DIGITAL LEARNING

through the eyes of a

DIGITAL IMMIGRANT
TEACHER
We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of
all our exploring will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time.
T. S. Eliot
CHAPTER 1: THE TREE.
The successful digital learning teachers, have proven in their
endeavors to be brilliantly smart, because they do not claim that
technology can replace traditional methods of teaching.
What they believe is that we can use the Internet to empower teachers
at schools, to help them make their teaching methods more effective,
to develop new educational programs in a faster way, to have access
to the World Wide Web with its huge wealth of information
resources, to get in contact with the parents, so that they can resolve
more directly the problems of their students, to be able to have fast
and analytically updated briefing in regard with each and every kind
of students performance. And if we help them achieve all that, then
automatically teachers come to a position from where they can
perform their mission in a better and more efficient way.
Several schools have, until today, kept a stance of isolation with
respect to the hundreds of efforts which are in progress in several
countries for the rebirth of their educational surroundings. It is
rather improbable that their organization team abruptly start
functioning so well, so as to give soon, the green light for the
exploitation of the new technologies in their schools. These schools
are condemned, with time passing, to fall behind in all the efforts
done in the new digital era to formulate a productive and yet inspiring

educational landscape. On the contrary, it remains a deep conviction

that a very significant number of private schools in the U.S.A., and
anyway the bigger and most qualitative of those, appear to be willing
to introduce the modern educational methods into their curricula,
provided that the whole effort have the pledges of the technologic
soundness and the educational seriousness, that only the successful
digital immigrants in teaching can easily promise to provide.
These digital pioneers are certainly masters of the technology, but the
deftness that the traditional teachers have to contribute to the whole
teaching and learning process, with respect to what can function and
develop in the school system and what cannot, is extremely important
for the successful completion of every effort in relation to the
introduction of the new technologies in schools. It is here that the
digital natives of every school have a very meaningful role to play.
I have been a student who got trained from a distance in the
applications of distance teaching and learning, I have been a director
who tried and tries to find and apply solutions to educational
situations with the help of blended learning techniques, and I have
been a teacher who fights to teach in as little time as possible as much
as he can. Whatever follows and my whole digital immigrant profile is
a result of the failures of the past and the successes of the present.
I know that the most important component of the effort that a school,
which wants to become a leader in digital education, is NOT money.
Rather it is the presence of a human potential with the perspicacity,
the courage and the endurance to challenge the status quo of the
traditional educational practice. Each member of this team tries with
all the power he/she has to contribute to the carving of new ways in
the educational Internet, having for years listened closely to the
learning needs and difficulties of the community he/she functions in.
Each and every one of the digital teachers saw in his/her work a new
opportunity and he/she grabbed it. Each of us undertook a risk. Each
of us has espoused a challenge.
Those who in education want to make us wait still, fail to grasp what
is evident to the several successful digital schools for a decade now.
Electronic education is not a madness of our times. It is not one
more product in an endless line of technological innovations, which
promise a powerful treatment to education. We aspire that its effect
to all sorts of educational practice, remain unprecedented. It gets its

flesh and bones in a truly interactive environment, different from

every related endeavor of the past. It elicits the participation, not the
passive interest. It offers to the students a place of communication,
not isolation. It is not a new kind of television. It is the start of a new
way of learning.
The question is not anymore IF the electronic environment we
propose can be used to transplant the learning procedure with new
and powerful methods. We believe that it can. Neither the question is
if we SHOULD invest in time, energy and money, so that we can
realize the promise to create a modern educational practice. We
believe we should. Digital teachers, digital natives, digital
immigrants, traditional teachers, parents we all have a role to play.
The real question is HOW to take advantage of the capabilities that
the new digital environment offers us. We digital teachers ask for
your walking with us. We can collectively transform the learning
power of the Internet from a promise to a fact. It is high time that the
legacy of the one classroom school building left its place and quitted
putting obstacles to the formation of a worldwide classroom.
The chance has arisen. The force is here. Its high time the collective
efforts of digital teachers and digital natives alike for the rebirth of
education, to be cultivated everywhere. Its high time that the tree of
modern, student-centered education rise its stature. Its high time for
the vision to become an experience.

