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Educational Uses of the Digital World for Human

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DOI: 10.36510/learnland.v6i2.605

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Educational Uses of the Digital World for Human
Development
Colette Daiute, The Graduate Center, City University of New York

ABSTRACT
This article discusses several enduring features of the digital world in relation to the
dramatically changing global context and visibility of the human condition. Based on
the author’s experience as an educator and researcher, she explains that interactiv-
ity, multi-modality, and information storage are ripe for advancing students’ creative
and critical interactions with diverse others and themselves. With the digital world as
a focal point, although by no means the only communication medium, educators are
in unique positions to guide contemporary human development, which is increas-
ingly an interdependent individual-societal process, thereby requiring knowledge of
realities beyond one’s own.

“Future prospects” – Are they on the horizon?

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 Colette Daiute

T
his image of two horizons expresses an ongoing dilemma for teaching
and learning in the digital world: Are prospects for teaching and learning
in the digital world rising or setting? Does the seemingly limitless access
to information and other peoples, at least by those in some parts of the world, in-
crease or decrease educators’ roles? What is the best use of precious education time
when pre-school through college aged students spend so much of their time in digi-
tal worlds: texting, playing multi-user games, using wikis, blogs, or YouTube for term
paper resources, learning foreign languages on computer-based programs or apps,
and augmenting skills with word-processing and related tools? Guiding students
to find meaningful purposes, interactions, and follow-up is more important than
ever. How might educators think about the digital world to guide the development
of horizons?

In this article, I focus on the capacities of the digital world in relation to

challenges and possibilities for individuals and societies in the contemporary global
context. Based on my experience as an educator and researcher, I explain that spe-
cific capacities of the digital world are ripe for advancing students’ creative and
critical interactions with diverse others and themselves. With the digital world as
a focal point, although by no means the only communication medium, educators
can address contemporary human development needs, which are increasingly inter-
dependent, thereby requiring knowledge of realities beyond one’s own.

The above image “Mogucnosti”—meaning “Prospects” in Croatian—was

created in a research workshop for young people using myriad digital and non-digi-
tal tools to support mutual understandings among a generation growing up in coun-
tries separated by violent wars during their childhood. The activity culminating in the
“Prospects” image was for the 12 to 27 year-old participants to use a digital survey
template to create their own online interview with peers in the formerly adversarial
countries. The text accompanying the “prospects” image read:

YOUTH OF THE WORLD, WE ARE ASKING YOU TO FILL OUT OUR SURVEY
AND ALLOW US TO FIND OUT WHAT YOU WOULD LIKE TO CHANGE IN YOUR
COMMUNITY. WHAT ARE THE POSSIBILITIES FOR CHANGE, AND DOES YOUR
COMMUNITY HELP YOU IN ACHIEVING THOSE GOALS?
(Daiute, 2010, p. 148)

The digital work young people did in community education centers across
the former Yugoslavia was purposeful, relational, and sensitive to each local situa-
tion. One hundred thirty seven youth in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, and

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 Educational Uses of the Digital World for Human Development

the United States participated in several activities to create local newsletter entries
about problems and possibilities in daily life from the youth perspective. These young
people created, implemented, responded to, and interpreted the “By and For Youth”
survey, as well as writing letters to public officials, narrating personal experiences
of conflict, reflecting on adults’ interactions in public, reading narratives by peers
across the region, and interpreting recent news stories about tensions in their locale.
The activities were designed for implementation in the digital world, but not all the
centers had such resources, so accommodations for offline participation worked of
necessity and well.

Regardless of the specific tools available for creating, exchanging, and

responding to the survey, these youth whose lives had been defined by war explained
that sharing experiences and opinions with diverse others was a highlight. This com-
ment by one teenager was typical: “I feel powerful thinking about others’ responses
to a survey I completed a little while ago” (p. 169). While participating in such a global
imaginary—thinking about geographically and culturally distant others—the partic-
ipants’ hypothetical thinking, such as considering future education or employment,
flourished in conversation with peers, community members, and educators. Activi-
ties that involved reviewing the responses of other youth to the same survey one had
just completed, as noted by the teen cited above, and to surveys one had created,
engage young people’s reflection and agency.

