"Digital Learning" versus "IT"

IT (Instructional Technology) is indispensable to most educational institutions. Its development and enhancement are crucial to the institution. But does improving IT improve "digital learning"? Sometimes. Not always. Maybe not even often. The reason is that IT is usually institutionalized from the top. Digital learning is almost always shared, contributory, collective, collaborative, customizable. With IT, teachers or, even more typically, administrators decide what the IT budget is and then propose and implement and often require other teachers and students to use the new technology in a certain way. Other times groups of teachers and administrators will propose an innovative plan for the use of IT at their institutions and will present an array of options, training, skill sessions, and information sessions to help teachers with the new technology. All that is good and important. But in key ways it is very different from the vision of "digital media and learning."

In IT we presume to know what the objective of the education is and want to improve instructional technology to help teachers deliver education better, or report better on what they are doing, or evaluate their students homework better, or communicate their work better. Some IT even makes collaborative tools that teachers and students can use, but it doesn't usually rearrange the relationship of teacher to student or the educational mission predetermined by the institution.

In digital media and learning, the outcomes are less clear, the teachers have less of a determining role, and technology isn't something delivered to others to be used by them but is intrinsic to the larger learning project; its building and application is itself part of the collective learning experience. In building the field of digital media and learning, we are coming up with methods and practices for learning in the Information Age and are looking for the best research for exploring what new modes of learning look like. For example, we know people are doing things differently with their time and their lives--but we don't fully know yet if all the digital ways we spend our lives changes the way we think and what we think about. We'd like to know more about that. If I spend more and more of my time interacting with lots of other people (most of whom I've never meet) on line, how does that change my sense of civic engagement, my sense of community, my imagination, my creativity, my social life? Whether shopping on Ebay and giving feedback, searching on Google, adding content to Wikipedia, adding my comments to Trip Adviser rankings, writing a blog, social networking, bookmarking my favorite websites and sharing those favorites with others, playing and customizing multi-player games, I am now trusting and listening to and contributing to public forums and learning from others whose authority, intelligence, and knowledge I have to be able to evaluate. How do I do that? (This is not the usual role in schools, where a certain level of expertise is assumed to be held by the teacher.) In digital learning, judgment and creativity are very important since, first, "authority" is harder to locate and I have to judge worth in new ways; and, second, I have to be creative about where it is worthwhile to use my energies and what I have to contribute to some greater project. My path is very different than it is with other other conventional in-school education, especially of the "Leave No Child Behind" variety where what I am learning is measured by set tests, set texts, and set methods. Digital learning has no simple, fill-in-the-box multiple-choice answers (although there are multiple questions). In the latter, there is typically a teacher with the knowledge lecturing, leading discussions, and giving assignments to students who seek knowledge. This is a great and time-tested method of learning. I love hearing a great lecture (I've blogged about some great ones on this website). But digital learning is a different way of knowing than the traditional top-down model of education. In digital learning, there is a more fluid, sharing, collaborative, customizing, synthesizing mode of gathering, exchanging, shaping, repurposing, rethinking, where the digital form is the medium and the inspiration and maybe even the content.

To simplify: IT is technology that facilitates instruction. What we mean by "digital media and learning" is more collaborative, customized, bidirectional thinking and learning. It can happen in school or in the community center or just online without a formal institutional sponsorship or with many institutional sponsors. Digital learning uses digital means to enhance those interactions and, where possible, to think about technology too, and to actually push the technology to see if it can further enhance the way we learn, the way we think, and the way we do both together.

If you are looking for examples of digital media and learning, I urge you to go to the MacArthur Foundation's Spotlight Blog where an array of innovators talk about the many different forms of digital media, the many different ways to learn. Here's the url: http://spotlight.macfound.org/