The three waves of the Internet:From closed to open classrooms - the evolution of educational communities within the digital medium environment

In: Tække , J & Paulsen , M 2015 , ' The three waves of the Internet : From closed to open classrooms - the evolution of educational communities within the digital medium environment ' , Paper presented at NordMedia , København , Denmark , 13/08/2015 - 15/08/2015 .

Abstract

In this paper we sketch out how the old school system with classroom teaching changes in relation to the new conditions for teaching and learning shaped by the arise of the Internet and digital media. We propose that what is happening is a deconstruction of the old closed classroom in favour of an open community between learners, teachers and third parts. Yet, the deconstruction does not happen at once. Rather we suggest that it arises through three waves. In the first wave the old classroom is opened up. Students are distracted and teachers do not know what to do. Internet becomes a challenge to teaching and learning in this phase. In the second wave attention is drawn back to the educational interaction between teachers and students through the use of social media that re-stabilise the learning situation and intensify it. The Internet hereby becomes a reservoir of new possibilities. In the third wave teachers and students go a step further and succeed in establishing educational relevant interaction with third parts (authors, researchers, foreigners etc.) through the Internet. Only in this final phase the Internet becomes a mean of new perspectives that alter the old educational setting thoroughly. To analyse the three stages of deconstruction we draw on empirical findings from an action-based research project that took place between 2011-2014 in an upper secondary school class in Denmark. We frame the empirical findings in regard to four classroom-coordinates: a spatiotemporal, a social, a factual and a meta-communicative. Further we try to understand how the situation in the class alters in each case. The upshot is a tentative theory of how classroom teaching transforms in connection with the arising of the Internet and the new digital media. Extremely tentative we also suggest in the end of the paper, that this result might holds for other social institutions as well, e.g. the family, political institutions etc.