Lest an example of a youth workshop with digital and non-digital tools

seem limited to one region struggling to overcome war, consider the fact that the
digital world makes conflicts, inequalities, and abuses worldwide visible to all with
access not only to personal computers but also to public digital displays, news, and
conversation. In addition, with the current extensive migration across the globe, peo-
ple who do not have access to digital technologies are likely to have access to other
people on the move. At the time of this writing, for example, millions of children
are growing up in societies affected by armed conflict, resulting in unstable living
situations, and displacement, often with no access to schooling (www.unhcr.org). As
refugees flee to safer ground, they interact with residents, aid workers, and, most
prominently, media like radio, newspapers, and billboards, all the while sharing expe-
riences. These technologically enhanced mobilities create what many refer to as a
shrinking world.

Diverse global human conditions are exposed in the digital world. Educa-
tors can seize the opportunity to use the web to expand students’ interactions with
situations beyond their own. There is, for example, no excuse for not knowing the

LEARNing Landscapes | Vol. 6, No. 2, Spring 2013 65

 Colette Daiute

story of a child living in a refugee camp in Syria or a martyred Egyptian idealist in the
stalled “Arab Spring” that sparked the overthrow of dictators in several countries in
2011. Knowing that those situations occurred and why no one is exempt from them
have become educational basics.

Global Potential, Questionable Use

Children and youth in many countries are passing increasing amounts of
time in digital worlds, yet evidence is scant that this time is expanding knowledge
or communication skills. Digital worlds create the potential for interactions from the
most remote places and by the youngest people to major urban centers and the most
powerful leaders. The reach of email, social media, wikis, computer-assisted language
learning, simulated science environments, tweets, and other digital communication
tools via web 2.0 and cell technologies has tremendous potential for teaching and
learning about the world from within its chatter. For educators and students of liter-
acy and the human sciences, applications of digital technologies remain potentially
useful, albeit not yet fully realized. (Applications in the physical sciences and arts are,
of course, also extensive and addressed elsewhere.) Education can make a priority to
use digital worlds to close gaps in human relations and human development, if not
materially then symbolically with activities that expand students’ understandings.
The “By and For Youth” survey is but one example of such an application.

Given the presence of others visually, aurally, and textually on screens in our
homes, schools, libraries, phones in our hands, and public displays, the educational
challenge is to learn how to read, interpret, respond to, and develop with others,
especially those who might be difficult to understand. For their own personal, soci-
etal, and global benefits, American school children and youth, in particular, stand
to benefit from becoming individuals who can communicate, identify problems,
and imagine with diverse others. Research has begun to show, for example, that
U.S. born youth exhibit less ability to narrate breaches in social interaction from the
perspectives of those who differ in origin and experience (Lucić, 2012). Immigrant
youth who have experience with people whose histories, language, and knowledge
differ from their own, demonstrated an ability to explain others’ approaches to solv-
ing a problem, while the U.S. born youth offered the same explanation for everyone
(Lucić, 2012). Students in a country with the most access to the digital world could
be especially good at imagining, empathizing, and interacting with diverse others.
Therefore, a challenge for teaching and learning in the digital world is to develop

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 Educational Uses of the Digital World for Human Development

and employ symbolic capacities for mutual awareness across divides of national bor-
ders, inequalities, stabilities, and geographies. Students who may understandably be
drawn to friends’ Facebook pages benefit from teachers’ guidance in semi-structured
activities toward interaction with diverse others, beyond their own standpoints, ide-
ally with understanding and compassion. Building on the view that it’s desirable to
have many “friends” and “likes,” educators can employ features of the digital world to
help students consider those who “friend” and “like” something different. The goal is
not to agree but to be able to know and to discuss.

Features of Digital Worlds

Three enduring processes of digital worlds are interactivity, symbolic
flexibility, and vast sources of information. These capacities are especially ripe for
expanding imagination, knowledge, thought, and action.

Interactivity
Interactivity of myriad kinds defines the digital world. Direct interaction
in the digital world can augment face-to-face interaction. Asking questions and
receiving feedback is immediate and fast, for creating seamlessly merged narratives,
reports, emails, blogs postings, or social media connections. When tools are not
uniformly available, hybrid forms of interactivity can work, as long as there is interac-
tive purpose.

