eLearning and Intercultural Dimensions of Learning Theories and Teaching Models

1. eLearning and Intercultural Dimensionsof Learning Theories and Teaching Models FeConE Framework for eContent Evaluation

2. Presentation Plan • Contextual considerations • Digital challenge • Epistemological shift • eLearning, an opportunity for intercultural competence • Cultural embeddedness of learning and teaching • Urgent need to rethink educational goals and content in an information/knowledge society

3. Context in educational institutions • More and more students are more and more bored whether they are in schools or universities. • Teachers are more and more saying out loud that kids and students are lazy, superficial, uncultured and impolite. • There were exceptions…

4. Contextual considerations The digital challenge • Information Tsunami : 5 exabits of information produced in 2002, or the equivalent of 35 000 « Library of Congress » (Lyman & Varian, Berkeley, 2003) • Factiva: Provider of press information, business news from 10,000 authoritative sources in 22 languages (192 French press titles) • Education is largely if not exclusively referring to paper-based information

5. Contextual considerations Epistemological shift • Epistemology has to do with « What is knowledge ?» • From naive realism to cognitive construction • From logical positivism and scientific objectivity to constructivism and situated processing of information • Policies still deal only with “how to educate” and not with “why educate, for what purpose, goal, or aim”

6. eLearning, an opportunity for intercultural competence • Intercultural competence: • more than linguistic competence, • skills in understanding, in discovery and interaction • Involves the whole dynamics of human communication • “iCt” (Davric) tools can provide a renewed and situated approach • eLearning: interactivity, live exchanges, etc… • New competences for teachers

7. Cultural embeddedness • Tectonics of educational change • Learning and teaching: academic activities specialized in • Learning to think • Learning to think with with existing knowledge • What is “knowledge” in an information/ knowledge society?

8. Rethinking goals and aims • Information society: • Tacit and explicit knowledge • Capacity to mass produce information and knowledge • Need to cope with large quantities of information and of heterogeneous content • With what cognitive tools, methods, taxonomies, strategies, metadata?

9. Towards Meta-eContent for eLearning in an information/knowledge society?