What are the opportunities and risks brought about by the escalating speed of technological advancement and the transformative changes that this will bring? How can digital technologies be leveraged to augment and strengthen human skills and capabilities for an equitable and sustainable future? In this symposium, four prominent researchers from Europe and Australia will share their related research and perspectives to address these questions.
Growing up in the digital age faces new opportunities and challenges. It has also brought new research questions and stimulated new approaches and methodologies to understand and support children and youth growing up in the digital age. The two invited speakers shared with us their research in this area.
Prof. Sanna Järvelä, Learning and Educational Technology Research Unit (LET), Department of Education, University of Oulu, Finland
Prof. Judy Kay, University of Sydney
As technology has become ubiquitous in learning contexts, there has been an explosion in the amount of learning data. This creates opportunities to draw on the decades of learner modelling research from Artificial Intelligence in Education and more recent research on Personal Informatics. They use these bodies of research to introduce a conceptual model for a Personal User Model for Life-long, Life-wide Learners (PUMLs). They use this to define a core set of system competency questions. A successful PUML and its interface must enable a learner to answer these by scrutinising their PUML, aided by its scaffolding interfaces. They aim to give learners both control over their own learning data and the means to harness that data for the important metacognitive processes of self-monitoring, reflection and planning. They conclude with a set of design guidelines for creating PUMLs. Their core contribution is a way to think about the design and evaluation of learning data and applications so that they give learner control and agency beyond simple data access and algorithmic transparency.
Prof. Halla Holmarsdottir, Oslo Metropolitan University
DigiGen aims to develop significant knowledge about how children and young people use and are affected by the technological transformations in their everyday lives. This would include a focus on educational institutions, the home, leisure time and children and young people’s civic participation in the short and long term. To achieve this, we aim to explain the conditions under which harmful versus beneficial effects of ICT use by children and young people occur in order to develop effective social, educational, health and online safety policies, practices and market regulation. This would be achieved through the use of participatory methodologies focusing on understanding why and how some children and young people benefit from ICT use while others seem to be impacted negatively. It takes as its focus children and young people (from 0-18 years of age), a group growing up today that is described as the digital generation (DigiGen). Through sustained engagement with the digital generation as co-researchers, the project would include the use of innovative quantitative and qualitative methods and in-depth case studies. In the project the cross-disciplinary team of researchers would enhance cooperation between home, schools and the wider community to ensure safe and productive ways of using ICTs.
Prof. Ola Erstad, University of Oslo
In this talk, Professor Erstad drew on his rich research on the learning lives of children and youth in formal and informal settings to share his insight on the role of media and technology on learning, as well as the pervasive influence and interactions of learning at school impacts learning outside of the formal schooling system.
