Training, teaching content and new technologies

This paper presents the results of a research conducted by the Center for Generative Communication (CFGC, University of Florence) in collaboration with Alessandra Anichini (INDIRE researcher) and Jose Antonio Cordón García (Director of Electra Group of the University of Salamanca). Through a process of narrative inquiry, the research investigates and describes the practice and study habits of Italian and Spanish university students, while referring to the integrated use of traditional textbooks and digital tools (Wikipedia, thematic portals, discussion sites, blogs, social networks, etc.). The project’s main goal is to understand how students study for an exam in the humanities. In particular, it intends to highlight and verify how new digital instruments integrate the use of paper volumes and the traditional forms of communication and examines their role during exam preparation. In this vast field of investigation, our research focuses primarily on the presence of the ‘dialogue’ in students’ study practices; a dialogue understood as a relationship that establishes itself at various levels between student and teacher, student and colleagues and the student and texts of study. The analysis attempts to describe the way in which new communication tools and new texts are able to promote or, in some cases, inhibit the relationship between students and teachers, colleagues and educational content, by exclusively using the learned habits of study. In this scenario, digital tools may, in fact, represent an added value only if they foster in students a truly creative and proactive attitude that allows them to appropriate and reprocess various content addressed individually (Jenkins 2006). Following the ‘generative methodology’ (Toschi, 2011) we closely analyzed the dynamics at play within a class of students, to understand how the relationships that develop among the students, among teachers and among the study materials, create, de facto, a complex learning environment.