Pedagogies for the open knowledge society

According to David and Foray (2003, p. 22 and the following) knowledge economy is characterized by the massive and extremely fast acceleration of knowledge production; intangible capital growth on a macroeconomic level, through the investment in human capital, education and the dissemination of knowledge; innovation; a revolution in knowledge instruments: and information and communication technologies. The link between socio-technical context and education and economy is visible on different levels: a) the educative industry, which hand in hand with the technology industry allows for mass knowledge production; b) development of abilities through training human capital (workers and creators in knowledge economy), establishing and reproducing the rules for knowledge production and dissemination, and defining educative models, curricula and pedagogies that allow to outline teaching and learning (Gurung, 2013), as well as the emphasis on adopting technology and developing digital competences to incorporate and advance in knowledge society; c) investment in innovation and the education’s role in the development of creative abilities, the positive valuation of scientific areas and their inclusion in the curricula as priority; the systematization of innovation processes, and scientific and technological progress; d) investing in the development of technology infrastructures that facilitate the creation of networks that allow the flux of information, as well as knowledge creation and transference. Based on these elements it would be possible to establish education as an essential mechanism, part of the generation, transference and appropriation of knowledge and, therefore, as one of the pillars of global economy.

The close relationship between technology and education has created a prolific field of study which, through diverse approaches, looks to characterize the nature, impact and the meaning of the transformations in the learning process. There are numerous studies that approach the problem of infrastructure technologies intervention in the cognitive or pedagogic processes. Others focus on appropriation models and the use of devices or platforms (Internet, mobiles, social networks, applications) in the educative context and its impact on learning, without highlighting the pedagogic processes. It is less frequent to find the argument focusing on the analysis of the relationship between technology systems and knowledge production systems, or ones that propose models to analyze learning in digital contexts in terms of economy, politics and emotion (McCann, 2014). In respect to the questions that we ask ourselves, Postman (1993) considers that what is important about technology is not its efficiency as a learning tool, but the way in which modifies our notion of learning and, on other level, and the way that the ecology of media (McLuhan, 1994) in conjunction is modifying the idea of the educative institution.

In the case of public policy, we see in the governmental and institutional discourse the absence of consideration about linking educative models with technological development and the global ecosystem of knowledge production. In general terms, educative innovation initiatives in educative institutions at any level limit themselves to reproducing the narratives and models designed by the agendas of technology corporations, and in a few occasions they consider original pedagogic proposals that contribute to a critical reflection about learning processes in relation to technology. Exceptionally it is possible to find institutional discourses that on a macro level (as is the case of Uruguay) and micro level (as in some disruptive schools), are interested in framing pedagogic practices and learning in a context that allows to evaluate its influence in the local and global knowledge production systems. Because of this, it is important to highlight that proposals which emphasize the technological dimensions of learning in a network and not its pedagogic dimensions contribute to (or are motivated by) the initiatives of technology corporations that have in the educative institutions and in governments their main clients.

The group of socio-technical context transformations and its implications in the field of pedagogy has generated abundant papers in the scholarly literature. There are publications that provide an outlook of the pedagogic tendencies emerging in the digital age (Bates, 2015; Beetham, McGill, & Littlejohn, 2009; Cartelli, 2006; de Oliveira et al., 2015; Limbu, 2014; Yáñez, Okada, & Palau, 2015). Next we’ll talk about these tendencies. It is not an exhaustive survey, and its sole purpose is to illustrate certain trends in today’s pedagogic debate.

A group of pedagogic approaches that emerged in recent years locates its origin in the social construction of learning (Dewey, 1897; Vigotsky, 2000). They expand classical perspectives on the zone of proximal development (Vigotsky, 2000) in the digital context and include approaches from network society theory (Castells, 1996) and cognition (Downes, 2012, Siemens, 2005). It is also possible to find ramifications in the understanding of learning’s social character as a process located (Wenger, 2009) and materialized in the concept of communities of practice (Lave, 1991; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1999) and applied to learning in digital contexts.

