Emerging Online Democracy

The emergence and development of Web 2.0 has enabled new modes of social interaction that are potentially democratic, both within and across digitally mediated venues. Web-based interaction offers unlimited opportunities for organizing across geographic, demographic, and contextual boundaries, with ramifications in professional networking, political action, friendships, romances, learning, recreation, and entertainment. The authors conceptualize the democratization of Web-based social structures, defining online democracy as an imperfect balance of formal and informal modes of discursive control. The wrangling between formal and informal modes of discursive control ensures perpetual dynamism and innovation; the wrangling also offers the promise that diverse voices are not only welcome but also potentially responsive and responsible. The conclusion advocated is the importance of paying attention to these tendencies since they demonstrate that the Web’s proclivities for decentralization and pluralism do not necessarily lead to relativistic and nihilistic hypertextuality but to potentially novel forms of shared social control.</jats:p

Alfabetización mediática a través de la fotografía y la participación. Una aproximación conceptual

<p class="AbstractHead">Estamos viviendo procesos de masificación social que oprimen nuestra identidad y nuestra especificidad como grupo humano. Sin embargo existen herramientas, cada vez más presentes, entre investigadores, educadores y otros profesionales, capaces de contribuir a elaborar interpretaciones y crear conocimiento desarrollando una perspectiva comunicativa participativa.</p> <p class="AbstractHead">Este artículo analiza cómo, a través de la interacción social y los procesos dialógicos generados a través de workshops de fotografía participativa, pueden impulsar la comunicación y el aprendizaje a través del diálogo y la práctica creativa, así como contribuir a la alfabetización mediática.</p> <p class="AbstractHead">Como todas las experiencias creativas de este tipo, no es solo un espacio para compartir productos, trabajos, técnicas o consejos, sino también un espacio para la interacción social y la comunicación. Los educadores del ámbito de la alfabetización en los medios pueden encontrar en estas iniciativas retos y oportunidades sin precedentes para aprovechar el volumen de conocimiento de los adolescentes y promover el aprendizaje.</p

Critical online learning networks of teachers: communality and collegiality as contingent elements

This chapter addresses the increasingly well-documented problem of teacher stress and attrition, focusing upon the need for critical conversations about this problem. Our response to this problem centres on online networks of teachers, which have the potential both to (a) counteract the stress experienced by pre-service and early career teachers and to (b) minimise the attrition of early career teachers. The case in favour of online learning networks of teachers focuses on three features of productive learning networks. The first is criticality, which includes critical thinking and combines it with communicative action as part of critical dialogue. Teachers in online learning networks engage in particular kinds of critical dialogue, and in doing so they display professional identities and exercise professional agency. One of the results of this critical dialogue is the development of shared understanding and a form of social cohesion, which manifest as the other two elements, communality and collegiality. Working in combination, these elements can drive innovative learning opportunities for neophyte teachers, while acknowledging the ongoing deprofessionalisation and politicisation of teachers’ work and identities that render a reimagined and reinvigorated criticality ever more timely and urgent