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Means and teaching materials. Conceptual foundations - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Through information and communication technologies, human beings have transmitted their thoughts, values and knowledge from generation to generation, they have been able to extend them beyond their territory or physical space, they have united those who were far away, ..., In short, through the media we human beings have been building the sociocultural framework of our past and of current civilization.
        
        As we pointed out in the first topic "Information society, digital technologies and education" each historical time, each civilization has one (or several) idiosyncratic, hegemonic technologies for its operation in the sense that a symbiotic relationship is established between society and technology , not a deterministic interaction.
      - The first footprints: icons in the stones
        The first great milestone linked to the need to express human thought was the engravings made on cave walls, on large stones or on animal bones by the first Homo sapiens populations more than 20,000 years ago.
        The animal paintings of Lascaux in France, the bison of the Altamira caves in Spain, the Saharan engravings of Tassili in North Africa, ... are some of the most outstanding vestiges in this attempt to leave a mark or reflection of thought human on a physical support other than his mind.
        The icons engraved on the stones (in the form of spirals, labyrinths, human or animal figures) were the first non-oral manifestations of communication.
        This phenomenon tells us that homo sapiens needed to transcend, to leave a record and permanence of his ideas and emotions.
        
        What is remarkable about this fact is that for the first time our biological species reaches a high evolutionary degree of intellectual development that allows it to embody or objectify its thought on a physical support beyond its brain.
        This materialization of ideas in stones or other objects is the first enduring manifestation of human thought. Handwriting.
        Thought transformed into symbols The expressive and cultural maturity of human civilization was not reached until the invention of writing.
        The creation of a set of symbols that combined under certain rules produced meaning was, perhaps, the most historically relevant cultural milestone.
        The earliest traces of writing date back to 2,000-3,000 years BC.
        
        The origin of the writing is due to the Mesopotamian civilization developed in the basin of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
        One of the first pieces of evidence that we know of a written engraving is the Hammurabi code from the second millennium before our era.
        
        The creation of alphabetic writing comes with the Phoenicians who established a limited number of graphic signs that, properly combined, allow naming everything that exists. However, the full use of writing in the service of culture and knowledge will be made by the Greco-Latin civilization.
        The extensive knowledge that we have today of Greek and Roman culture occurs because they left their mark on their thinking in written works.
        The different philosophers and creators (Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Ovid, ...) were first of all writers, that is, scholars who used the written text as a technology to communicate their ideas. Their thinking has reached our days because they recorded their ideas in written documents.
        
        Printed texts and schooling. One of the most notable sociocultural effects of printed technology was the need to organize educational processes around the book.
        Schooling, that is, institutionalized education aimed at the entire population, is a relatively recent historical phenomenon that appeared in Europe, in the midst of the industrial revolution, in the mid-nineteenth century.
        It was important, at that time, to educate the working labor force and transmit to the entire population a series of common cultural elements that would serve as national identity marks.
        
        To achieve such pedagogical goals, it was essential to develop a first-rate instrumental ability: knowing how to read and write, that is, knowing and mastering the codes of textual language. Access to knowledge and to perfection fulfilled this task.
        
        The audiovisual culture. The pleasure of the senses The end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th was a fertile time of discoveries and technological creations: the telegraph, radio, photography, the phonograph, cinematography, ... For the first time in history the human being was able to manipulate energy atoms to transform them into meaningful data.
        
        The digitization of information. Towards virtual environments The twentieth century, in addition to being the century of audiovisual culture, has been the beginning of the digital age. In the middle of the century, the first large information processing machines encoded in a binary data system were built.
        The creation of the ENIAC in 1946 is considered as the milestone that opened the technological evolution of computing.
        It was a huge machine (it took up almost 1,500 m2) that worked with vacuum valves.
        The development of the transistor in the 1950s will reduce the size and speed of machines.
        
        The digitization of information based on the use of computer technology is the great cultural revolution of the present. Digital technologies (computers, CD-ROM multimedia equipment, local networks, Internet, digital television ...) present a series of features that clearly differentiate them from traditional technologies (books, index cards, encyclopedias, videos, ...)
        
        In short, the use of digital technologies for educational purposes promises to open up new dimensions and possibilities in the teaching-learning processes since they offer a large amount of interconnected information for the user to manipulate; They allow greater individualization and flexibility of the instructional process, adapting it to the particular needs of each user; represent and transmit information through multiple expressive forms causing user motivation; and they help to overcome temporal limitations and / or geographical distances between teachers and students, constituting these in virtual learning communities.
- - - - Faced with the conceptualizations of the media that underlie the previous definitions, we have found one that we believe fits our vision of the media, while being sufficiently complete, in the sense that it includes the defining critical attributes of the media. teaching. This definition to which we refer is the one offered by Escudero (1983, p.91):
        "(teaching medium) is any technological resource that articulates in a certain system of symbols certain messages with instructive purposes".
    - - MANIPULATIVE MEANS
        These means would be the set of resources and materials that would be characterized by offering subjects a mode of representation of knowledge of an inactive nature. In other words, the modality of learning experience that these means make possible is contingent, only that it must be intentionally regulated under a teaching context.
        The actual objects and resources:
        1 It would be the entire set of materials that by themselves do not encode or represent a reality beyond themselves, but that under a teaching context are capable of causing learning to the extent that they are used for said purposes. The following media would be included in this category:
        
        environmental material (minerals, animals, plants, etc)
        
        research and work material (microscope, scales, cuvettes, thermometers, etc.).
        
