Finding gaps in digital competencies
Digital competencies are framed by two important human activities, namely problem solving and learning. Although we devoted a relatively large space to words such as pedagogy or learning in the previous text, we did not deal with learning more systematically. In modern technology, learning is one of the most essential and distinctive competencies that one needs. Digital competence cannot be acquired, and the feeling that in five or ten years, a person will still be digitally literate. Bořivoj Brdička uses the image from Alice in Wonderland - we have to run like in a race and hope that we will seem to at least standstill in the context of the surrounding world.
If we accept the necessity of continuous learning, other important questions will arise - what should one learn? When? How? Or perhaps in the context of our reflections more generally - does the digital environment change the educational process? These are just some of the questions we will answer in this last chapter. Although DigComp itself may narrow it to finding and closing gaps in education, we believe in a broader perspective.
What should an adult learn? Some authors will emphasize the dimension of interest - they understand what he has a specific interest in, which can be expressed by need or hobby. Another, more skeptical current emphasizes the role of economic adaptation - one learns to maintain or improve one's social or economic status.
Online environments allow the emergence of the phenomenon of open educational resources, which is one of the premises for reflection on education in cyberspace. Available courses, textbooks, texts, or even social groups or scientific communities create space for self-redefining the educational approach. It is not easy to find regulated jobs, such as a doctor or psychologist, in an online environment. Still, it is relatively easy to have a good knowledge of mathematics, computer science, or sociology.
The ease is in terms of the availability of educational resources - if a person is sufficiently literate, he can relatively quickly build an educational environment that will allow him to master a specific competency package. It does not matter whether he wants to become a sociologist or learn to tie a tie. Although the issue of OER is widely discussed, its significance cannot be ignored. Not only does the educational process open to a broad group of people to whom it can remove many barriers, but it also changes the very concept of what the educational process looks like.
It is probably most noticeable in IT, where few companies today require a university but are much more interested in specific experiences and skills, what the person studied, and how (including MOOCs, books, seminars, etc), and especially the current creative portfolio. This is not to say that formal education does not matter but instead draws attention to its shifting role. The barrier between formal and non-formal education is decreasing. A school must become more focused on general competencies. It is also increasingly losing its position as an unwavering bearer of education. In terms of the amount of knowledge and skills, the school is entirely uncompetitive on the Internet and must actively seek its (new?) identity.
One more critical aspect should also be mentioned - school ceases to be the only educational institution with which one comes into contact. By actively learning throughout life, there can be a particular distribution and decentralization of education, which will allow a person to accept a broader range of educational opportunities and transfer to him the responsibility for his education. Whereas previously, the school determined the individual's curriculum almost exclusively, today, its share is rapidly declining. It, therefore, makes sense to ask how to orient oneself in the educational environment thus identified.
The idea of education as a specific network is nothing new or original. Pragmatic philosophers have already emphasized that learning and cognition take place through a network of relationships and social ties. Each individual has a unique network and at the same time shares it with others. Isolation is inappropriate behavior for pragmatists, which leads to a loss of the complexity and integrity of such a network. Piaget emphasizes that man has two basic modes of interaction with the world in which he is intrinsically embedded - assimilation and accommodation, adapting to the world, and adapting the world to himself. It is a double movement that we can perceive in the network of social and information relations.
Ivan Illich came up with the concept of a trained society in which schools cease to play state-maintained and controlled institutions. Still, such a society will perceive education so substantially that it will begin to create its structure of completely uncontrolled, adhocratic, and free education. Such an educational network, which will be based on communities and active individuals, is a vision of a school with real value and can lead to real education and not just to opinion indoctrination - according to Illich.
Indeed, in this context, the concept of a parallel society is not uninteresting, as Václav Benda thought of it, which had education in the form of entirely independent free states in its integral structure. Housing seminars or an underground university are not examples of a model where an individual decides on education fully autonomously, but examples of a certain committed freedom of educators. Bend's model envisages a society that - like Illich's - has educational structures but is not subordinate to or dependent on the state.
This tradition is followed by connectivism, which develops Illich's and pragmatism's view of what education can look like. Connectivism comes with a model of network learning, in which it emphasizes the role of critical thinking and information literacy as two necessary educational prerequisites. Education here is no longer the focus in the physical network of seminars or associations. Still, the individual actors interact with each other, and through the Internet, there is a connection and creation of networks. According to Siemens, one of the leading protagonists of connectivism, inanimate devices can also be part of the learning process. In such a model, the school can play a secondary role because it has no control over social or knowledge structures.
