Contenu du sommaire : Les élèves, entre cahiers et claviers

Classroom strategies rest largely on the use of digital tools combined with developing skills to support information searches and processing, content production and creativity, collective work and collaboration. These strategies are designed to match social practices, especially among young people. Ideally, their implementation should be supported by specific training for both teachers and students, suitable equipment and infrastructure and project-based educational approaches. The point of our article is not to describe what happens in practice in the classroom, but rather to bring out the representations reflected in these requirements, as well as shortcomings and contradictions compared to the means actually available to achieve the objectives. Our research is based on a study of a pilot educational establishment where all the right conditions were present in theory. Our point of view highlights the compromises that have to be made daily between what is supposed to be taught and what actually can be taught, as well as with market players in terms of professional ethics and the drive for efficiency.

In recent decades, the question of integrating technology in schools regularly reappears in a cycle of positivist discourse, while the policies applied produce an equally regular cycle of disappointment. Radio, television and computers, and now information and communication technologies, are all ranged under the “digital” banner, a term whose emergence and presence in official discourse we analyse here.

The education landscape has been transformed by the digital industry, raising questions about the way learning assessments are being taken over by technology and industrialisation. Through a socio-technical analysis of industrialisation in education and training, this article explores the political, economic, social and technical dimensions of the changes that have occurred. After discussing the issue of learning assessments, we bring out the types of logic that drive choices as regards assessment practice and its industrialisation.

This article discusses how digital resources have been integrated into schools in Morocco, and especially secondary schools. We describe the national GENIE programme (GENéralisation des Technologies de l'Information et de Communication dans l'Enseignement) implemented by the Ministry for Education from 2005 to 2016.This programme was first introduced to bring a new impetus to classroom practice by bringing Information and Communication Technologies within reach of all teachers and students. Ten years after the launch of the GENIE programme, we discuss a wide-ranging assessment conducted with secondary school pupils and teachers in different disciplines in order to highlight the main outcomes of the GENIE programme in terms of both successes and difficulties encountered by the main players concerned.

Are educational uses of digital information and communication systems a direct legacy of the way textbooks were used in the school system that emerged in the mid-19th century ? At the time, schools were supposed to provide education for primarily productive purposes. Today, education is being digitised to serve a multitude of disparate educational goals. The resulting uncertainties are more keenly felt in primary schools than at any other level of education.

In France, digital educational content is the most recent chapter in the long history of tools and media brought into use to support progress in the functions of educational establishments and in access to and transfers of knowledge. This is a history that can be told not only through technological progress and experimentation, but also through the convergence of government policy and economic interests. In the context of globalisation, it shows how policy prerogatives have shifted towards economic and commercial players, with access to knowledge becoming increasingly privatised and not always primarily for the benefit of students.

A great many scientific studies in the humanities and social sciences have shown that the spread of a technology always goes together with imagined and utopian technophile scenarios where the assumption is that technical innovations are the necessary driver of social, individual and collective progress. This point of view is operative in day-to-day communication and a highly fertile source of discourse on the virtues of digitisation in education. Among the multiple promises of digitisation, the development of autonomy has had pride of place for many years. In this article, we keep today's prevailing technophile ideologies at a distance to offer a critical analysis of the promise whereby digitisation necessarily promotes autonomy in students.

This article explores the relationship between educational establishments and digital technologies from the perspective of public policies and the technological innovations that have influenced them throughout their history. Our approach shows why learning new modes of reading and writing and new ways of acquiring and producing knowledge has to be a central prerogative of the education system. By sketching out a profile of the “digitally literate” learner, this article offers an appraisal not of the role of digital content in schools but of how learning takes place in an environment and a culture that are increasingly shaped by digitisation.

In France, “learning your humanities” used to mean “going to school”. But what does the phrase “digital humanities” mean ? Pointing to a paradoxical meeting point between so-called classical studies and digital information and knowledge engineering, the phrase refers to the impact of the digital environment on learning and to the new intellectual affiliations of the digital universe. Representing both continuity and a break with the past, the digital humanities are contributing to the debate on the transformation of education. In this article, we explore educational scenarios in the humanities, the different educational directions taken as digital technologies evolve, and digital strategies in schools. The humanities, which include aspirations towards humanism, are joining the debate on digital schooling.

