“The fixity” of knowledge - the accumulation of fixed elements of knowledge - no longer meets the requirements of nowadays society. The capacity of change, adaptation, and constant updating of these elements according to individual needs, but also to the needs of the various contexts the knowledge, must be used as a prerequisite of social integration for the graduate. Education stepped into the era of deep reforms based on new concepts: student-centered learning, informal education, and personal learning environment. Thus, to teach means to model and to demonstrate; to learn means to practice and to consider. The information technology provides the new student with the learning environment he/she needs in the new context, and it connects him/her rapidly to the up-to-date information and to the rest of the world. Finding new ways of recreating student community on the background of the change of the student structure, the profile of the new student, his/ her interests and individual learning habits, on the one hand, and the main challenges of the workforce training/retraining for the current and future information society, on the other hand are the main concerns of this chapter. Due to the spectacular extension of the Internet use, the blog is a solution for the development of the student community, for social interaction and serves as an alternative or extension of classroom discourse.
TopIntroduction
No doubt we are experiencing today a rapid transformation of the learning process and the stakeholders involved in it need to clearly define their role. Teachers, students, parents, future employers are facing the knowledge “wave” coming through the Internet, and they are starting to realize that the traditional learning methods are not enough or appropriate in the new “digital world”.
Traditional learning, consolidated over the years, has outstanding results in enriching the world knowledge heritage, but today it seems to become less effective (for teachers) and not at all attractive (for students).
The Lisbon Strategy and the Bologna Process in the European Union set forth the main objectives such as reforming and even transforming the higher education systems, so as they should be more flexible, more coherent, more transparent and more open to the society needs. In this context, the National Qualifications Framework in Higher Education was established in Romania (CNCIS)1 as a unique instrument setting the structure of qualifications and assuring national recognition and the international compatibility/comparability of the qualifications acquired in the higher education system. Due to this framework, all the learning results acquired in the higher education system may be recognized, measured and related (bachelor studies, master and doctoral studies) and the coherence of the qualifications and certified titles is assured.
Within this framework, the professional and transversal competence acquired after the completion of the level 6 studies (bachelor) also subordinates the social interaction competences training.
In the first part of the chapter we will show how from the didactic point of view for certain content areas all the disciplines, irrespective of the specialization, support the development of the transversal competence of social interaction. Thus, we will elaborate on the C7 descriptor derivation – ‘Getting acquainted with the roles and specific activities of the team work and task distribution for the subordinate levels’ in the specific descriptors that may be adapted to the scientific content of any discipline for the bachelor level. Here is the exemplification of the phrasing of the following structures, to materialize this working principle: competence, contents, minimum performance standards, information and methodological resources, examples of learning activities and assessment items.
The second part deals with digital literacy, as an imperative of our society. Facing digital society means in fact to accept the need of a digital literacy, for young and old people, teacher or student, the learning process never ends life-long learning in the digital society is a must. The means of presentation and debate in the student virtual environment are particularized by the web transmission path: faculty site, Blackboard e-learning platform, teachers’ blogs, yahoo groups, facebook, twitter etc. is approached in the third and fourth parts, with particular focus on educational blogs.