The digital world for the “Dynamic Storytelling by Youth” workshop was, for
example, defined as a space for meeting up with others who before the war might
have been neighbors, fellow vacationers at the seaside or lake, passers-by, or sweet-
hearts, when, almost a decade after the war, cross-national contact remained prob-
lematic if not dangerous. Although these young people living in rural and urban con-
texts did not all have access to the latest technologies, they did the same activities,
supported by several goals of teaching and learning that integrated human and tech-
nological capacities and needs. Some community centers had computers donated
by international aid organizations, and others welcomed even low-cost tools like
markers, pens, and recycled paper. Thus, for some participants in this practice-based
study, interaction occurred via the web and instantaneously; for others interaction
occurred via borrowed email addresses or post, which took weeks.1

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 Colette Daiute

Participants across the hybrid digital and face-to-face workshops used

available tools to reflect on conflicts in their everyday lives, from the perspectives
of others, and their own desires for the future. They used word-processing software
collaboratively and individually, digital survey tools resident on computers and con-
nected to others on the web, digital drawing tools, printers, publishing software, and
peace games. In the absence of digital tools, the young people participated with
printed copies of the surveys, shared via borrowed email accounts. Kinds of interac-
tion included face-to-face small group work to generate survey questions, to discuss
how participants imagined those who might take their survey, to enter the survey
items in an interactive survey tool, and to examine results of a brief test.

Working in self-selected groups of four or five, participants across six inter-

national workshops wrote surveys to discover what peers in the other contexts felt
about their positions in their newly formed countries. Instructions suggested that
participants write a draft survey on paper, following guidelines to “Create a Title for
the Survey,” “Write questions,” and “Decide on a format for each question” (remind-
ing them of formats such as multiple-choice, Likert scales, and open-ended ques-
tions-responses in the survey they had completed at the beginning of the workshop).
After writing a draft on paper, participants entered it into the online survey-maker
application program if computers and the Internet were available, and if not, they
handwrote or dictated to a volunteer scribe. To interest potential respondents, the
groups designed ads for their surveys, like the one at the beginning of this article.

After entering their ad and questions in the digital survey tool, participants
responded to a test version and then made any changes they deemed necessary. The
research team compiled the surveys, maintaining every question and merging simi-
lar questions. This compiled “By and For Youth” survey resulted in 148 questions in 15
categories, including “Basic Facts; Cultural Life and Media; Society/The Company You
Keep; Substance Use and Abuse; Education (including subsections on Relationships
with Professors, Skipping School and Favorite Subject, Abuse); Health; Politics; Work;
Social Relations and Life in Your Town; Violence and Causes of Violence; Philosophy
of Life and Religion; Migration-Moving Across the World; Approaching Marriage.

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 Educational Uses of the Digital World for Human Development

Fig. 1: Youth-designed survey example

Interestingly, issues that emerged in the survey, like war, violence, abuse by
professors, homosexuality, and prostitution, remained silent in other genres, sug-
gesting the specific value of the interactive survey for addressing certain complex
and controversial issues. Participants wanted to know how the children of their par-
ents’ and teachers’ adversaries thought, felt, feared, and dreamed about life in the
aftermath of war and thereby used the activity—in and out of the digital world—to
begin a conversation otherwise silenced. When entering the hypothetical space with
their intended survey audiences across borders, participants realized that they did
not know about their peers’ experiences, nor their news or worries about emigration,
for example. After asking about possible emigration to peers who left during the war
(many forcibly), survey writers inquired, for example, with questions like, “What’s it

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 Colette Daiute

like?” leading to a list of questions that become increasingly skeptical, such as, “Is it
really worth leaving your home, family, loved one?” even if you’re destined to remain
poor? Such a questioning process itself prompted and expanded reflection, even
before getting responses.

In summary, in the process of creating surveys that would actually go

through the web to different sites, with responses compiled digitally, a goal emerged
to learn about the “other side.” Such new horizons could eventually continue with
ongoing educational support.

Symbolic Flexibility
Multi-modality—images (moving and still), words, and sounds available for
flexible use—is another important feature of the digital world. As stated by research-
ers, “multimodality can afford, not just a new way to make meaning, but a different
kind of meaning” (Hull & Nelson, 2005, p. 225).

Research with verbal and non-verbal media shows how diverse tools may
complement one another to “create new synergies” (Hull & Nelson, 2005). Hull and
Nelson (2005) studied the use of digital storytelling by college students and commu-
nity groups, illustrating

how (a) the visual pictorial mode can repurpose the written, linguistic mode;
(b) iconic and indexical images can be rendered as symbols; (c) titles, iconic,
and indexical images and thematic movement can animate each other
cooperatively; and (d) modes can progressively become imbued with the
associative meanings of each other. (p. 239)