Authors such as Cabero (2006), Suárez (2010) and Suárez and Gros (2013) have explored e-learning’s advantages and reach, reflecting on internet as an educative environment and the pedagogic use of “social software” (McLoughlin & Lee, 2010). In this tendency, Internet is considered a learning environment that should be approached pedagogically, as proposed by networked pedagogy (Suárez, 2014). Associated to the need to emphasize connected learning we find the research on personal learning environments (PLE) and personal learning networks (PLN), both of which take advantage of technological tools to create environments and networks that potentiate learning (Adell & Castañeda, 2010, 2013; Castañeda & Adell, 2013). Another group approaches this learning methods through specific digital platforms, as MOOC (Massive Online Open Courses), social networks and other applications (Alemán, Sancho & Gómez, 2015; Gallardo, Marqués, & Bullen, 2015; Kigozi, Vesisenaho, Hansson, Danielson, & Tusubira, 2012; Roig Vila, Mengual-Andrés, & Suárez Guerrero, 2014; Santally, 2005).

Another approach comes from a series of meta-theories studying learning processes in a network. This is the case of distributed cognition (Hutchins, 2006; Salomon, 1993) which maintains that cognitive processes may be distributed through the members of a social group. These approaches have used network theory (Barker & Kemp, 1990) and also Latour’s (2005) actor-network theory as a pedagogic proposal (Fenwick & Edwards, 2010; Fox, 2002) or as an analytical resource to understand learning processes.

Digital convergence and mobility offered by technology have made way for proposals that exploit these features. Aparici and Silva (2012) in Pedagogy of Interactivity explain how interactivity reflects on the value of participation, dialogue and co-authorship, features that are also common to the principles of participative web. McGonigal (2011) proposed to include videogames as pedagogic tools, which allow solving real problems.

In general, on another block, we can identify some trends that reflect on learning in digital environments and that focus in the development of participatory cultures (Jenkins, 2009), collective peer production (Bauwens, 2006; Benkler, 2006; Benkler et al., 2015; Rheingold, 2014), the necessary competences to take advantage of learning possibilities self-suggested by the digital environment (Rheingold, 2014), and common goods (Lafuente, Alonso, & Rodríguez, 2013; Ostrom, 1990). Other authors go back to the foundations of cooperation theories to develop a group of patterns on the learning process in diverse contexts, including digital, as is the case of peer pedagogy (peeragogy) (Rheingold, 2014, Ricaurte, 2013). In the latter, learning is associated to cooperation principles, free software, free culture, and peer production (Corneli, Danoff, Peirce, Ricaurte, & MacDonald, 2015). A different aspect offered is one in which proposals conceive learning and knowledge production as a citizen’s process, self-regulated and inscribed in a “makers” culture (Lafuente, 2013; Lafuente et al., 2013; Lafuente & García, 2015), which in a way recovers the spirit of critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970), experiential learning (Kolb, 2014), and even located learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991). This vision emphasizes the need for a form of learning that allows the apprentice to perceive its surrounding needs, to act in consequence, collectively and with self-regulation, hand in hand with the possibilities of digital production through free technologies. With respect to practices and resources, Coughlan and Perryman (2013) argue that Open Educational Practices (OEP) and Open Educational Resources (OER) promote innovative pedagogic models that encourage the creation of communities and collaboration (UNESCO, 2012).

The pedagogical trends reviewed show a vision of the student as an essential agent of the process. Also it is possible to distinguish in them certain common principles as participative culture, network learning, cooperation and openness. However, not all proposals necessarily commit themselves to free culture, through open licenses or the preference of free technology –proposals which could be associated with a vision of an open knowledge society–, over the private. With exception of the pedagogies associated to a concept of knowledge as commons (Bollier, 2007), in general, among the pedagogic approaches, the relationship between their pedagogic goal, the knowledge production system and its implication in the social order is not made explicit.

The emergence of new trends or the reformulation of classical theories makes the universe of possibilities for approaching learning in digital contexts a complex task. However, there are profound implications to making pedagogic decisions outside of knowledge production’s global context. We feel it is pertinent to promote an educative culture that doesn’t contribute to the concentration of power and capital through knowledge. Because of this, we propose through a case study of two learning environments, Wikipedia and Google, to carry out an analysis that allows us to compare these two models of knowledge society materialization. We chose these two learning environments because they constitute the most representative cases of two opposed paradigms in the Internet universe.