Abstract
The educational comparison between past and present, in information technology, makes obvious how much innovation influences didactics and the relationship students have with knowledge and competences. Tools accelerate relationships and information, often, though; obsessive use of technology determines an impoverishment of one's personal knowledge. This ties young people even more to Internet connections to fill these gaps. Wearable technologies might represent a concrete possibility of overcoming the knowledge gap, by offering, in any place, at any time and in any situation, some definite supports to reassure us about any of our occasional or well-established forms of interaction lack. How much of what we know and take care of, our personal heritage, contributes to determining who we are, our way of acting, thinking, planning, interacting and loving? The article aims to reflect on wearable relationship to education, by offering some data resulting from an Italian experience a secondary high school.
TopIntroduction
If we turned the question: “Where can we find information?” The answer would be obvious: “on the Internet”. The Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT) or National Institute of Statistics reports on “citizens and new technologies, (ISTAT, 2011). They confirmed the most frequent activity practiced by Internet surfers, after electronic mail, is searching for information. Certainly, among those using these services we find teachers and students, for whom research includes finding resources, useful for teaching and studying, underestimating the reliability of those contents as well as their trustworthiness. The knowledge society generates new reflections on educational institutions, traditionally designated to learning purposes and to transfer knowledge that would be useful for a lifetime.
Technology can be an information distributor, which is a lot faster and less demanding than traditional educational paths. It challenges the educational system, which for ages was presented as the main if not the exclusive cradle of knowledge (Regni, 2004). The extensive presence of technology imposes a rethinking of the role of the school and a definition of erudition (not considered separate from a pedagogical project for learning) or the fundamental competences. The technological component, which in the last twenty-five years has occupied an ever more important space in the world of education, has produced a sort of dispersion of knowledge and ability in students, within a context, sometimes disoriented and overloaded.
Can new technologies be effective or are they just instruments, capable of giving in to restless students and providing teachers the illusion of carrying out innovative teaching? The pairing “more technology equals more learning” appears to be way too superficial, it would be best to pass to a phase characterized by more careful evaluations; technologies should be introduced whether it is clear the “added value” they can give. Starting from the 80s, with the development of the digital revolution, all technologically advanced countries launched programmes to introduce Information and Communication Technologies in schools. The program was supported by massive funding and equal expectations, but the process is quite complicated. On one side the schooling system remains at the margins of the decision-making processes, on the other technology is not capable of becoming a resource with a non-capital nature (Desinan, 1998). The objective of the contributions are to demonstrate how the use of technology in the educational environment does not necessarily represent a resource for developing competences; instead, it develops a pseudo-knowledge in young people, who consider the tools a solution to every problem.