What is cyberculture?
This article explores the usefulness to the field of educational communication theoretical reflection about cyber culture. It explores the concept of educational communication and its potential links to cyber culture (in both concept and production space environment). It is linked with some notes on the complex thoughts and finally uses lines described as theoretical reflection for educational communication.
To define the seemingly obvious: Educational Communication (EC)
Reflection on communication education has increased in recent decades, there is no justification to persist in confusion or misunderstanding of these two concepts, certainly wide open, but that can be identified and operationalized by the actors of educational communication practices.
Media literacy, education for the reception, Image pedagogy, educational media, educational communication, nonformal education, leisure education, technology education are some of the most common names to describe the complex web of relationships that affect the binomial communication and education. We understand the binomial principle EC in the field of cultural intersections that have taken shape over the past four decades. Either way, Smith (2000) notes that while progress has been made, the result in many cases remains a notable lack of integration and a consistent little comparative analysis of the various systematic experiences in both education and practice social of various social institutions. Thus one of the challenges in the consolidation of the EC is the systematization of experience and empirical work to test and study the behavior of some descriptive variables in education-communication practices. This, as pointed out later is fundamental to the consolidation of cyberculture.
The first systematic reflections between education (ie school, formal education in the first place) and communication (especially mass media) from the early seventies. The first attempt for definition by the UNESCO dating from 1972 with the Faure report Learning to Be "in 1979 an expert group at the same institution, recognized and recommended the study of education" with "," through "y" to "the media as a strategic knowledge. This debate has increased by two ways: the recognition of the importance that the educational and school is in development and the new appeals of the new technologies of information and knowledge (ICT) that have strained the formal classroom and require a reconfiguration of educational practices capable of taking into account the specific needs of the players involved and the demands of social media. A visual pedagogues of the sixties, the experiences (radio for example) the alternative use of (micro and large) media for social emancipation processes, is bringing out a consensus among educators and communications specialists to the needs imposed by technical progress requires a similar development of the formal education system who knows about all being proactive and creative at the same time he knows criticize and analyze the implications of sociocultural impact of ICT.
A look at traditional areas of the EC can help demarcate its borders with more substance and consider the whole wide strategies that can result. These four areas are.
Educational Communication
Some of the questions that emerge from this first area is, what is the best way to transmit knowledge, how to make teaching and transmit any message properly? (Perhaps the visions functionalists and behaviorists in the social theories of the media may say something about it, here means the actual means of transmission of information and all that is "communicative" can be seen in the teaching. Usually communication teaching comes with a functional approach to guidance and regulation in the content, procedures to organize, prioritize and manage information in relation to the vehicles used, the objectives, the environment and the characteristics of the recipient. The teaching we see it as a level of basic skills that enables the building of more complex communication strategies.. A functional approach and edu-positivist communication can stay in this descriptive level that does not pay much attention to aspects such as interaction, context or history.
Classroom Communication
Communication in the classroom where we study the field of communication and interaction. As in communication theory is mainly systemic approach or schools that are responsible for the study of the subsystems involved in the interaction. Another approach (like those of a humanistic psychology) are concerned to know and build the conditions for effective interaction free of coercion where people can participate openly and where deemed communicative-referential levels of interaction as well as meta-communicative relational.
Education by and for the media
Reflection on the problems of distance education, education by the media. From this perspective, the educational community would be the specialist who can produce post-program-content for different levels and to collaborate with educators and teachers in the areas in the design of strategies to use and develop these materials especially in non-formal education ( distance, data transmission, semi-face ...). From the questions that seem ever more pressing are the interactive and cognitive consequences of using certain means, resources or technology: what makes the content using two means of one or another setting, what specific objectives and serve mainly what structural implications, perceptual possess. The success of distance education in various countries is one indicator of how the social needs of demanding action and universities.
Education for critical reception
Education for critical reception has its origins in the literacy of the mass media to raise standards and ensure receptor perceptual skills that allow reception most critical levels. On the premise that the recipient is not born but made, for receiving education for the development of methodologies according to messaging systems to build a message reader that combines information on the various codes of messages, social practices, impact and may in turn become a player of such systems. Critical literacy can have many purposes ranging from the recognition of rhetorical structures of the messages they convey visual electronic media, or to more specific objectives can be defined as the narrative organization of the telocoele, the use of language in a certain group social or political awareness through systematic cluster viewing of messages. Here in receiving training becomes a pretext to drive other types of literacy and eventually strengthen the broader process of critical awareness not only about the role of the media, but above all, the structures of power and property that they are based.
