Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Since 1997, Mexico - like many Latin American countries - has seen significant public and private investment aimed at incorporating information technology in the classroom. In-class information technology holds the great promise of revolutionizing the teaching-learning process. The reality is different, often showing negligible impact from such efforts. One common criticism has been the failure to properly train and support teachers before rolling out technology for use in their classrooms. This article looks at a recent effort of the Mexican government to address the issue of teacher training and support. @prende 2.0 was a program of the Mexican federal government that involved 2,700 digital trainers who trained more than 63,000 teachers in the use of technological equipment that they would be provided. Analyzing administration information and hard data from @prende, this article analyzes the program’s successes and challenges to fashion a series of recommendations regarding similar training and support efforts. 

This article focuses on educational technology as applied in the context of programs and institutions that offer completely distance education courses. All education in the 21st century is digital education in that the use of networking, text and image creation and editing and search and retrieval of information punctuates the life of almost every teacher and student.  However, the context of distance education – where all the interactions are mediated, creates a unique and heightened context of digitalization. This paper focuses on two questions: (1) What aspects have not been completely satisfactory in the transit and transformation that education has undergone, from its more traditional, campus-based conception, towards its new configuration marked by the continuous use of digital technologies and environments? (2) In order what are the future challenges that distance education must deal with to support sustainability of this teaching model?From a theoretical and interpretative analysis, based on the review of relevant articles and documents on distance education, some critical dimensions (limitations, unkept promises and future challenges) the use of digital technologies in distance education is identified and subsequently analyzed. These dimensions evidence how the initial (sometimes excessive) enthusiasm about the insertion of digital technologies in distance education has not (yet?) been fully reflected in reality.

This paper explores the ways in which students perceive digital technology as being helpful and/or useful to their schooling. Drawing upon survey data from students (n=1174) across three Australian high schools, the paper highlights seventeen distinct digital ‘benefits’ in domains such as information seeking, writing and composition, accessing prescribed work, scheduling and managing study tasks. While these data confirm the centrality of such technologies to students’ experiences of school, they also suggest that digital technology is not substantially changing or ‘transforming’ the nature of schools and schooling per se. Instead, students were most likely to associate digital technologies with managing the logistics of individual study and engaging with school work in distinctly teacher-led linear and passive ways. As such, it is concluded that educationalists need to temper enthusiasms for what might be achieved through digital technologies, and instead develop better understandings of the realities of students’ instrumentally-driven uses of digital technology.

Educational change, particularly change involving the adoption of educational innovations, is a complex process. In Malaysia, the significant role of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in promoting digital education is reflected in the national ICT in education policy. Nevertheless, studies in the Malaysian educational context have shown that the policy implementation resulted in varying degrees of success. Through a discourse analysis approach, this paper aims to examine the evaluation studies on large scale initiatives introduced to digitize the Malaysian education system, from the Smart Schools programme to the incorporation of the Frog Virtual Learning Environment in classroom. The rationale behind these top-down initiatives and how they affected the stakeholders at the micro level, namely, teachers and students, are reviewed and analysed. The analysis informs our understanding of the factors that contribute to the successful and unsuccessful implementation of these initiatives and guide the planning of future policies.

Advocates of digital education have increasingly recognized the need for young people to acquire digital media literacy. However, this idea is often seen in instrumental terms, and is rarely implemented in any coherent or comprehensive way. This paper suggests that we need to move beyond a binary view of digital media as offering risks and opportunities for young people, and the narrow ideas of digital skills and internet safety to which it gives rise. The article propose that we should take a broader and more critical approach to the rise of ‘digital capitalism’, and to the ubiquity of digital media in everyday life. In this sense, the paper argue that the well-established conceptual framework and pedagogical strategies of media education can and should be extended to meet the new challenges posed by digital and social media.This article presents some reflections as an epigraph of the special issue "Digital learning: distraction or default for the future", whose final result has allowed us to group a set of critical research and analysis on the inclusion of digital technologies in educational contexts. The points of view presented in this epigraph is also developed in more detail in the book "The Media Education Manifesto" (Buckingham, 2019).

