on truth» (Raimondi, 2007, p. 39).

Pedagogy from inside the images We have already mentioned that the media today have reduced the importance of writing. They make use of the much more primitive mode of communication which provided the basis on which writing and literate cultures have developed.

And there are theories which are able to explain how man can think without necessary recourse to writing. These theories are important because they show that it is possible to igure out a “post-alphabetic” education.

We are confronting a new challenge for education: the ability to work, produce and develop within the universe of images. This means being able to relate to the world of the media, that accepts and rides out the explosive aggression of the image without distancing oneself or critically interpreting this visual world. In other words, pedagogy should attempt «an interpretative approach which provides the groundwork for the construction of further pedagogy: pedagogy from within the images. This approach is able to affect the inner aspects of human action and to identify and redeem the dark and troubling side of all image based communication» (Maragliano, 2008, p. 35). So, following this path we can question «the logocentric emphasis in current education practice» (Maragliano, 2008, p. 35). At the same time this opens education to all that is «body, touch and action», «movement of spirit, sensation and affect».

This is living, inhabiting images. And so we enter a craftsman workshop dimension which no analysis can substitute. As De Kerckhove (1995) maintains, the best way to deal with psychotechnologies is not to see them as strange and threatening, but to make them an integral part of our individual psychology: «a new human is being formed».

A pedagogy suitable to images is one that is able to perceive the image as «an embryonic form of thinking, a lump of pre-thought, a senso-motory layer of intelligence or the trunk onto which language is grafted, which brings about the ability “to call”, “to classify” and “to say”» (Maragliano, 2008, p. 66). In this pedagogy we 153

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can differently relect images, where to relect means to consider, to take on abstract forms of conceptualisation and to transform them into objects of thought. Here, we accept the challenge of the society of images, and the relection is the movement that the individual makes, which relects itself in the image-thing, so that in looking he is looked at. Comparing internal and external images is the way in which individuals rapport with others, allowing further communication. What is inside oneself is exteriorised, and what is outside is interiorised and then assimilated. We do not relect on the image, we relect with the image. We discover how to hold both the emotive dimension and the abstract rational dimension. We discover how to immerse ourselves in reality, to produce emotional thought and re-immerse ourselves in experience to creatively enrich it.

In the era of electronic media we are all obliged in some way to become artists.

«To talk about images means learning how to play on numerous tables of translation, of parody, of transformation and of composition» (Maragliano, 2008, p. 179). We need to carry out «a regeneration of images so that we can guarantee choice in terms of guaranteeing the possibility to talk and exchange stories. These experiences are crucial for the growth of one’s and others’ images» (Maragliano, 2008, p. 179).

The hope is that doing this we can contribute to build a society where its citizens know — following Rorty — how to be tolerant, united and ironic, and wishing to dedicate themselves to self improvement and aspire to self determination.

References Abruzzese, A. (2000). Il potere per me e per te. In S. Cristante, & M. Binotto (Eds.), Media e potere. Il lato oscuro della forza (pp. 155-164). Roma: Luca Sossella Editore.

Berardi Bifo, F. (2000). Il potere e i new media. In S. Cristante, & M. Binotto (Eds.), Media e potere. Il lato oscuro della forza (pp. 125-136). Roma: Luca Sossella Editore.

Cambi, F., & Toschi, L. (2006). La comunicazione formativa. Strutture, percorsi, frontiere.

Milano: Apogeo.

Cornell, D. (1992). The Philosophy of the Limit. New York: Routledge.

De Kerckhove, D. (1995). The Skin of Culture. Toronto: Somerville Press. (De Kerckhove, D., La pelle della cultura. Milano: Costa & Nolan, 1996).

Maragliano, R. (2008). Parlare le immagini. Milano: Apogeo.

Mubi Brighenti, A. (2008). Visuale, visibile, etnograico. Etnograia e ricerca qualitativa, 1, 91-113.

Raimondi, E. (2007). Un’etica del lettore. Bologna: Il Mulino.

Semeraro, A. (2007). Pedagogia e comunicazione. Paradigmi e intersezioni. Roma: Carocci.

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Editorial Luciano Galliani Media education research. Multidisciplinary contributes and development perspectives Luciano Galliani The meaning of media practice. A SIREM enquiry for a national research about media practices of youngsters, parents and teachers Pier Cesare Rivoltella Digital space Mario Ricciardi Media and learning. What can cognitive psychology suggest to multimedia education?

Alessandro Antonietti and Manuela Cantoia eLearning. PLEs perspectives Paolo Frignani Professional profiles in eLearning Lorenzo Cantoni School and media curriculum Nicola Paparella Media Education as pre-service and in-service training for teachers Floriana Falcinelli The evaluation of media programmes and products.

Formative and participatory research Laura Messina The analysis of media consumption. The active role of the “audience” Gianni Losito Media and animation in the community. Scenarios of participatory design Pierpaolo Limone Pedagogy, social citizenship and ethics of (mediated) communication Salvatore Colazzo

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