This document summarizes key social factors influencing e-learning and trends in learning with information and communication technologies (ICTs). It discusses how ICT has accelerated competition for universities and migration of knowledge away from traditional institutions. Other trends include unemployment, rapid changes in user habits/expectations, and the spontaneous growth of online informal learning. The document also notes the EU's role in funding e-learning initiatives and criticisms around gaps in digital competence and effective implementation of e-learning. It introduces concepts like "rhizomatic learning" through proliferating informal online contexts and discusses distortive effects of open online models on learners and educational systems.

1. ICT enhanced learning – the
socio-economic environment
Andras Szucs
Secretary General, EDEN

2. 2
Social factors influencing E-Learning
• Human and social elements in the forefront - technology is
available and affordable
• Accelerated technical-economic development, globalisation:
– performance pressure at universities,
– strong competition for their „social space”
• Migration of ‘knowledge construction’:
away from traditional educational institutions
• Easier access and affordability of new ICT - it becomes
natural commodity
• Cheaper tools with higher performance,
cheap/free access to network
• Integration of three sectors with the ubiquitous technology:
− Work,
– Education and Training and
– Lifestyle and Entertainment

3. 3
Trends and contextual factors in learning and ICTs
• Unemployment, economic crisis - Focus is shifted
nowadays to the socio-economic environment and
contexts, access issues.
• Enormous changes in user habits and expectations
– Dramatically increasing number of users
– RAPIDLY LEARNING USERS!
• Spontaneous strengthening of on-line informal (e)-learning

4. Some socio-economic facts and concepts
• Increasing domination by market realities
• Labor productivity up 85% since 1980 – wages up 35% only
• Social role of education, in particular higher education:
keeping students in frames of the educational system -
when their chances on the job market are uncertain and
unstable, unpredictable
• The post-modern world puts a premium on ‘tertiary
learning’ - a kind of learning which our inherited
institutions, are ill prepared to handle
Zygmunt Bauman, The Individualized Society, 2001
• “Only the well educated will be able to act effectively in the
Information Society.”
Michael Barber, The Learning Game

5. Distance and e-learning:
distinctive European elements
• Avoiding social exlusion, support equal access,
fight against digital gap(s)
• Stressing the importance of pedagogy,
educational methodology, instructional design
• Critical and responsible application of technology (ICT)
• Linguistic and cultural diversity,
• Remarkable differences in (e)-maturity across
member states

6. 6
The EU role
• Important initiatives, programmes, commitments:
- eEurope - eLearning - Information Society Technologies
programmes, Opening up Education
• EU policy and funding important in the field –
national initiatives are rarely strong enough
• Main objectives:
- improving quality and effectiveness
- facilitating access of all to E&T
- opening education and training systems
to the wider world

7. 7
Recent Keywords for Education
Economic growth
Employability
Accountability
Enterpreneurship
Innovation
Competences, Skills
Change towards excellence, flexibility, adaptability
... Did something really change in pedagogy...?

8. 8
Critics - Problems
 Digital competence problem: gap between students’ and
teachers’ approach
- Students seek for efficiency gain, rather than exploring the pedagogic
opportunities
 In the educational sphere the effective takeup is not satisfying.
– E-learning fails meeting the access and digital-social divide challenge
 Discrepancy of supply structures, access possibilities and social
demand
 E-learning policy is often dominated by hypothetic/speculative
scenarios, overstatements.
• Are we working with real needs along real situations or modelling the
needs and situations?
 “learners must change, learning must change, system has to
change, schools must change …”

9. 9
„Rhizomatic learning”
• Proliferating informal and non-formal learning contexts, situations, with
the help of ICT
• Practice of learning which is diversifying spontaneously
without co-ordination,
• Nodes, able to grow independently, no center, no boundaries
(cf. blogs, wikis)
• Strength and weakness at the same time: the content and competence is
legitimated by the networked co-operation.
A botanical metaphor, offering flexible conception of knowledge for the information age: the rhizome. A
rhizomatic plant has no center and no defined boundary; rather, it is made up of a number of semi-
independent nodes, each of which is capable of growing and spreading on its own, bounded only by the
limits of its habitat.
• http://davecormier.com/edblog/2008/06/03

10. Distortive effects of the free world of the web
• Concept and business model of voluntary contribution, free
work for the online community
– Authors: User generated content, Wikipedia- Peers : mentors,
tutors, evaluators, advisors online.
• ANYTIME - ANYWHERE...? - Moving parts of the burden of
education on the learners' shoulders: time and often costs
as well.
• The openness model and underfunded educational systems
• What can change the scenario?
– A breakthrough when employers will consider, accept the
atypical certifications as"normal" ones
• Civil society, professional community is our strength
- Needs investment in the power of the organisations !

11. Thank you!
www.eden-online.org