WIKIS - AN ENVIRONMENT FOR DEVELOPING SPECIFIC (ACADEMIC) LANGUAGE LEARNING AND DIGITAL COMPETENCES
WIKIS - AN ENVIRONMENT FOR DEVELOPING SPECIFIC (ACADEMIC) LANGUAGE LEARNING AND DIGITAL COMPETENCES

Summary/Abstract: Recent reports show that European education policy makers are having a difficult time keeping up the pace with the effects of technological advance on the educational landscape and graduate employability. An increasing number of educational experts and researchers participate in a joint effort to define, extend and improve digital competence as an essential component in a rapidly changing world. The present research is based on the assumption that new technologies generate educational, social, and cultural effects that are visible in the learning environment. For instance, within the area of languages for specific and academic purposes, digital and media literacy have been embedded in online courses as cross-curricular competences. Starting from the definition of digital competence as “the capacity to mobilize different "literacies" to manage the information and communicate knowledge and solve issues in an evolving society,” the authors investigate whether digital competences needed in a wiki-based online environment built for academic language learning are enhanced during the learning process. For this purpose, a selection from the Framework for digital competences published in 2013 is used to analyse and interpret data collected from a sample of wiki pages containing students’ assignments carried out during an academic semester.

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