Network and mobile technologies in education: a call for e-teachers

At present an ever-widening gap exists between how students and how schools use network and mobile technologies (NMTs). In fact, there are still various barriers hindering widespread use of NMTs at school. We are obviously not referring so much here to the diffusion of technology in itself as to diffusion of the new pedagogical approaches required to best exploit that technology for the reinforcement and improvement of learning processes (Thorpe, 2012). Take for example so-called "e-pedagogy" (Elliot, 2008), which relies greatly on learning-by-doing, connectivity and the strong integration of formal ( school) education with the informal learning processes (Cook, 2012) which are typical of peer-learning, experiential learning, etc. Considering that today personal availability of technology to students is (almost) no longer the main obstacle to educational use of the new technologies, there remain essentially two conditions which favour wide propagation of e-pedagogy: (a) an organisational development of the school institution to foster didactic innovation in which NMT use is the normal condition, just as use of the traditional blackboard, paper and pen used for a long time to be the normal condition; (b) a process of continual professional development of teachers which is no longer (or not only) based on formal training so much as on informal learning processes specifically centred on NMT use. They are two absolutely necessary, strongly interdependent conditions. Organisational development aimed at pedagogical innovation cannot work without adequate corresponding professional development of teachers. Viceversa, professional development of teachers without any guarantee of the institutional conditions for putting a real pedagogical renewal into practice would end up by blocking any large-scale diffusion of such a renewal (Trentin, 2010). In order to act on both these conditions we must be aware of the rapid changes in the context and consequently of how the figure of the "e-teacher" should be "modelled" to produce someone who is able to use NMTs both for their students' learning and for their own continuous professional development. These are the themes which will be dealt with in the present chapter.