Rethinking Learning for a Digital Age: How Learners are Shaping their Own Experiences

Rethinking Learning for a Digital Age addresses the complex and diverse experiences of learners in a world embedded with digital technologies. The text combines first-hand accounts from learners with extensive research and analysis, including a developmental model for effective e-learning, and a wide range of strategies that digitally-connected learners are using to fit learning into their lives. A companion to Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age (2007), this book focuses on how learners’ experiences of learning are changing and raises important challenges to the educational status quo. Rethinking Learning for a Digital Age: moves beyond stereotypes of the "net generation" to explore the diversity of e-learning experiences today analyses learners' experiences holistically, across the many technologies and learning opportunities they encounter reveals digital-age learners as creative actors and networkers in their own right, who make strategic choices about their use of digital applications and learning approaches. Today’s learners are active participants in their learning experiences and are shaping their own educational environments. Professors, learning practitioners, researchers, and policy-makers will find Rethinking Learning for a Digital Age invaluable for understanding the learning experience, and shaping their own responses.

Table of Contents:
Foreword, Betty Collis and Jef Moonen An introduction to rethinking learning, Rhona Sharpe, Helen Beetham, Sara de Freitas and Gráinne Conole Part I. New contexts for learning 1. The influence of pervasive and integrative tools on learners’ experiences and expectations of study, Sara de Freitas and Gráinne Conole 2. Social networking: key messages from the research, Keri Facer and Neil Selwyn 3. Managing study and life with technology, Linda Creanor and Kathryn Trinder 4. Constructs that impact the Net Generation’s satisfaction with online learning, Charles Dziuban, Patsy Moskal, George Bradford, Jay Brophy-Ellison and Amanda Groff 5. Provisionality, play and pluralism in liminal spaces, Maggi Savin-Baden and Cathy Tombs Part II. Frameworks for understanding learners’ experiences 6. Understanding students’ uses of technology for learning: towards creative appropriation, Rhona Sharpe and Helen Beetham 7. Expanding conceptions of study, context and educational design, Peter Goodyear and Robert Ellis 8. How learners change: critical moments, changing minds, Judy Hardy and Amanda Jefferies 9. Listening with a different ear: understanding disabled students’ relationship with technologies, Jane Seale and Nick Bishop 10. Strengthening and weakening boundaries: students negotiating technology mediated learning, Laura Czerniewicz and Cheryl Brown Part III. New learning practices 11. The changing practices of knowledge and learning, Helen Beetham and Martin Oliver 12. Analysing digital literacy in action – a case study of a problem orientated learning process, Thomas Ryberg and Lone Dirckinck-Holmfeld 13. Collaborative knowledge building, Greg Benfield and Maarten de Laat 14. ‘But it’s not just developing like a learner, it’s developing as a person’: Reflections on e-portfolio based learning, Julie Hughes 15. Skills and strategies for e-learning in a participatory culture, Simon Walker, Jill Jameson and Malcolm Ryan

About the Author :
Rhona Sharpe is Principal Lecturer in Educational Development, Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development, Oxford Brookes University. Helen Beetham is an e-learning consultant. Sara de Freitas is Director of Research, Serious Games Institute, University of Coventry Technology Park.