Review by: Rapanta, Chrysi (2009-03-06)

In this article, P. Dillenbourg takes a quite revolutionary perspective regarding the current use of technologies in education. Being himself a teacher, a professor, and a computer scientist, his opinions in the Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL) field are respectable and quite realistic. The starting phrase of his article already hints at what is going to follow. Very ‘innocently’ he asks the reader a rather provocative question: ‘When teachers use a blackboard to teach, do they claim to do chalk-based teaching?’. This rhetoric question, however simple it sounds, reveals a deep-routed problem that, according to the author, lies hidden in nowadays' educational theory and practice.

The article is divided in four basic sections called respectively: ‘Faded Myths’, ‘Convergences’, ‘Examples of Integrated Learning Environments’ and ‘Orchestration’. Starting from the first one, Dillenbourg addresses four basic myths, referring to overstatements about learning technologies that are currently losing their previously high status.

The first myth is about the overestimated effect of the use of media in education, stressing the fact that media itself do not bring pedagogical innovation, in the same way that teachers do not necessarily provoke good learning outcomes.

The second myth is about the futuristic approach regarding the upcoming ‘success’ of e-learning applications. According to Dillenbourg, teachers’ current technological skills are fairly well developed so that lacking skills do no longer count as an excuse for the poor development of TEL practices.

The third myth consists of the assumption that a technological application yields the best results when it is as similar to traditional practices as possible. Recent research in the educational field has shown that this is not the case. In addition, the author suggests that designing TEL environments in a way that imitates traditional campuses or institutions does not help teachers exploit the whole range of possibilities that new technologies offer.

Dillenbourg finishes with the fourth myth considering the teachers’ role. The teacher today is neither a ‘sage on the stage’ nor a ‘guide on the side’. To provide all the meta-knowledge ‘hidden’ in the learning contents he has to be in the middle of the scene, whatever the means of teaching are.

The second part of the article extends the first one, giving some examples of convergences, or realities that have been transformed because the focus has changed. In the same way that a [i]digital[/i] camera is progressively called just ‘camera’, digital technologies in education are always present but less salient as new or different from "traditional" teaching and learning methods; the focus shifts on the educational practice itself. Another focus shift is that of researchers approaching the same object – in our case ‘education’ – from different points of view. Dillenbourg confirms that in the field of TEL this has been done in a quite strict and limited way, giving as an example the subject of Computer-Supported-Collaborative-Learning (CSCL). This has been the author’s main field that blurred because of the ongoing integration of different educational approaches. This integration is the keyword of any learning environment nowadays and is distinguished from blended learning in the sense that it does not complement distant activities but proposes learning scenarios where campus activities are enabled or enriched by online activities.Dillenbourg finishes his insightful article by briefly describing two examples of integrated learning environments developed in his research group: ArgueGraph and ConceptGrid (both of them are more extensively described in other articles). The reason he mentions these practices is to illustrate his last and basic conclusion of what the teacher’s role nowadays is or should be: she needs to orchestrate an integrated scenario with all the different elements involved with the flexibility required by the workflow-like software. In the orchestration metaphor, time, space and resources are managed in a way that supports both teacher and learner.

The only critique that can be made to this inspiring article is a context-related one: although the author has the Swiss perspective as a field of reference, this is only obvious in some points of his writing, where he states evidence coming from the Swiss context. It might be more ‘honest’ if this was clear from the very beginning of the article. Even if it is not an experimental survey, the few reliable data that exists in order to support the author’s view could be used in a more explicit way, not so much to convince the reader but more to help us have a more complete image of what is in Dillenbourg’s head!