Of these four areas are some activities that flow from a specialist in educational communication. Traditionally this activity is usually performed by teachers who are interested in some further communication technology skills or "communications specialists / communicators" that they are interested in any of the areas of educational tasks or their educational experience with a strong imprint communicative. While the formal education field margins are clearly defined action, semi-face education, non-formal, informal offers many possibilities for that level of municipality, district or committee to develop education-communication programs. If the technologies have already embraced the culture, not justified or lukewarm indifference of the authorities, the idea of development is not limited to the number of computers or terminals bases but above all the community's ability to use ICTs as tools for produce knowledge (not just information) and since they meet the most pressing questions as a community.
The discussion around ICT is not only competition in telecommunications specialist or teaching, his discussion of strategic importance in the design of educational, cultural and communicative, especially since the debate on education in the information society and knowledge includes other sectors, it was de-schooling education to conform more instrumental as a cultural category that linked to social organization. To upgrade the educational communication term sociocultural propose a definition from the cyberculture, which retrieves the new rationality of complex thought, all without denying a tradition of educational communication in Latin America, linked to processes of social demand, strengthening the public sphere and colonization of the lifeworld. Let us describe some concepts.
Cyberculture and Educational Communication
Cyber in Greek means the person who rules, guide, and "culture" which is originally in Latin, the idea of culture, development and productive land was eventually acquired the meaning universe of all representations of the world and life. Culture expresses the life of sense and meaning of their lives. That second nature full of symbols, text, meta-text that the human species to survive and to generate live.
The CC that reality can be understood as cultural emergency arises from the interaction between cyberspace and culture, in the manner of a web of meanings that can interpret experience and guide action. For Gonzalez (2003) the CC is a communication strategy is a culture / culture of coordination of actions for growth and development of the players involved and the social environment. Remember that communication is articulated by two terms: the suffix (ing) "action" and the root communis, meaning "make common" or pooling of shares. Unlike the cultural use of the etymological root in the word "communis" Gonzalez prefers the biological connotation: see communication style do neurotransmitters in the nervous system of living beings.
For the full realization of the CC, Gonzalez (2001) suggests the development of three cultures / culture: (a) information, (b) research and knowledge and (c) communication.
As to the first is succinctly in the generation of information systems that serve as generic platforms for design, evaluation and prospects to relevant stakeholders in the processes and teaching-learning environments. Gonzalez complaint and in Mexico there is a culture of information leading to the formation constant and growing databases. Information systems do not mean mere accumulation of data, and operators are tools to view, sort, preserve and potential knowledge is not known. Systems tailored information, where knowledge, that specific capital that has accumulated in educational settings is fed and from which all actors can make a profit, retrieve it, use it, "buying time" to articulate more effectively actions, have greater information for decision making.
The research culture and knowledge not only has to do with the training of researchers and producers of professional knowledge, but they are permanent and ongoing activities at all levels of development activity, an institution or ministry. The research work focuses on how to convert certain problems into research questions and observable dimensions, relationships to generate special information systems that allow us to solve, according to each level of expertise.
Some of the questions arising from this dimension (cyber) culture are, what action can be improved as an actor in the communication, how to be set up that the various edu-communicative actions are being carried according to a program or a goal?
The third culture, the media has to do with building horizontal relationships as a condition for the effective coordination of actions. According to Gonzalez the majority of institutional relations at looking "up", "down" but not "sideways." In work environments learn to give or receive orders, but not to work collectively, to build consensus, is more difficult in these highly hierarchical and stratified societies with strong authoritarian tendencies are not building this culture of horizontalis.
