ICT in Education: personal learning environments in perspectives and practices of young people

Abstract

This article examines conceptions, practices and perspectives on learning with ICT of a group of young people engaged in secondary education. The text is based upon a social semiotic analysis – following Kress and van Leeuwen’s grammar – of 19 drawings and 14 interviews, part of a data corpus collected in a broader piece of research that aimed at exploring the possibilities of integrating the idea of Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) into a school setting. The discussion suggests that, in representing their PLEs, which show uses of ICT tools to support learning, including social networking platforms already integrated into their repertoire of learning resources, these young people do not present innovative or uncommon uses of digital artefacts. In fact, the drawings appear to be characterised by an absence of creative activities and other forms of productive engagement with their immediate environment and the world: the young people seem to position themselves, predominantly, as receptors, suggesting that their appropriation of these technologies is strongly mediated by a traditional and hierarchical school culture. In revealing a picture marked by the mere reproduction of relations that are typical of a banking education based upon a pedagogy of transmission, the discussion points to the limited usefulness of the digital natives category, challenging decontextualized, Promethean expectations of ICT’s transformative potential.