Digital culture in educational contexts

Some weeks ago we had the opportunity to attend a conference by Hugo Pardo Kuklinski about education and digital culture. Hugo is Doctor in Communication from the University of Barcelona. He is the founder and director of an educational project called "Outliers School" and he is the author of some books about digital culture -“Planeta Web 2.0. Inteligencia colectiva o medios fast food” (2007) being the most popular-.

From the very beginning he made clear that integrating technology into the classroom does not only mean to work with ITCs in the lessons but to go beyond that. He proposed the idea that, in order to improve the classroom pedagogy, teachers should be “Intraemprendedores” and that they need to realise how each one sees his or her role as educators so that it is possible to start designing a sort of “red de interacción” inside the classroom.

In our opinion, the conference was not totally good because of 2 reasons. Firstly, we realized that although during his talk he strongly emphasized the importance of “interaction networks” mentioned before, he did not provide us with specific examples about how to implement them in the lessons. It gave us the impression that besides he told us his experiences with some projects, all the ideas were too general.

In the second place, he gave us a series of tips to reach the aim of integrating digital technologies into education but we noticed that most of his suggestions were based on capitalist ideas, with a clear focus on the market. We do not completely agree with this idea, since we consider that educating needs to go beyond this capitalist perspective.

In conclusion, we think that it is necessary to find ways to include technologies in the classroom but always taking into consideration the context we are working. In fact, although Hugo intended to give us some ideas, they were not completely specific so as to start implementing concrete ideas or designing a project.

References:

Pardo Kuklinski, H. (n.d.). Dr Hugo Pardo Kuklinski Perfil. Retrieved October 12, 2016, from http://digitalismo.com/hugopardokuklinski/