Ola Erstad

Defining Twenty-First Century Skills

As the previous chapter indicates, there has been a significant shift in advanced economies from manufacturing to information and knowledge services. Knowledge itself is growing ever more specialized and expanding exponentially. Information and communication technology is transforming the nature of how work is conducted and the meaning of social relationships. Decentralized decision making, information sharing, teamwork, and innovation are key in today’s enterprises. No longer can students look forward to middle class success in the conduct of manual labor or use of routine skills – work that can be accomplished by machines. Rather, whether a technician or a professional person, success lies in being able to communicate, share, and use information to solve complex problems, in being able to adapt and innovate in response to new demands and changing circumstances, in being able to marshal and expand the power of technology to create new knowledge, and in expanding human capacity and productivity.

Challenges to learning and schooling in the digital networked world of the 21st century

This article elaborates on the competencies, often referred to as 21st century competencies, that are needed to be able to live in and contribute to our current (and future) society. We begin by describing, analysing and reflecting on international frameworks describing 21st century competencies, giving special attention to digital literacy as one of the core competencies for the 21st century. This is followed by an analysis of the learning approaches that are considered appropriate for acquiring 21st century competencies, and the specific role of technology in these learning processes. Despite some consensus about what 21st century competencies are and how they can be acquired, results from international studies indicate that teaching strategies for 21st century competencies are often not well implemented in actual educational practice. The reasons for this include a lack of integration of 21st century competencies in curriculum and assessment, insufficient preparation of teachers and the absence of any systematic attention for strategies to adopt at scale innovative teaching and learning practices. The article concludes with a range of specific recommendations for the implementation of 21st century competencies.

A new direction

Digital literacy is now defined as a key area of competence in the new national curriculum for schools in Norway. For policy makers the terms ‘information society’ and ‘knowledge society’ has been used to argue for implementing new technologies in education, and for improving learning. These views have been highly problematic, partly because they do not take into consideration how new technologies are used by young people, or how schools work as social practices. This article will focus on how we conceptualize a student perspective in schools related to the use of digital technologies. Combining an increased focus on digital literacy in school curricula with an increased focus on student participation challenges our conception of the school-aged learner. In discussing these issues I will draw on results from a number of school-based ICT projects that I have been involved in since 1998.

Re‐mixing multimodal resources: multiliteracies and digital production in Norwegian media education

Youngsters are increasingly using digital technologies through participation in informal settings. Schools, however, seem to be struggling with implementing digital technologies into formal school activities. With the impact of digital technologies, media education can be seen as an increasingly important ‘transactional learning space’ between school‐based education and leisure activities among youth. Our analysis in this article is grounded in the framework of media learning and multiliteracies, focusing particularly on the re‐mixing of available semiotic resources downloaded from the Internet. We are interested in media production as a key defining component of the Norwegian media curriculum, especially how digital media and the Internet create new affordances that affect how students work on creative media production. We analyse interactional data from two school settings and discuss some of the implications of the main findings for broader current issues in Norwegian education, with an emphasis on digital literacy.

Reviewing Approaches and Perspectives on “Digital Literacy”

This paper explores the purchase and usefulness of the notion of digital literacy. Comparing and contrasting theoretical formulations of digital literacy from the “top-down” and “bottom-up”, it reviews how the concept has been used across three research fields in Europe and Australia. An introductory section situates the ways in which digital literacy offers itself as a mean of empowerment in the tradition of the “new literacy studies” but at the same time exposes contradictions in terms of access and power. The first domain explored is media discourse, and this section of the paper examines ideas which have been circulating in Australia since the early 1990s about the need for children to become digitally literate. The second section examines how the concept of digital literacy has developed over the last decade in the domain of school policy, curriculum documents and practices in Norway; and the third section reviews transnational research to explore how the term digital literacy is used in the domain of childrens and youths out-of-school cultural digital practices. We argue that the term “digital literacy” incorporates more notions of exclusion and division than is commonly supposed, and that it exposes the contradictory politics of literacy education in new and provocative ways.

