Learning, Tablet, Culture—Coherence?

This paper presents understandings of learning in schools where Internet-enabled Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are taken for granted. The context is a full-scale 1:1 tablet project in Danish municipality schools where this study bring forward expressions of learning from one class (12-13 year old children) in order to offer interpretations of how the learning is possible to relate to the use of the tablet and the municipality intentions of changing the teaching and learning culture. The aim is a deeper understanding of learning and the learning-tablet relation. The qualitative research involves asking learners to describe learning with the help of their own pictures of learning situations. The learners' expressions of 'what learning is' are related to tablet use and municipality intentions of developing teaching and learning. Five themes show how the learners express learning, in coherence with the municipality's intentions. Key learning outcomes are related to this coherence and to the fact that learners use tablets in 55% of all expressed learning.

"...the paper highlights and presents three conclusions as key learning outcomes to inform educational stakeholders on a variety of levels. All conclusions are all about the interpreted coherence of three elements: learning, use of ICTs in education, and intentions of developing teaching and learning. The first conclusion is that when researching the use of ICTs in education, it makes a difference if it is understood from an Informational, a Communicational or a Technological (sometimes even technical) perspective.... The second conclusion is that the ‘quality of learning’ or ‘what learning is’ indicate what kind of learning and learning activities to which the learning culture subscribes.... the third conclusion...is that to understand tablets as fully integrated and in coherence with the learning culture doesn’t mean that they have to be used in 100% of all learning situations. What is important is that learners can choose to use them when they are useful and choose to put them away when they are not." (Author, 1316)