A classroom-based example of multi-media composing drew on capacities

of multi-modality (and interactivity) to support writing development of 4th and 5th
grade students with learning disabilities (Daiute, 1992; Daiute & Morse, 1993). The
research-practice intervention guided students to write a book about their communi-
ties via the use of a multi-media composing environment. Students used disposable
cameras and cassette audio recorders to collect images and sounds of places, people,
or objects they thought depicted the culture of their neighborhoods. Together in the
classroom, the students digitized their photos and sounds into a collective database,
discussing each one and creating a basic organization of a cultural database. This
database included images as diverse as photos of storefronts, t-shirts, clips of favorite
music, photos of friends, and bedroom walls. The activity was then for students to

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 Educational Uses of the Digital World for Human Development

write individual entries for a neighborhood culture book, drawing on multi-media

resources as they wished. In addition to the image and sound database, which all
students had access to, resources included digital drawing tools, word processing,
and basic formatting for arranging words, images, and a sound icon digital printable
pages, like the one below.

Fig. 2: Keisha’s story

Analyses of the students’ composing processes and texts revealed flex-

ible and productive uses of the diverse digital tools. As shown in Figure 2, Keisha
used the image of a candy wrapper (entered into the database by someone else)
as a springboard for a story not about candy alone but about her relationship with
a beloved grandfather. The visual mode, thus, served as a prompt, in large part via
what appears to be a sensual connection from one kind of candy to another and
beyond, eliciting another kind of affective memory. Keisha’s teacher and analyses
from the study indicated that this narrative was the most fluent and coherent that
this student had written all year. Another student used multi-modality in a different

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 Colette Daiute

way, shifting in real time from a digitized image of a music idol, drawing tools to add
features to the musician’s album cover, digitized snippets of a song by the artist, and
the young author’s writing about listening to this music in his neighborhood. This
educationally directed activity—writing a book about contemporary culture—with
a range of symbolic modes in the digital world is an example of an integration of
tools and purposes to expand students’ local horizons.

Another major digital feature is the storage and search capacity of the digi-
tal world.

Vast Sources of Knowledge and Experience

Given the constant and increasing amount of information in the digital
world, students need to develop skills for accessing it. Creating databases, as Keisha
and her classmates did, can provide a foundation for defining digital databases, their
design, issues related to their development, and processes for accessing informa-
tion—archived and live. Searching wikis and doing collaborative projects to stretch
students’ spontaneous realms of interest can guide their knowledge that those
resources exist and can serve purposes beyond staying in touch with friends. Using
digital tools for student research projects may not seem as appealing as using social
media, but engaging students’ activities and imaginations has scholarly and ethical
value, as well as educational value. Because using digital tools to expand beyond
one’s personal concerns and milieu is not so easy, defining search purposes and
processes requires educational guidance. Also benefitting from discussion in educa-
tional contexts is the fact that while the Internet provides recourses beyond a close
circle of friends and family, there are dangers and supports. Like parents, teachers,
librarians, and other professionals in educational contexts should be resources stu-
dents can turn to about such issues.

Especially limited has been research on children’s digital searching strate-

gies. Search strategies require learning goals, not the closed-ended kinds for specific
answers, but expansive goals that offer ongoing guidance and inspiration. With the
general goal I have proposed of interacting with diverse others about their plights, a
first step must be to have a framework, such as a project to learn about how those on
the other side of a conflict divide feel about it. The next goal is for students to work
interactively in their local contexts to discuss ideas for questions about what they
would like to find out, need to find out, cautions, and ultimate uses of the information
they gather. Available research indicates that this process has been, for the most part,
the province of media specialists and librarians (Gray, 1994; Mendrinos, 1995). The

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 Educational Uses of the Digital World for Human Development

spate of research interest in this topic in the 1990s seems to have subsided, perhaps
because search skills are taken for granted, given the apparent ubiquity of the digital
world or the relative transparency of the student research process. Nevertheless, that
many young people spend time in the digital world does not mean they are using
search processes to expand their knowledge.

Augmenting databases like books, journals, newspapers, YouTube resour-

ces, and wikis, students can interact with others who have knowledge, experience,
and insights likely to be comparable to their own. Compelling social purposes can,
with some guidance, be extended to serve scholarly and community development
purposes. Some young people may, of course, do so spontaneously, but even they
could benefit from ideas and structure for research projects. Young people across
the region where we did the online peer survey-interview activity knew, for exam-
ple, of certain events that led to the wars, albeit from the perspectives of their own
country and certain impressions that others had about their country. Information
in the media, from migrants across the region provided such insights, but direct
and diverse interactions were needed to break the local rigid scripts on any single
side of the war. Given the opportunity to inquire about the lives of youth in other
areas, about whom they had some knowledge, some assumptions, and, no doubt,
some prejudices, sparked participants’ curiosity and empathy. Inquiries of peers liv-
ing in different political positions brought contradictory ideas together, for example
whether adolescents across sites of political conflict experience ongoing discrimi-
nation because of ethnicities that, in part, fueled the war. Asking rather than only
answering questions shifted agent-audience relationships, thus prompting some
participants to realize they had actually never considered their peers’ plights. Asking
questions is, moreover, foundational to navigating the enormous digital world. As
question askers, young people can expand their receptivity to diverse ways of know-
ing and knowledge.