The Learning Lives of Digital Youth--Beyond the Formal and Informal

The main objective of the paper is to present an outline for an approach studying young people as learners across contexts, presented here as a ‘learning lives approach’. For youth, the two most time-consuming aspects of their daily lives are schooling and media use. In research, we tend to study these as two separate worlds. The challenge is to find ways of understanding the interconnections between these two worlds as experienced by young people. The term ‘learning lives’ is meant to grasp the longer trajectories of learning that young people are involved in, moving from one setting to another. The paper explores key issues that inform a learning lives approach: theoretically, conceptually and methodologically. It is broader in scope than former approaches, comprising a study of learning as lifelong and lifewide in studying young people, new media and learning.

Norwegian students using digital artifacts in project-based learning

Discussion about information and communication technologies in education are often conducted at a general level. To increase understanding about new technologies and learning it is necessary to be more specific about what kinds of tools are being used and how they are related to knowledge construction by students within specific subject domains. Three Norwegian cases studies are reported so that different school cultures on how the learning environments are implemented are exposed. One important conclusion from the cross-case analysis is the diversity among cases. What is the added value or changes that these technologies represent? Within a Norwegian context the paper shows how technology contributes to the design of new learning environments and how it might stimulate knowledge construction among students.

Vidas de aprendizaje conectadas: Jóvenes digitales en espacios escolares y comunitarios

Aunque la mayoria de los estudios sobre el aprendizaje hablan de las experiencias intra-institucionales, nuestro interes se centra en el seguimiento de las trayectorias de aprendizaje individuales a traves de distintos dominios. Las investigaciones sobre el uso de los diferentes medios por los jovenes en el entorno extraescolar muestran como las practicas aplicadas en el uso de medios digitales difieren de las practicas en el entorno escolar, tanto en forma como en contenido. El reto principal actualmente consiste en encontrar formas de entender las interconexiones y la creacion de redes entre estos dos mundos de la vida, tal y como las experimentan los jovenes. Aqui los elementos importantes son los conceptos adaptados como contexto, trayectorias e identidad, relacionados con las redes de actividades. Presentamos datos del «proyecto sobre vidas de aprendizaje» actualmente en curso en una comunidad multicultural de Oslo. Nos centraremos especialmente en los alumnos de educacion secundaria post obligatoria que cursan estudios de Medios y Comunicacion. Con un enfoque etnografico, nos centraremos en la forma en que se construyen y se negocian las identidades del alumno en distintos tipos de relaciones de aprendizaje. Los datos incluyen datos generados por los investigadores (entrevistas, observaciones a traves de videos, anotaciones de campo) y datos generados por los participantes (fotografias, diarios, mapas).

Being a Learner Using Social Media in School: The Case of Space2cre8

The aim of this article is to gain knowledge about what it means to be a learner using social media in an educational setting. The article presents an ethnographic study of students in a multiethnic community in Oslo who participate in a social networking site called Space2cre8 (S28). In this article, we set out to explore the kind of space for learning that can be created in a lower secondary classroom by a social networking site. The article provides a detailed study of how two students made use of this social networking site as part of school activities, and it outlines two specific ways in which to be a learner using social media in school. The findings suggest that a social networking site such as S28 can provide different resources for different students with different learner identities, and might represent a space in which everyday knowledge and school knowledge merge to offer a hybrid space for learning.

Virtual learning environments as sociomaterial agents in the network of teaching practice

This article presents findings related to the sociomaterial agency of educators and their practice in Norwegian education. Using actor-network theory, we ask how Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) negotiate the agency of educators and how they shape their teaching practice. Since the same kinds of VLE tools have been widely implemented throughout Norwegian education, it is interesting to study how practices are formed in different parts of the educational system. This research is therefore designed as a case study of two different teaching contexts representing lecturers from a higher education institution and teachers from primary schools. Data are collected by means of interviews, online logging of VLE activities and self-reported personal logs. From the analysis of the data, three main networks of aligned interests can be identified. In each of those, the sociomaterial agency of the teaching practice with VLE is crucial in shaping and consolidating the network.