Informational environments: Cognitive, motivational-affective, and social-interactive forays into the digital transformation

Abstract

This chapter deals with the question of how people use digital technologies in order to get a better understanding of the world surrounding them, thus offering a cognitively inspired perspective to the current digital transformation of society. After delineating the importance of information and information processing, we introduce the concept of informational environments as the set of informational resources that a person habitually taps into over a life-course in order to get a better understanding of the world. Implications of this definition are discussed. We also introduce the two main themes of the current book and provide a preview on the subsequent chapters. The first main theme (effects of use) is to provide descriptive accounts of how people currently make use of their informational environments. On the one hand, effects of use depend on cognitive, motivational-affective, and social-interactive characteristics of a person. On the other hand, effects of use depend on the characteristics of the environment (e.g., rules and regulations). The second main theme (effective designs) prescriptively refers to the way that informational resources in an informational environment can be designed to improve learning. It is argued that digital technologies can provide such learning opportunities inasmuch as they engender teacher-like characteristics. Among these are cognitive characteristics (e.g., fostering self-regulation skills), motivational-affective characteristics (e.g., fostering emotion regulation), and social-interactive characteristics (e.g., providing interactive support that is adapted to the current needs of a learner).