Because of the vast sources online, educators can help students figure out
the best digital tools for increasing knowledge and social relations—tools for con-
necting with others and one’s self, critically and creatively. Using digital environments
and tools in these ways is not only instrumental for creating knowledge products, but
also useful for purposes of human development. Research and practice must con-
tinue to explore how students use the digital world and what they gain from using
specific features, such as interactivity, multi-modality, and information.

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 Colette Daiute

Relational Projects in Digital Worlds

Still needed are educational designs to guide students’ and society’s pro-
social development. Educational projects in digital worlds can implement collective
purposes among face-to-face and distant groups building from local and global
issues, like immigration, displacement, unemployment, social media miscommunica-
tions, and other problems worthy of the energy of students across upper elementary
through high school. This focus on using digital affordances along with others in rela-
tion to cultural realities like the roles of diverse institutional actors is consistent with
other socio-cultural approaches (Cole, 2010; Gee, 2013; Kress, 2003; Hull & Nelson,
2005). A brief review of theory about the role of education in the digital world is a
reminder of the need for a renewed educational agenda.

Epistemological assumptions guiding research and practice with learning

technologies have shifted from behaviorist to constructivist to socio-cultural. Expla-
nations of relationships among the computer, teaching, and learning have, for the
most part, changed since the 1980s when microcomputers entered public K through
12 schooling. An early focus was on computers as teaching devices, with the atten-
dant excitement, doubts, and fears. Educators then applied constructivist theory to
explain that children would, at different ages, interact with the capacities of techno-
logical tools based on their own developing capacities. This shift was represented by
an emphasis on computer-aided instruction for teaching specific skills (Skinner, 1961;
Taylor, 1980) to uses of computers to facilitate early writing development (Daiute,
1985), geometry with child-friendly programming languages (Papert, 1993), prob-
lem finding and problem solving with diverse symbolic media (Bamberger & Schon,
1991), and visually rich environments integrated with symbolic media for simulations
(Cognition and Technology Group, 1992). Contemporary theorists of learning and
development have explained that digital technologies serve as mediators of human
activity—useful tools for figuring out what is going on in the world and how one fits.

Scholars are increasingly interpreting digital systems as they do other

uniquely human symbol systems like speech (Vygotsky, 1978). Words are cultural
technologies (Ong, 1982), and novels are like utterances offered in chains of com-
munication across time and place (Bakhtin, 1986). From the perspective of socio-
cultural and activity theories, educational researchers have emphasized the use of
technologies to mediate interactions (Cole, 1998; Daiute, 1985; 1993; Hull & Nelson,
2005; Stone & Guitierrez, 2007). The interactive qualities linking diverse audiences
for real purposes include, for example, university students participating in commu-
nity development (Cole, 2010), children of formerly warring groups communicating

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(Daiute, 2010), multimedia student writers using diverse symbolic modes (Hull & Nel-
son, 2005), and children expanding their perspectives through on-screen role mod-
els (Richert, Robb, & Smith, 2011). Consistent approaches for teaching and learning
in the digital world have focused on the digital world as a “scaffold,” in one strand
of research explaining that “the growing prevalence of screen media in young chil-
dren’s lives suggests technology itself may function as a more advanced partner scaf-
folding children’s developing abilities and facilitating learning” (Richert et al., 2011, p.
82), relating to and learning from characters on the screen (Calvert, Strong, Jacobs, &
Conger, 2007; Hoffner, 2008).

In spite of such theoretical advances, few consistent lines of inquiry have

survived, in part because research tends to be defined in terms of specific hardware
and software rather than features (like those discussed above). Moreover, recently
published research indicates that the pendulum sometimes swings back to suggest
a one-way process from technology to student, as suggested by numerous research
articles reporting the “impact,” “effects,” or “learning from” technology, rather than
explaining the mediational uses of technologies in the midst of a range of collabora-
tive purposeful activities. What insights are especially relevant for educators wanting
to employ this theory of technology use to mediate global contexts for human devel-
opmental purposes?