CHAPTER 2: THE ROOTS.

Learning is the procedure of the transformation of
experience into knowledge, talent, stance of life,
values, sentiments and feelings.
Peter Jarvis.
The fundamental philosophy which governs the rebirth of the schools
practices, as we digital teachers propose, is that education should
constantly forecast the future needs of the society and be redesigned
in the direction of the satisfaction of those needs. The abilities that
the society of the future demands from its members are three:
craftsmanship in thinking, talent of learning and ability of
communication. The reinforcement of the teaching and learning

activities that take place either in the school or outside of it, with the
methods of electronic education constitutes the strategic step, so that
our digital natives acquire and cultivate these abilities.
The overall solution that we digital teachers have to suggest is
designed in such a way so that it absolutely obeys, satisfies and serves
the

WEDEMEYER PROSPECTIVES
OF MODERN EDUCATION
1. Teaching and instruction should be available at whatever place
there are students even one no matter if at the same place
there are teachers or not.
2. Teaching should convey the main part of the learning
responsibility to the student.
3. The modern educational system relieves the educators from
every binding bureaucratic procedure, so that even greater and
greater part of the time of teachers and students alike is devoted
to truly educational matters.
4. The educational system should allow the students to have a wide
variety of choices and options in their objects, methodologies
and plans of study.
5. The educational system should use, in the most appropriate
each time way all the means of teaching and those certain
methods which have their efficiency tested.
6. The modern educational system should mix and adapt in a
multitude of combinations, all the means and methods, so that
each teaching subject and every unit of the subject to be taught
in the most appropriate way.
7. The teaching means and the technology used should be cleverly
structurally interconnected to each other, both at their design
and at their usage. The structural elements of the teaching
model, should complete one another, and each of them should
enforce in its own way the teaching plan of the learning
material.
8. The educational system should preserve and amplify all those
opportunities which enable it to adapt to a variety of rather
different learning and teaching practices.
9. The educational system should evaluate the learning
performances not by raising obstacles in relation to the place

where the digital natives should study, to the rhythm, to the

method or even the sequence of study, but by appreciating, as
directly as possible, the accomplishment of the learning targets.
10.
The system should allow the students to start, stop and go
on with their studies in as broad and convenient as possible,
time intervals and rates, which are in accordance to their short
term and their long term learning targets, the circumstances
and the special private characteristics of each one of them.
Computers neither should, nor can they, replace the traditional
methods of teaching. On the contrary, they should be used so that
they can empower constructive learning and render digital learners
capable of doing things which, without the computers, they would be
unable to do.
The ideal digital school helps the traditional one to surpass all the
limitations which set in its perfect from the educative point function,
its geographical position, the local sources of information, its tight
fiscal budget, and the probable limited experience of a number of its
teachers. The primary lever to lift these obstacles is the ability for
teachers and students to have access to online courses, sources of
knowledge and experts, till now inapproachable. The challenge is one:
the creation and optimization of a virtual, but completely real, class.
Its an idea whose time has come.
Digital learners and digital teachers function together in the creation
of gnostic societies which defy the limitations that time and distance,
under the traditional conditions, render insurmountable, allowing
the access to knowledge sources distant till now.
The promises that such an environment gives:
To centralize learning round each separate learner.
To focus on the learners abilities and his/her special learning
needs.
To render life-long learning an everyday practice.
Such a society will allow the digital educators to:
Render a great variety of authentic learning material,
specialized or not, easily accessible to their digital learners,
straight from its source.