Learning through networking (about OER) has an extraordinary potential to transform the educational process. As early as the 1960s, Malcolm Knowles came up with the idea that one could learn on their own. It is a model that assumes a person's interest in learning something and builds four simple steps to make such a process sustainable and possible in the long run.
The first step is to set an educational goal within the coherence of this chapter that someone can work with a model in which the educational goals are determined by the problem needing to be solved. Knowles promotes a strictly linear approach to learning, and therefore the second step is related to the precise definition of the steps that need to be taken to achieve the goal. This is followed by the learning itself, during which the individual steps and procedures are recorded. The last step is the evaluation of the achieved result. Educational goals must be set so that it is possible to divide them into the learning process, into steps, and measure their fulfillment or non-fulfillment. If education is not associated with measurable facts, it is difficult to persevere in it and evaluate the shift or effectiveness of the whole process.
Critical pedagogy, linked to Paul Freire, adds another essential dimension to this change - education is no longer regulated. People do not learn only from approved textbooks and public schools, but the range of educational activities is broader and more varied. Thus, technology may not only play the role of segregation from the structure of the school but may contribute to the reduction of power structures within it.
Thus, self-directed learning within a network is one of the possible approaches to learning in cyberspace. It offers access to many materials, communities, or other resources, thus creating potentially the most robust educational environment in the world today. At the same time, however, such a way of learning presupposes both a high degree of self-regulation and discipline, i.e. certain personality traits that should be supported in the formal educational process and the development of information literacy. If one learns independently, one must reckon with material with errors, intentionally manipulative, or meaningless. Together with critical thinking, information or scientific literacy represents the absolute foundation of the concept of digital competencies.
Gaps or ruptures in digital competencies can be thought of in two senses - the first one we have dealt with so far, the individual identifies his educational need and can use technology to meet it. Within the cyber environment, such education typically takes place in the context of networks. The second, in our opinion, perhaps even more exciting option, is not to look for these empty spaces at the micro-level of the individual but to try to analyze those that have societal or global potential. We want to indicate some directions or possibilities of new perspectives on the view of digital competencies.
Digital competencies presuppose interdisciplinary dialogue - i.e. a connection with one or two disciplines to create a mutually cooperating set of competencies that can be used to create new artifacts, solve problems or even work. Apart from today's typical data journalism, we can talk about data-driven education or medicine. In general, we can say that interdisciplinarity is one of the hallmarks of today's society and will be promoted more and more. It can be expected in several possible forms.
It is offered by DigComp itself, which also exists in a version for teachers - a specific group of people receives specific competence packages or support to develop adequately. It can be expected that people will acquire specific competence frameworks relatively quickly and then link them with their own life, professional experience, and digital technologies. It is, therefore, one of the typical elements of a functioning, learning society. We can also expect a growing offer of university studies, which will emphasize interdisciplinarity in the form of two disciplines.
One step further than interdisciplinarity, which places two or more disciplines or competence frameworks side by side, is transdisciplinarity, which allows for their complete blending. Here, too, we can see the basic concept of DigComp, which expects that technologies, as they diffuse into the widest number of phenomena, will be gradually implemented in a large part of particular fields or disciplines.
A completely different source of the novelty will be technological change - new tools and ways of searching for information or trends in content creation will create significant pressure on the fact that digital competencies are something that the individual must constantly renew and deepen. They lose them without constant updating. By applying Moore's Law, the pace of these changes can be expected to be faster.
The changes do not only concern technical aspects but completely new or hitherto outdated topics. Until a few years ago, it was not relevant to focus on what a person's interaction with a dialogue system should look like, which, based on the analysis of available data and measurements, will help diagnose the individual's health. Similarly, it was not relevant to educate workers on robots on assembly lines, or how to teach them. These are all common topics today that will need to be included in the various standards of digital competencies.
We believe that the massive expansion of artificial intelligence will also bring significant changes, which will result in fundamental changes in the school educational process, especially in terms of the content of teaching and the competence developed. It can be expected that this change will open a discussion on broader perspectives of computer-human cooperation on solving various tasks.
At the same time, however, it is also true that fundamental discoveries are changing the world in a way that cannot be assumed by elementary extrapolation. In the world of ICT, this is at least one discovery per year, making prediction completely impossible. However, we do not believe that this should be a reason to fall into deep skepticism and insecurity, fear for one's own identity, and the fight against globalization. On the contrary, this development will require the intensive involvement of both social networks and individuals.
