Session Information
ERG SES D 09, ICT and Education
Paper Session
Contribution
Digital technologies are massively being used in educational institutions and society, and this leads a transforming way of learning and studying not only inside but also outside educational institutions. Electronic tools and mobile devices, social networking environments and online learning are increasingly becoming popular among students. Therefore digital learning is becoming a central part of student’s daily life as a form of informal learning. Informal learning refers to learning that occurs outside the school (Callanan, Cervantes, &Loomis, 2011), the informal learning process and structure is self-directed, intentional interest (rather than curriculum-based), non-assessment-driven and non-qualification-oriented. Current research suggests that students have a great diversity of technology use and types of technologies adopted into learning (Corrin et al., 2010; Johnson, Levine,& Smith, 2009; Jones, Ramanau, Cross, & Healing, 2010;), but the understanding of learning with digital media from learners’ perspective is still limited (Corrin, L., Bennett, S., & Lockyer, 2010).University students’ lives nowadays are saturated with digital media, they develop their experience and knowledge of digital media in out-of-school settings, the way of their learning is clearly different from how they use digital media in school. This study aims to understand how university students learning with digital media in informal learning context, focusing on identifying the individual factors (Intrinsic Motivation, Attitudes to Digital Technology, Digital Competence and Productive Learning Habits) that influence students’ digital informal learning, and the relationships among these factors.
Digital Competence has been acknowledged as one of the 8 key competences for Lifelong Learning by the European Union(Commission, 2006), which is the set of knowledge, skills, attitudes (thus including abilities, strategies, values and awareness) that are required when using ICT and digital media to perform tasks (Ala-Mutka, 2011). Hatlevik argues digital competence is students’ ability to achieve with digital technology (Hatlevik & Christophersen, 2013). Meanwhile, informal learning for young people is key opportunity to interplay with digital media(Meyers, Erickson, & Small, 2013). Since the informal learning is a learner’s control process, which including the control over the process and the goals (Naismith, Sharples, Vavoula, & Lonsdale, 2004), intrinsic motivation is often higher than in formal settings where goals are pre-set(A. C. Jones, Scanlon, & Clough, 2013). Students who are intrinsically motivated to learn often perform better in formal learning settings (Ryan & Deci, 2000). Intrinsic motivation has been associated with high cognitive performance, in-depth learning, and better recall of the acquired knowledge (Vansteenkiste, Simons, Lens, Sheldon, & Deci, 2004). In addition, Productive learning habits refers to more productive learning than being distracted, deep processing productive than shallow processing, and seeking multiple perspective more productive than trusting single sources (Thompson, 2013), and previous researches show that high levels of digital media use have some association with their productive learning habits (Thompson, 2013). Therefore, the productive learning habits Scale is also included in this study to test whether more productive behavior have positive effects on student’s digital informal learning.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Reference List Callanan, M., Cervantes, C., & Loomis, M. (2011). Informal learning. WIREs Cognitive Science, 2, 646–655. Commission, European. (2006). Recommendation of the European Parliament and of the Council of 18 December 2006 on key competences for lifelong learning. Official Journal of the European Union, 394, 10-18. Corrin, L., Bennett, S., & Lockyer, L. (2010). Digital natives: everyday life versus academic study. In Proceedings of the 7th international conference on networked learning 2010 (pp. 643–650). Johnson, L., Levine, A., & Smith, R. (2009). The 2009 horizon report. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium. Jones, C., Ramanau, R., Cross, S., & Healing, G. (2010). Net generation or digital natives: is there a distinct new generation entering university. Computers & Education, 54,722–732. Hatlevik, Ove Edvard, & Christophersen, Knut-Andreas. (2013). Digital competence at the beginning of upper secondary school: Identifying factors explaining digital inclusion. Computers & Education, 63(0), 240-247. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2012.11.015 Naismith, Laura, Sharples, Mike, Vavoula, Giasemi, & Lonsdale, Peter. (2004). Literature review in mobile technologies and learning. Szabo, Michael, Montgomerie, T Craig, & Davies, JoAnne. (2002). Assessing information and communication technology literacy of education undergraduates: Instrument development. Paper presented at the World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications. El-Gayar, O. F., & Moran, M. (2006). College students’ acceptance of tablet PCs: an application of the UTAUT model. In Annual meeting of the decision sciences institute conference proceedings (pp. 2845–2850). Eom, S (2008) Strategies for enhancing the learning outcomes for web-based distance education students further investigation of the relationships between motivation and learning outcomes. AIS SIG-ED IAIM 2008 Conference.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.