A dialogic approach to technology-enhanced education for the global knowledge society

Abstract

There is now a general consensus amongst education policy makers that there is a shift towards a global knowledge society that requires that we teach for those general transferable thinking and learning skills associated with communication, collaboration, and creativity. We argue that a dialogic theory of education provides the best basis for understanding and teaching these knowledge age skills. We outline a dialogic theoretical framework for educational design incorporating the use of communications technology that offers a response to the educational challenge of the knowledge society. In essence our approach is to draw learners into dialogues across difference. Handling the complexity of such dialogues, we argue, develops individual and collective thinking through a shift in the identities of learners towards greater openness, not only openness to listening to the voices of others but also openness to new possibilities. Our approach involves using new communications technology not so much to ediate thinking, as in some socio-cultural approaches to the use of ICT in education, but as a way to open, widen, deepen, and resource dialogic space. In this chapter we offer evidence from a number of case studies to illustrate the potential of this dialogic pedagogy. © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010.