Exploring how innovation and pedagogy intersect in digital education.
The Network’s themes articulate its intellectual framework—encouraging inquiry into the evolving relationships between teaching, technology, and society. These themes emphasize that innovation in education must be guided by human values—balancing creativity, inclusion, and critical reflection.
Malgosia Green, Tenth International Conference on e-Learning and Innovative Pedagogies, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada (2017)
Themes & Tensions
Theme 1: Considering Digital Pedagogies
On the dynamics of learning in and through digital technologies.
Living Tensions:
New learning supported by new technologies: challenges and successes
Old learning using new technologies, for better or for worse
Traditional (didactic, mimetic) and new (transformative, reflexive) pedagogies, with and without new technology
Changing classroom discourse in the new media classroom
Peer to peer learning: learners as teachers
From hierarchical to lateral knowledge flows, teaching-learning relationships
Supporting learner diversity
Beyond traditional literacy: reading and writing in a multimodal communications environment
Digital readings: discovery, navigation, discernment and critical literacy
Metacognition, abstraction, and architectural thinking: new learning processes in new technological environments
Formative and summative assessment: technologies in the service of heritage and new assessment practices
Evaluating technologies in learning
Shifting the balance of learning agency: how learners become more active participants in their own learning
Recognizing learner differences and using them as a productive resource
Collaborative learning, distributed cognition and collective intelligence
Mixed modes of sociability: blending face to face, remote, synchronous and asynchronous learning
New science, mathematics and technology teaching
Technology in the service of the humanities and social sciences
The arts and design in a techno-learning environment
Theme 2: New Digital Institutions and Spaces
On the changing the institutional forms of education—classroom, schools and learning communities—in the context of ubiquitous computing.
Living Tensions
Blurring the boundaries of formal and informal learning
Times and places: lifelong and lifewide learning
Always ready learnability, just in time learning, and portable knowledge sources
Educational architectures: changing the spaces and times
Sources of knowledge authority: learning content, syllabi, standards
Schools as knowledge producing communities
Planning and delivering learning digitally
Teachers as curriculum developers
Teachers as participant researchers and professional reflective practice
Theme 3: Technologies of Mediation
On new learning devices and software tools.
Living Tensions
Ubiquitous computing: devices, interfaces, and educational uses
Social networking technologies in the service of learning
Digital writing tools; wikis, blogs, slide presentations, websites, and writing assistants
Supporting multimodality: designing meanings which cross written, oral, visual, audio, spatial, and tactile modes
Designing meanings in the new media: podcasts; digital video, and digital imaging
Learning management systems
Learning content and metadata standards
Designed for learning: new devices and new applications
Usability and participatory design: beyond technocentrism
Learning to use and adapt new technologies
Learning through new technologies
Theme 4: Designing Social Transformations
On the social transformations of technologies, and their implications for learning.
Living Tensions
Learning technologies for work, civics and personal life
Ubiquitous learning in the service of the knowledge society and knowledge economy
Ubiquitous learning for the society of constant change
Ubiquitous diversity in the service of diversity and constructive globalism
Inclusive education addressing social differences: material (class, locale), corporeal (age, race, sex and sexuality, and physical and mental characteristics) and symbolic (culture, language, gender, family, affinity and persona)
Changing the balance of agency for a participatory culture and deeper democracy
From one to many, to many to many: changing the direction of knowledge flows
Beyond the traditional literacy basics: new media and synaesthetic meaning-making