 Encourage critical thinking and interaction between the digital

natives and the learning material and between teachers and
students.
Respond to the students expectations, who even more and
more, prospect that their lessons will be empowered with
digital material and digital spaces for conversation.
If designed correctly, the space of electronic learning which digital
teachers propose, can become very effective in concentrating learning
on the learner and not on the teacher. The if we earlier used is
much more important than it originally seems. It is a common
practice for the majority of the software companies who work on elearning, that their efforts are limited to the simple transformation in
digital form of the material and methods which were made to be used
in the space of a traditional classroom. Such attempts are inescapably
most of the times meant to fail to yield the expected result.
There exist very important differences in the ways of knowledge
impartment, management and retrieval between a traditional
classroom and an e-learning environment, where many times the
computer is many times asked to second or even replace not only the
everyday simple practices of a school classroom, but the very own
teacher of the classroom. What is demanded is a conversion, a
turnabout from the teacher-centered model of learning, where the
teacher suggests what must be taught and when, to a model where the
digital native learner is in complete control. In the first model, the
answer which a mathematician would give to the question: What do
you teach? is Mathematics. In the second model the answer
changes. It becomes: Students. The student-centered learning is
what true education should have offered since long time ago. The
limitations of the traditional classroom impeded such an approach.
Now, with digital learning at hand, the focus of the lesson is the
student and not the subject. The well designed e-learning
environment achieves exactly that.
Teaching is very often treated as the transfusion of knowledge from
one vessel to another (Fox, 1983), a definition which must be
overruled as very restricting when it refers to the demands of the
modern education. According to Fox, the modern concepts about
teaching are three:

The moulding theory, which treats teaching as a process of

modulation and standardization of students with respect to
predetermined norms; the travelling theory, which treats a gnostic
object as a field ready to be explored, with the learner obliged to climb
mountains if he/she wants to acquire a better view of the object and
with the teacher acting as the travel guide to the excursions of his/her
students; the developmental theory, which focuses its attention to the
mental and sentimental development of the learner. Digital teachers
claim that digital natives respond better when offered the third kind
of education, which responds to the needs of full-fledged teaching and
learning. Of course, there is no doubt that the other two kinds of
education are also wildly in use, especially the travelling one, which is
sometimes and under certain conditions better fitted for a digital
environment.
In my opinion, teaching consists a means of facilitation of learning,
which is regarded as one mostly independent, personal activity that
has as its purpose the reaching of some goal (self-consciousness,
success in some exams, professional adequacy, etc.). This definition is
important to make us get rid of one solidly entrenched view, which
treats teaching and learning as one and the same packet. My objection
to this is that many times teaching and learning have a minimum
relationship to one another. It is, for example, known that when
somebody learns something in an environment of teaching-learning,
this can be the outcome of out of teaching procedures.
Furthermore, when something has been taught, it is not at all certain
that this something will be learned. And if something has been
learned, it is not at all certain that this something is the one that has
been taught. In the end, teaching is an endeavor, often successful, to
ease up learning towards a certain direction.
In the past almost all schools were pivoted on the traditional model,
where the student is a passive learner who gets rewarded for
independent accomplishments, with the school being at a distance
from the parents and the society. In the model, which is suggested by
the majority of digital teachers, students are energized and active,
participants in the procedure of learning, well prepared to live and
work in the Digital Age of Information.
We employ Information Technology as a tool, to prepare digital
natives and teachers, to face the challenges of the 21st century and

transform this tool to be a part of their everyday practice. We hope to

supply the school teachers with the qualifications and means so that
they can shape their lesson in a more interesting fashion, with the
learner as the epicenter. Only via this way, learners are altered from
passive receivers to independent and life-long agents of learning.
The environment we propose provides all the necessary features and
capabilities for a change in the educational landscape, seeking a
change in the way of thinking and attitude both from the staff of the
school and from its learners and the society it exists in. For example,
digital teachers are called to reexamine their role, now that it is
transformed from the one of a carrier of knowledge to the one of its
facilitator and of one who accommodates learning. Students should
redefine their responsibility in the way the knowledge is acquired.
Parents should revalue the priorities they have posed for the
education of their kids. It is high time we get rid of the syndrome Old
Wine in a New Bottle. Teachers should recognize that technology has
successfully expelled the limitations in space and time of the teaching
models of the past and has enforced us to define from the fresh the
basic teaching notions about where, when, and how learning should
take place. As it happens with every new innovation be it the fire, be
it the wheel, be it the personal computer teachers should
demonstrate the braveness that is requested, so that they revise the
old-fashioned preconditions which exist for teaching and learning.
Without a doubt, the environment digital teachers love to work in
constitutes a vital step towards the redefinition of the educational
procedure and the full preparation of the students to be integrated
harmoniously in the society of Information.

