Educational Ideal for the New Wave of Textbooks

Introduction

Globalisation is even a modern concept to define all challenges to educational systems. As far as its impact on education is concerned, discussion of globalisation tends to consider simultaneously its effects on educational ideal, without distinguishing between educational systems and within educational systems inequalities. Moreover, the debate is often confused from a methodological point of view by the interaction between philosophy, psychology, pedagogy, cybernetics and management. As consequence of the lack of clear theoretical and methodological approaches, the current debate is characterized by a divide between the supporters and the opponents of new educational ideal. Supports argues that globalization presents new irreversible challenges for education. Since the 80s, the world education has become increasingly “connected”. The rapid diffusion of new information technologies has implied a fast downgrading of the concept of textbook, while digital textbooks use and development have risen significantly. In most countries around the world, including developing countries, the current wave of digital textbooks has accompanied by increasing concerns about educational ideal.

Whatever indicators for educational ideal are chosen, the current chapter is characterized by a debate between the advocates and critics of digital textbooks use and development. While this is true even as regards distribution effects within the world, positions diverge over the impact on learning design. For instance, Bourn (2014) underline the link between increasing global dimension and promotion of digital learning and they conclude that the term ‘Global Dimension’ had at its central focus the promotion of learning in an interdependent world, addressing the similarities of people around the world and a belief in working towards a fairer and a more sustainable world. This term is used in relation to Global Citizenship; Sustainable Development; Social Justice; Diversity; Values and Perceptions; Interdependence; Conflict Resolution and Human Rights.

Moreover, it is suggested that a new more integrated approach is needed, one with great emphasis of the processes of learning, including critical reflection, placing learning about development at the heart of the practice of global learning, construction and application of knowledge etc. In contrast, research has shown (Aliyev, Altayev, Ismagambetova & Massanov, 2012, p. 1096) that globalisation requires a change of scenarios, attitudes to technology, and knowledge.

Globalization shifts from instructional system design to learning design (Hsieh, Lu, Lin & Lee, 2014; Lyons, Hannon & Macken, 2014; O'Rafferty, Curtis & O'Connor, 2014). As was noted by Paquette (2014, p. 14) a basic learning design involves three kinds of entities with relationship between them: actor’s role, activities and environments grouping learning resources and activities. Activities, performed by actors are organized in a method, decomposed into alternative plays, each decomposed into a series of acts, and further decomposed into activity structures down to terminal learning or support activities. Furthermore, the learning object paradigm has moved the focus toward aggregating resources and interactions. The learners and the facilitators use and produce learning resources. Web has been evolved to Social Web (Web2.0) and the Semantic Web (Web3.0).

A number of theories, models and approaches form the basis of the modern pedagogy (Williams & Donnellon; 2014; Rowley, 2014; Cochrane, 2014). Indeed, these theories come from debates about the relationships between globalization, educational ideal and learning. The success factors indicate to pedagogy in area of multicultural influences on child and adult development; as well as new functions of teachers and students. Essentially, it sees pedagogy as a science of the effective learning processes.

New trends in pedagogy focused on post-modernism philosophy in multi-measured spaces (Rudic, 2013) with require the b) complex behavioural metapatterns (Peregrin, 2014) and on c) emotional intelligence (D’Mello, Lehman, Pekrun & Graesser, 2014) as the ability to guide own learning, decision making thinking and behavior.