        Symbolic Manipulative Media: Also within the manipulative media there would be another category of materials whose property is to provoke learning through an inactive experience, but which differs from the previous ones in that they do represent and encode a reality that transcends them as mere objects. I am referring to symbolic manipulative means. This category would include:
        
        logic blocks, rulers, geometric figures and other logic-mathematical material, games and toys.
        
        TEXTUAL MEDIA
        This category includes all the resources that mainly use verbal codes as the predominant symbolic system. For the most part they are materials that are produced by some kind of printing mechanism. Although today, the meaning of "text" transcends beyond the mere physical support of paper, to also include the cathode ray tube (texts on computer screens) (Jonassen, 1982).
        Consequently, in the category of textual media we include the following resources:
        
        Teacher-oriented material: Teacher or didactic guides, curricular guides, other curricular support materials
        
        Student-oriented material: Textbooks, Reading-writing material Other textual materials.
        
        AUDIOVISUAL MEDIA
        They are all that set of resources that predominantly encode their messages through iconic representations through an electronic medium. The image is the main symbolic modality through which knowledge is presented.
        In this sense, it is also necessary to classify these types of media into still images and moving images. The attribute of movement in images is powerful enough to mark notable differences in syntax and symbolic structuring in these media, making it necessary to subdivide iconic media into the two aforementioned subcategories. Based on this, the means that could be integrated here are:
        
        Still image media :. overhead projector of transparencies; slide projector: episcope; the blackboard; poster, comic
        
        Moving image media: the movie projector2; TV; video.
        
        HEARING MEDIA
        They are those resources and materials that use sound as the predominant coding modality. Music, oral words, real sounds of nature, onomatopoeia, ..., represent the most common codes through which messages are presented in these media.
        The resources we include here are the following:
        . The cassette; The turntable; Radio.
        
        INFORMATIONAL MEDIA
        This set of resources, representative of the so-called "new technologies", are characterized by the fact that they make it possible internally to develop, use and combine any type of symbolic encoding of information without distinction. Verbal codes, iconic fixed or moving, sound are likely to be used in computer systems. The quintessential medium that is included in this category is the computer.
        So here we have to include what is called digital systems that include media such as videoconferences, CD-ROM, virtual reality, and the different Internet services: WWW, email, chats, etc.
- - - - According to Solomon, the factors that influence the determination of the amount of mental activity required of a student in a learning situation would be given by:
        1) individual differences of the subjects, both in their cognitive development and in the mastery of one or other cognitive abilities. Certainly, this group should include other non-cognitive variables such as personality, prior knowledge, interest, etc., and
        2) the task to be carried out (memorize, solve problems, classify, ...) from the medium. Therefore, "one system of symbols communicates better than another not because of a similarity between the symbol represented and its referent, but because a system of symbols, in comparison with others, can present the information in better correspondence to -or congruence with - the mode of representation that an individual, with a certain cognitive structure and a given task, can best use "(Salomón, 1979, p. 73).
        
        In short, according to this author, the process and way of obtaining knowledge when a subject interacts with a medium would be regulated by the following principles:
        
        The media, insofar as they encode knowledge differently, require different skills in subjects to decode messages. Consequently, it can be suggested that the type of symbolic structuring used by the medium will tend to cultivate in the subjects some processes and cognitive abilities over others.
        
        The degree of learning that can be obtained from the medium will be influenced by the degree of isomorphism between the coding presented by the medium and the internal coding carried out by the subject to process said information.
        
        The environment may have the potential to supplant certain cognitive operations of the subject, which in contact with the environment, would tend to acquire said operations.
        
        The different ways of symbolizing information in the media also affect the amount of mental activity and effort required to decode it.
- - - - What we want to rule out is that the curricular media and materials are information and communication technologies that at the service of a curricular program or project represent, under various forms and symbolic systems, the knowledge and culture that students are supposed to acquire.
        
        The first idea derived from the previous statement is that the media allow subjects to obtain knowledge through figuratively or symbolically mediated learning experiences. That is, learning through media and materials involves a process of acquiring knowledge carried out beyond the mere contingent or direct experience of the reality that surrounds them.
        
        Logically from all of this derives the need for the teaching processes to teach students the skills of knowing how to access the different sources of information and master the languages of symbolic representation (not only textual, but also audiovisual and sound language).
      - The media not only allow access to new information or knowledge, but are also the resources that enable students to express and express their own ideas, knowledge and feelings. For this, teaching must offer experiences that go beyond the decoding of messages, presenting opportunities for children to use different types of media as resources for expression and communication.
        This means that in school education students must become literate not only in the domain of linguistic codes and symbols (that is, textual language), but also learning processes must be developed aimed at students interacting and knowing how to express themselves in other types of languages such as those of a sound and / or audiovisual nature.
        
        The second consideration is that the media and materials, from an ideological point of view, are not neutral neither in the values they transmit nor in the social implications and personal interaction that are produced by their use.
        Consequently, the media are not a mere vehicle for transmitting ideas that reflect reality in a neutral and faithful way, but inevitably what they offer to students is a “representation” of knowledge and culture.
        
        The elaboration of any curricular material (be it a textbook, a didactic video or an electronic material) is a creative act of its authors.
        This implies that they make decisions regarding the selection of the ideas or messages that the material will carry, decisions about the educational goals for which said material is useful and appropriate, about the activities that the students will have to carry out, ... That is to say , the elaboration of a curricular material inevitably implies that its authors have a certain conception and ideological vision of the society and reality that surrounds us, a certain theory or vision of education, and entails a certain teaching and learning model in which supposedly said material will be integrated.