The Hows and Whys of Blended Learning.

The environment most digital teachers work in is founded upon and
materializes the modernly accepted model of learning which is known
as BLENDED LEARNING. It is defined as the method which couples
distance education via solutions of high technology with traditional
education in a schools classroom. Students learn wherever,
whenever and independent of the place they stay. They meet
opportunities to learn every day and all the time. They learn at school,
at home, on the street. The educational material can be designed in
such a way, that it will take advantage of the capabilities of all the

teaching means, it will be user-friendly to the Digital Natives, and

most important, it will serve their independent and personal learning
needs without the danger of becoming punk or condensed. It will
provide the means of successful learning, whatever is the learning
style of the Digital Native. And this is exactly what makes the
difference between an environment that operates correctly and one
that it fails.
The new environment should allow students to exploit the analytical
method of thinking, to explore and to discover. For them to have such
an ability, their digital teachers should have effortless access to
modern technology, so that they can take advantage of all the means it
has to offer, presenting the lesson ideas with rich multimedia tools,
3D animations and always in an interactive way.
Blended learning modulates one with another:
The electronic educational procedure based on the Internet (an
environment of a virtual ideal classroom, teaching whose
rhythm is defined by the user, collaborative learning, flow of
sound and vision, electronic passages, etc.) under the aim of
the materialization of certain educational targets.
The various pedagogical educational approaches (behaviorism,
Gnosticism, etc.) under the aim of the materialization of the
best educational result.
Whichever other educational technology (DVD, CD-Rom,
Smartboard, etc.)
The traditional live teaching in the classroom.
This model is the ideal one for the gradual introduction of a schools
educational system to the use and adoption of the e-learning methods.
Blended Learning allows the educational boards of schools to guide
with small and steady steps, both students and teachers from the
experiences stemming from the traditional classroom to the elearning environment and its potentials, rendering in this way all
changes easily acceptable. The educational planners in collaboration
with the teachers, develop the electronic material stage after stage,
making use of the serious investments that the school has already
made for the production of educational material destined for the
traditional way of teaching. Blended learning gives to the schools the

chance to supplement and enhance the already existing educational

activities without the need to replace them.
The problems that the transition from the old to the new has to face
and overcome have to do with the fact that, according to a global
study, almost 80% of the teachers do not feel appropriately prepared
to incorporate the new educational technology into the everyday
teaching practice and that in 77% of the schools studied, the teachers
do not use computers in their classroom on a daily basis. They all
seem to forget (or want to forget) that the Digital Natives of today
grow up with the technology and consequently an interactive,
palpable approach to learning constitutes for them the best motive for
success.
The modern educational solution should empower students and
teachers to run away from the limitations which enforces upon them
the use of a limited number of computers and rather during specified
hours inside certain, most of the times uncomfortable, labs.
The transition to the new is supposed to be done in an era when
globalization creates unthought-of conditions of competition and
redetermines how society lives, works and entertains itself. Education
comes face-to-face with myriads challenges, as it has to prepare
Digital Natives for the world of tomorrow. Maybe the most important
of them is to ensure the ability of those Natives to work efficiently in a
technologically centralized society, where they must use the supplies
technology offers to them in a productive and efficient way, in order
to find, exchange and exert their influence in the modern currency of
our era, the Information.
We, digital teachers, sure have a vital role to play in this transition.
The most important lesson that we have learned after several years of
effort, is that in order to create an online environment of learning and
determine the proper mixture of components which will constitute it,
is not at all easy and should not be regarded as something without a
great value. To design and develop all those interactive procedures
which, while they function in a traditional environment, now have to
function and be redefined electronically, takes a lot of time. But what
is truly imperative, is the composition of the right team of
contributors, who have the disposition and the courage to fail many
times, before finally their efforts are crowned with utter success.
And only then the roots of the tree will have grown deep

By John Botonakis,
Applied Mathematician, Physicist and
Senior E-Learning Expert.
[email protected]
Tel.: (+30) 2310323094.
BASED on the book BORN DIGITAL, chapter 11,
By John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, 2008.