Moving on Towards the “New Normal” in Education: ICEM 2022 Annual Conference Reflection
In a time characterized by reality as a fluid concept between virtual reality, physical presence, augmented reality and other modalities, education knows unprecedented challenges. The world is globally marked by the instability of pandemia, war, and climate crisis, intensifying individuals’ awareness regarding threats to humanity.
On the education front, kids are daily immersed in the digital world, but it’s crucial that they learn to use digital devices safely and ethically, focusing on learning to enrich and deepen knowledge, rather than just entertainment or isolation from social life and interaction.
This special volume of EMI brings together topics that discuss education in the digital age. They are addressed by several researchers from all over the world, Africa, Asia, America, Europe, from countries such as Angola, Singapore, the USA or Estonia, Spain and Portugal.
Regarding students, there are approaches about how to make young learners more proficient in computational thinking, through non-formal programming summer courses. Empowering women in technology, using role models tailored for young girls, is another topic. It has been under discussion for more than a decade but the discussion remains pertinent and is revisited and reinvented in order to find orientations and solutions for the problem. Additionally, there is a section that focuses on guiding lower secondary students in the development of creative work, facilitated by prototyping, design teams, implementing ideas into tangible forms, from paper to digital, using more collaborative design and empathic involvement.
Concerning the recent pandemic, one of the chapters of this volume underscores the need of fostering students’ multiple intelligences through effective social and emotional learning (SEL) and stresses that teachers should provide more socio-communicative, metacognitive and affective learning outcomes and inputs to help their students in their learning strategies.
In the field of health education, a study about preclinical learning, using virtual reality-based education for nursing students, appears to be a valid approach in remote learning. Another issue involves the integration of artificial intelligence chatbots as digital teaching assistants. The importance of interdisciplinarity with STEAM approaches, combined with the Internet of Things, is another concern of today’s education, in order to promote participatory citizenship.
Whereby post-graduate students are concerned, a conceptual framework of digital competences for information literacy of doctoral programs is presented, based on literature review. Some of the reflections concern media literacy in early education in the European policies and their differences in countries like Germany, Portugal, Slovakia and Bulgaria. Teachers’ skills to incorporate the use of digital technologies, their training and perceptions about the potential of DT to enhance their students’ learning is also a concern in this volume.