Interacting With Diverse Others

The digital world and digital tools for communication, knowledge acqui-
sition, and goal-making have become increasingly easy to use, flexible, ubiquitous,
and immediate, although not in all places. What has also changed dramatically is the
world in which the digital world is embedded. These capacities stand, for the most
part, in parallel to contemporary needs of human civilization. As the digital world
has expanded across the 20th to the 21st century, scholarly and popular writing
about human social interaction has also increased dramatically. One reason for the
increased attention to interactive abilities and purposes—in the digital world and
around it—is that environments where children are growing up are changing rapidly.
We should, thus, be exploring developmental concepts that 21st century children are
using as they interact in unstable contexts. The more young people encounter others
with diverse experiences, ways of knowing, and interacting in the world, the more
they have to develop skills for negotiating differences—not as neutral processes
but as fraught with issues of inequality, prejudice, and conflict. This argument for
“pro-social” (Higgins-D’Alessandro, 2012) and “non-cognitive” capacities is increas-
ing in developmental literature (Boyden & Dercon, 2012). Cognition—language and

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 Colette Daiute

thought—are inextricably integrated with social and affective processes. While any
teaching and learning agenda cannot address all needs for human development,
educators can better define the teaching/learning process as interacting in the com-
plex social, cultural, and material world, using digital tools to mediate knowledge
and experience rather than merely transmitting them. An important question for
educators to consider in this process is whether and how their students use the digi-
tal world to steer increasingly toward people who think and look like them or to do
the more difficult task of considering difference.

A socio-cognitive skill that seems especially relevant to contemporary

circumstances is something like perspective-taking. Interestingly, scholarly writ-
ing about perspective-taking has risen increasingly over the 2000s, after a drop in
citations from the 1970s through the 1980s and 1990s. In addition to “perspective-
taking,” concepts like “diversity management” and “social inclusion” have increased,
adding cross-cultural and institutional dimensions to mutual understanding. Consis-
tent with those expansions is the concept “relational complexity.” Beyond interper-
sonal perspective-taking, relational complexity involves multi-dimensional interac-
tions across individual (child), group (ethnic history and affiliation), generation (as
historical circumstances change) and institution (such as school) positions by those
in different societal roles, such as student, teacher, administrator. These roles embed
diverse resources, influences (power), and goals in the communication process and
resulting meanings. Relational complexity, thus, accounts for structural relations,
reflecting the increasing need globally for individuals across the life span to relate
to others who live, believe, think, and know differently because of language, culture,
religion, and politics.

Children as young as 3rd grade in U.S. public schools and young adults in
politically and economically unstable contexts in countries elsewhere use diverse
genres for relational complexity—connecting in intra-personally sensitive ways to
diverse knowledge in diverse situations and with diverse audiences. Paying atten-
tion to relational complexity as a process and goal is likely to shift educators’ per-
spectives, as well. For example, we often value autobiographical genres as means of
bringing students’ personal perspectives into the classroom; nevertheless, there is
evidence that autobiographical genres are most useful for conforming to expected
mores, while fictional narratives are useful for questioning expectations or express-
ing less-than-ideal mores (Daiute, 2010). For example, Moira in Croatia used autobio-
graphical writing about a conflict she observed to conform to expected values of
moving beyond the conflict by means of compromise for a greater good:

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Misunderstandings always begin when people love each other. If people didn’t care about
each other, all the problems would be forgotten without any effort spent in trying to solve
them. People would simply go their way. My aunt has a boyfriend who is a biker. At the
parties he goes to, men always have to be the first in everything and have the best bike
and the prettiest woman sitting in their lap. The conflict between my aunt and his boy-
friend began because of a striper who was seeing my aunt’s boyfriend. They usually tried
to solve their conflicts with loud and long lasting conversations. … They annulled their
marriage but their relationship had many revivals. In the end they were happy because
they insisted on preserving their relationship. In their age it isn’t easy to find someone who
suits you completely, so they decided to accept their flaws and find a common language.
Now the story has a happy ending because my aunt is pregnant. (Daiute, database)

Moira organized that conflict as a “misunderstanding” among people who “love each
other” and, ultimately, “preserving their relationship.”

In contrast, when writing a fictional account positioning her as outside the

narrative actions, this same author expressed values related to her country’s justifica-
tion for war and their righteous victory. An allegory with the “Greens” and “Blues” as
antagonists (thinly veiled as Serbs and Croats), the following narrative elicited as a
fictional story expresses a political ideology that would be less acceptable, especially
among many future-oriented youth in present-day Croatia.

