Tecnología y aprendizaje continuo

Autor: Mario Nuñez en Digizen

El National Institute of Adult and Continuing Education (NIACE) ha publicado un informe en donde se explora como el desarrollo de la tecnología está impactando el aprendizaje de los adultos. Me parece que se identifican varias tendencias relevantes a todo tipo de aprendizaje::

1. El desarrollo del aprendizaje informal fortalecido por las tecnologías de aprendizaje y los recursos educativos abiertos:

Most learning does not take place in formal educational programmes. Increasingly, technology is being used for learning – both by young people of school age and older people inside and outside work, interacting with social networks – and is greatly increasing in its power to do so. Yet we remain largely inept at responding to this at curriculum, pedagogical, administrative or financial levels. If this situation remains, then formal education is likely to become less relevant for the everyday lives and learning of many people. Of course, lifelong learning will not cease to be, but may be increasingly disconnected from the formal provision of education.

The majority of learning at work takes place informally anyway and knowledge is collective rather than individualised. If learning can increasingly be facilitated through technology to take place in multiple contexts – in work, in the community and in the home – and individual assessment practice feels increasingly ‘out of place’, then formal education more generally may increasingly seem irrelevant for the everyday lives and learning of many people.

2. Tenemos que repensar las formas en que diseñamos los ambientes de aprendizaje:

This requires us to rethink the way in which we may design our built environments for formal education and learning. A more complex dimension, as individuals increasingly transport and ‘wear’ their means of communications and information access, is that learning actually becomes disassociated from any set place at all.

3. El desarrollo de las comunidades de practica como procesos ideales para aprender en grupo

Communities of practice: learning through communities of interest being selfdefined rather than institutionally defined, becoming highly dynamic, un-located, forming, dissembling and reforming according to a focus of interest.

4. La importancia del concepto de “atención parcial continua”:

Continuous partial attention: learning being repositioned as a perpetual scan for undefined opportunity in any given moment, paying continuous partial attention in an effort not to miss anything, involving an artificial sense of constant crisis as the individual is always in high alert.

5. “Portabilidad”:

Information and knowledge access become increasingly unconstrained by having to make choices about where to go, what to take, or what to bring at any given time.

Las Universidades tienen que hacer los cambios necesarios a su currículo y mantenerse relevantes ante estas tendencias que definirán las formas preferidas de aprender en el futuro. Ese me parece que es el gran reto que debe confrontar la Universidad en el siglo 21. (Vía)