Teaching and Digital Technologies Big Issues and Critical Questions

Introduction

Understanding how digital technologies might be used to support learning depends upon first understanding the nature of learning. Ideas about what can be learned, what should be learned, and how people learn are important as foundations for thinking about theories of learning and how they relate to digital technologies. Over the past seventy years digital technologies have seen major increases in storage capacity, computational power, and accessibility. During that same period there have been parallel developments in our understanding of learning. Although newer digital technologies have supplanted the old, newer approaches to learning with digital technologies are better viewed as complementary rather than complete replacements.

CRITICAL QUESTIONS

The nature of learning

Before we can consider the relationship between learning and digital technologies we need to clarify what we understand by learning. A simple definition of learning from the perspective of educational psychology would refer to a change in behaviour that results from the interaction of an organism with its environment.

The behavioural change might be manifested immediately, as when even a simple organism responds to something in its environment by moving toward or away from a light source. Such responses can be considered to be learning at its simplest.