The Greens and The Blues created this center in order for it to be the main place for social
development of our town. The Greens were ready to do everything. They didn’t mind the
fact that the Blues participated in some other community centers in other towns. The Blues
were loyal to the Greens as much as they were to the other partners. They had enough
time and will to be active in many places. The news they told the Greens destroyed every-
thing. With time, the Greens showed they weren’t open for cooperation with others. They
wanted their capital and their success only for themselves. They didn’t realize that it was
possible to be even more successful through cooperation with others. The Blues weren’t
able to explain them how they weren’t the traitors and that they didn’t operate behind
the Greens’ backs. In the end, the Blues, cooperating with others became even more suc-
cessful, while the Greens failed completely. The projects the Blues and others were writing
helped the development of many towns. Few years later, they called the Greens to join
them. (Daiute, 2010, p. 114)

The ultimate contribution of the relational complexity concept to be

explored further is the use of cultural tools in this technological age—to mediate a
variety of one’s relations from peers to powers, parental and political. Education can

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 Colette Daiute

serve to direct and connect people as they search the massive content and Babel
that’s on the Internet. Although interaction abounds, it is likely that engaging in chal-
lenging communications may require guidance, not to challenge for its own sake but
to provoke synergistic thinking, among, for example, people on opposite sides of
wars; participants in different educational contexts (university, school, and commu-
nity institutions) (Cole & the Distributed Literacy Consortium, 2006), users of MUDDS
(Turkle, 1995), and pro-social gamers (Gee, 2007).

Relational complexity is increasingly possible to provoke and support with

educational designs in digital worlds, where multiple diverse audiences are available.
Interaction with those diverse others to find and/or pursue common purpose can
expose students to diverse audiences, responses to their writing, and responses to
others’ writing. The plethora of other interlocutors in digital worlds also provides
opportunities to learn about responses from those who are similar and different in a
variety of ways—such as an age-mate growing up in a very different culture, a per-
son of a different age growing up in the same religion, an institutional representa-
tive (such as a governmental head) in a very different role from the student. Crafting
these interactional experiences is an educator’s job, in part because the principled
diverse interactions are not likely to occur spontaneously.

Using Hyper-imaginaries
Considered together, the features of the digital world allow for hyper-
imaginaries. Imagination employing cultural tools remains the mediator of life, while
blogs, wikis, social media, writing, radio, and other technological tools fuel imagina-
tion. In research to understand how poor migrants made decisions to embark on
perilous journeys, such as across oceans in small ill-equipped boats, in spite of media
evidence that odds are greatly stacked against their successful arrival, one scholar
wrote the following:

Our social imaginary oscillates between presentia and potentia thereby pro-
longing being into possible becoming, and when looking at the way people
envision themselves as agents and social categories – as groups of people
within and among others in time and space – this imagined community
often gains a holistic character, simply because people see themselves as
wholes and parts of wholes in relation to their historical becoming. (Vigh,
2009, p. 99)

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 Educational Uses of the Digital World for Human Development

Complex uses of symbolic thought to act in the world and on one’s self is a
uniquely human capacity. From the beginning of life, babies put these capacities to
work, understanding, for example, that a parent’s pointing finger means “Look there”
and that repeated sounds like “Mama” refer to a specific person, and so on. As educa-
tors teaching with digital tools know, children and youth participate with technolo-
gies in their realm spontaneously. The work for us is to understand the important
features and activities in the digital world that young people do not use spontane-
ously, do not use for developmental ends, or use for counter-developmental ends.
Recognizing those uses, we can create projects that would otherwise probably not
occur. Expanding the imaginary—knowledge, thought, conceptual strategies, and
communicative genres—is one of the major goals of education. Teaching the tools
of science (physics), math (geometry), literacy, literature, analysis of civilization,
prior uses of those tools, and the attendant purposes of those tools, is for example,
much of what we do in education. Consistent with that view, supporting the best
uses of hyper-imaginaries could be a major focus of teaching and learning in the digi-
tal world.