CC Developing teaching-learning environments is something that has to do with a composite and complementary development of these three cultures / culture. Note that the prefix "cyber" refers not necessarily restricted to the field of computers and chips, but with exponential growth and development and collective organizing potential of groups, interpretive frameworks and not just know computers or operating functionally. The EC CC perspective is to work together information systems, research and communication dialogically constructed, multi-directionally (peer, student-teacher, administrator, principals, teachers, managers, trade unions) in teaching-learning environment, training. The CC helps to articulate communicator educational activities, promote awareness, the production / dissemination of knowledge in a society with so many deficiencies and emergencies such as peripheral. The center of the educational activity has left much to be the transmission and reception of content in the classroom to take a more complex design. The purpose of the study of CC-communicators in education is to develop new operators to carry the design of new maps to understand and intervene in the world "virtual" and real information systems that allow players to relate to communication processes himself differently, with the information and its partners.
Complexity and Educational Communication
Along with the idea of cyberculture the idea of complexity is important in our theoretical characterization has to be explored in more detail the conceptual links between complexity and cybercultural. At the invitation of UNESCO, Edgar Morin made an interesting contribution to reflection on the essence of education in the third millennium. Mainly Retomamos Morin and apply that complexity has made to educational thinking. The complexity is primarily a thought that relates to and works through the principles of self organization, system-organization and what it calls the principle Morin (not just the parties are on the whole, but the whole is within the parties ). "The Complex" has been endorsed by UNESCO and the work that they asked Edgar Morin has turned into a great series explanatory light on the conception of work in the knowledge goals and structure of educational curricula in the school of century.
With the new emerging paradigm of complexity science that "notes" after-disciplinary phenomena and not confined to the discovery of truth, but its construction is what is human from a broader perspective and distinct (complex) (cf. Mass, 2003). For Morin (2001) complex thinking is able to conceive the complexity of social reality in its anthropological micro dimension (being single), which is a tapestry of events, actions, interactions, feed backs, determinations and hazards. His difficulty is that the fabric must be addressed-the infinite play of relationships, the solidarity of the phenomena with each other, the mist and uncertainty, contradiction and certainty.
To access the complexity of educational communication is necessary, as in any educational practice to develop and update knowledge, attitudes and abilities. In principle know the "new paradigm" of actors (enunciator) communication that is not conceived separately from the object and that (according to the investigation of second-order) sees her own look. This is a subject that does not reveal the truth, the building, its action will not object to the real but of what is thought to reality in the imaginative dimension that is not opposed to reason, but complementary and dialogue. The subject may perceive the object-see because it relates more and engages differently with the author, creates new ways of moving around the world resulting in a creative way to approach reality.
Secondly, the "Paradigm of the object of knowledge" is more open to the multicultural, trans-disciplinary. Betting on trans disciplinary is a creative act of communication from the diversity and complementarity. The speech that closed on an object opens study today of multiple relationships. Diversity is enriching if the join without fear, the key is to find new language to name things by new metaphors. This "new discourse" connects the theory, methodology, epistemology and even ontology. It's about creating a bond meta system that provides for the linkage between information systems, system research and communications.
Now, from the attitudes-demand skills of the actors are redefining rationality in communicative educational strategies based on three related skills to raise and look for differences. That is, act reflexively relations themselves the ways we use to communicate, so as to ensure that all interacting to as the aspiration of the popular communication and community models, say their own word or collectively assume its sameness . Another approach to promote is to contemplate the differences, means being able to appreciate both the detail, as a holistic configuration of the various special present for the rapport. Finally the ability to co-build a new relationship, ie co-produce responsible and strategically between callers, a new form of organization to coordinate actions, which builds its strength on the flexibility to integrate different generations and covered by path.
These three skills are his educational strategy for communication that enrich the idea of the relationship in the classroom, with the knowledge and the proper teacher-facilitator; have the potential to update and streamline the process itself. Recalling edu‑communicative models of Kaplun "focuses on content," "in conduct" and "in process", the latter takes place as the most appropriate in complex communication: the actor is no longer any actors of communication, but the process itself; of postive-functional epistemology centered on one of the poles of the communication process, we turn to an inter subjective conception which is based the "personal relationship" where differences are negotiated and complement; is not absolute sameness and other ness is counterbalance. After four centuries in which modernity privileged to the subject, the self, the ego cogito, Beuchot warns us of the temptation to fall into the opposite side: the absolutism of other ness. Anyway we cannot deny as other ness challenges us and challenges in environments characterized by social differentiation aggressive, very violent environments, few stable legal frameworks that characterize social environments in many countries of Latin America.