Today it is not easy to think in the society without the impact (and influence) of digital technologies. The relevance of digital devices and associated indicators are used as proxies to measure the development of societies today. In that context, both top-down and/or bottom-up technology in education initiatives seek to promote different forms of incorporating digital technologies in educational contexts. There are many successful experiences around the world to implement digital technologies in school contexts. However, it is critical to analyze the mismatch between the expectations and the reality but also to enquire how to provide better evidence and analysis to deepen and expand the knowledge in the field of education and technology from the Top-Down and Bottom-Up initiatives. Keeping that in mind, an international call for papers was launched that finally 14 contributions from 12 countries were included in this special issue. The articles shed light about two important aspects: (1) how good technical solutions cannot ignore the context in which these digital technologies are being used or adopted. (2) how the access to technologies can simply amplify the existing inequalities within a society (as well as between different societies) if additional (in most cases non-technical) components are not being carefully considered.

In the last fitty years, the remarkable development of digital technology, that has permeated practically all social, economic and cultural, political and technological realms is producing several phenomena that have a direct impact in education. In this paper, I discuss first, the fact that more and more we refer to digital technology as just ‘technology”, as if the rest of the many organizational, symbolic, artefactual and biotechnological developments were something “natural”. Second, I refer to the rise and spread of technological solutionism in education and a growing discourse that sees every new digital technology as the arrival of the Promised Land, as the panacea to solve the problems of education. I go on analysing the collateral effects of this discourse in the educational practice, with an especial reference to persuasive technologies and Big Data. The article concludes with the request and the need for researchers, practitioners and education policy makers to avoid the temptation to solve a deeply "wicked" problem such as education with simple solutions.

This article analyzes the reasons behind the end of the ICT in education policy (Enlaces) driven by the Chilean Ministry of Education for 25 years. The argument is that the institution that sought to give sustainability to this policy over time, ended up losing its ability to lead relevant responses to the educational challenges posed by the growing digitalization of the Chilean society. To develop this argument, first we describe the main characteristics, history and results of Enlaces until 2018, and second, we analyze the institutional development of Enlaces in light of the challenges posed to ICT in education policies in the world.

The aim of this work is to trace a route on the perception of the variety of Spanish spoken in Andalusia, from its beginnings in the 16th century to its presence in current technological supports, such as those evidenced by the digital press. For this purpose, we will select a series of representative samples: book references from the 16th to 19th centuries, audiovisual extracts from television series,films and, finally, journalistic texts collected in the Spanish digital press. The corpus arises as a result of our experience as researchers of the literary representation of Andalusian and of the linguistic ideologies reflected in the media. The latter are inventoried in a resource available to the entire academic community, such as the Virtual Linguistic Archive of the “Lengua y Prensa” project (www.lenguayprensa.uma.es). The analysis of some crucial landmarks will serve to reinforce a fundamental conclusion: despite the disguise of innocence with which it is usually dressed (throughits association with grace, humour or sympathy as an object of anthropological study), on other occasions the hate speech to Andalusian reveals the crudest intention of the person who issues it: personal disqualification, contempt for a society or position of superiority.

Spanish is the third most widely used language on the Internet. It is therefore necessary to turn to the Internet ecosystem in order to study Spanish, both in the description of our linguistic system and in the study of the relationship between language and reality. Rather than linguistics departments in universities, it is the large online sales companies who are leading the development of language programmes for natural language processing such as converting speech to written text, and conversely, transforming written text to speech, as well as morphosyntactic analysers, de-ambiguators, and more. At the same time, users generate such a large quantity of written and oral text on social networks that today the digital ecosystem comprises the largest study corpus of the diverse linguistic use, even though some voices opposed to this approach discredit this corpus as being unregulated by rules-based correction. For both of these reasons, one must to pay careful attention to the digital ecosystem in order to study the real use that speakers of Spanish make of our language, thereby allowing for a reliable analysis based on objective data to be carried out with regard to such disparate and complementary fields.