Reading books about the lives of children in distant countries is essential;

communicating with those children via the Internet advances learning about other
children to experiencing their thinking verbally or visually. Guided projects to address
cultural and other differences in rational ways are currently possible in the digital
world, albeit still for the most part a frontier in practice. The digital youth survey is
an example with the multiple means of interaction, multiple-symbol systems, and
engagement of knowledge bases in a way that brings age-mates who experienced a
war on the opposite side of reason into the room as potential audiences to consider.
Inevitably, when responses are entered, which could be during a class session, by
the next meeting of a class, or within a week, there will be differences that are off-
putting, foreign, or even abhorrent. Here again is where the organizational structure
of teaching and learning is crucial for engaging students with diversity, rather than
allowing them to turn away or to retreat to only familiar ways of knowing. How to
understand diverse perspectives, analyze and learn from them, or agree to disagree
is still on the horizon of educational practice and research with hyper-imaginaries.
The digital world is not absolutely necessary for such practice, but with enlightened
educational projects building on interactivity, multi-modality, archived and live infor-
mation sources, digital tools can greatly enhance imagination. While many make the
distinction between on-line and off-line life as a distinction between not real and
real, imagination is the basis of the real. The most brilliant scholars across time have
explained that it is social culture that creates mind, mind that creates activity, and this
meaningful activity that organizes everyday life.

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 Colette Daiute

Learning for Self- and Societal-determination

One expectation of the digital world is that it would increase democratic
processes. Although recent socio-political innovations like the Occupy Movement
and the Arab Spring, which involved masses of people, many of them young stu-
dents, expressing their opinions, intentions for political change, and ideas for how
that would occur, the Internet has not proved the magical tool for democratic change
(Sitrin & Azzinelli, 2012). Blocks to such change have to do with the concentrations of
power and inequality in the material worlds where virtual worlds reside. That said,
the interactive, multi-modal, and storage qualities of the digital world can be mined
for authoritative uses by individuals and groups with developmental goals. The
intentions and plans for such educational initiatives are in need of guidance—the
kind of guidance possible in educational contexts.

Having designed and implemented the “Wizard” project to involve cross-

generational communication for community problem solving, Cole (2010) summarized

…it is important to recognize that we provide the kinds of education our

social ecologies permit and promote, failures and all. It is changes in the
modes of human life, including the role of education in promoting human
adaptation, that will ultimately shape the forms that educational activity
takes… (p. 804)

Another scholar explained how, with some structure in place, the develop-
mental process occurs.

[An] intergenerational interaction between a child and undergraduate as

they engage in activities that represent two varieties of the imaginary situ-
ation proposed by Vygotsky: Playing a game and orienting to the ‘mythical
figurehead,’ a fantasy figure common to all Fifth Dimension sites. … As the
interaction unfolds, child and undergraduate are seen to engage creatively
with both game and [face-to-face] site rules as they create a collaborative
and increasingly complex representation of the mythical figurehead. The
participants’ engagement with rules … provides the child with multiple
opportunities, together with those prompted by the site artifacts, to affect
and negotiate the Fifth Dimension experience. (Poole, 2011, p. 216)

In conclusion, engaging students in important purposeful interactions

with diverse others is a way to expand the horizons of education by expanding inter-
personal and inter-cultural understanding. While digital worlds continue to transform

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 Educational Uses of the Digital World for Human Development

in many ways, educational projects must mobilize interactivity, multi-modality, and

vast databases of information, which endure along with welcomed changes in por-
tability, flexibility and, for some, accessibility. These digital capacities serve teaching
and learning to mediate students’ symbolic control, knowledge, and participation
in critical and creative thinking about and with others and one’s self. Considered
together these capacities are most useful for provoking students’ interactions with
diverse others to expand their horizons, not only to acquire information about other
places and other peoples, but also with the affective and intentional goals to under-
stand the world around them and how they fit. Given the ubiquity of digital tools and
the vast range of all kinds of information and chatter therein, it takes education to
guide and nurture that process.

Note
1. The efficiency of different tools—immediacy and speed of interaction—makes a
difference but whether and how remains an empirical question.

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 Educational Uses of the Digital World for Human Development

Colette Daiute is Professor of Psychology at the Graduate

Center, City University of New York. Dr. Daiute does research
on child and youth development in extremely challenging and
changing environments. Her recent book publications include
Human Development and Political Violence (Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2010) and Narrative Inquiry: A Dynamic Approach
(Sage Publications, 2013). Recent journal articles include “Hu-
man development in global systems,” Global Studies Journal,
2012 and “ ‘Trouble’ in, around, and between narratives,” Nar-
rative Inquiry, 2011. She teaches graduate courses on “Human
Development and Globalization,” “Narrative Inquiry,” and “De-
velopmental Theory and Interventions” and related profes-
sional development workshops for experienced scholars.

LINK TO:
http://www.colettedaiute.org

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