In the past, educational technologies have been promoted by an accompanying technophile discourse aiming to persuade teachers and learners alike of their legitimacy and the innovating character of their particular features. MOOCs are a good example of hyper-promoted potential, yet they have limitations that are identified here through a critical approach, which also shows why they are specific and how they are distinct from previous techno-educational innovations. Finally, will MOOCs live up to their promise, can we expect them to survive once the enthusiasm of novelty wears off and which way will their technological and social context take them in the future ? Because the real point at issue in the transfer of knowledge lies in the complexity of human communication.

Careers guidance and helping students develop their digital culture are issues that are reflected in new educational policies. What experiences involving digital resources are being tried out in France to support students' career plans ? How are the relevant classroom tasks organised ? What effects can be expected in terms of learning how to search for information ? And how are they contributing to reading and writing skills ?

The recent comeback of robotics in education reflects renewed interest in schools and society for an object that encapsulates the role and the power of data as the fundamental units of information, communication, activities and exchanges. Robots, and the way they feature in school curricula and activities, demand approaches that reach beyond programming operations and address social and educational values concerning emancipation via an object (as a means to people's relationships with the technical), a language (as a means to support communication) and a project (as a means to support thinking and learning activities).

Learning at school implies doing tasks. Through a brief review of the literature, we look at whether digital technologies are causing learning tasks to disappear or change, or creating new ones. We distinguish between the effects of educational technologies, of digital tools imported into the school environment and of the changing information environment. While classroom tasks have remained fundamentally unchanged, they are sometimes facilitated, sometimes made more complex, but always profoundly changed – which ultimately either improves or degrades the learning process.

The “concepts” of “digital natives” and “Generation Y” are actually media-driven commonplaces, in constant use but never criticised. This article questions these notions by putting them into historical and sociological perspective. When seen in this light, their attendant sense of euphoria fades, as socio-economic and socio-cultural differences bring the supposed technological ingenuity of the younger generations into question. The author underlines the fundamental role of mediators in young people's educational and cultural uses of ITCs.

How should the question of digital resources in schools be addressed in view of the relationship between knowledge, citizenship and exchanges ? How can school pupils, students and others in learning situations acquire a digital culture without becoming subjected to the interests of giant digital platforms ? How, in a digitised world, can they experience the individual autonomy that contemporary schooling should provide for ? The first part of this article attempts to define digital culture, in accordance with the two generally accepted meanings of the term « culture » : practices that build up and consolidate human groups, and practices of cultural creation. Digital resources produce social usages, collective creativity and ongoing interactions between authors and readers. A digital culture makes the idea of the commons a reality, and this is an encouragement to consider new approaches to the uses of digital resources in school, which is the subject of the second part of our article. Taking part in the knowledge commons and learning how to publish – how to speak to an audience – can once again become school activities that will incorporate digital resources in ways that go beyond the acquisition of IT skills alone, thus developing the digital literacy that can ensure people's autonomy with regard to the oligopolistic nature of online systems.

This article centres on the teaching community's efforts to cope with institutional and social demands relating to digitisation. Utopia and ideology are useful concepts to help disentangle teachers' ideals and wanting to « do the right thing » from the way they see their work and their educational relationships with digital resources, in a system driven by paradox and injunction. Digitisation, a particularly divisive topic in the teaching community, seems to be an instrumentalising force in the interests of a sense of « being innovative ».

Looking beyond the instrumental approach, which reduces digital learning to a form of manipulation dictated by the industrial logic of IT companies and platforms and pupils to docile consumers, a teaching approach from the angle of the « commons » uses digital resources as an environment to be understood and transformed, in all its informational, editorial and political dimensions. By making the ability to use tools central to the question of digital ecosystems and their governance, this educational approach helps to initiate not only group work, but also a way of sharing that enriches the knowledge commons well beyond the sphere of education.

Based on fieldwork combining interviews and observations of escort boys and their clients, this article shows how the Internet both lengthens and recomposes the time factor in prostitution. It discusses how this “extra time” creates a space where functional exchanges underpin relationships that are based on mutual understanding and recognition. These practices help to neutralise of the stigma surrounding the sale and purchase of sexual services. At the same time, they demonstrate the unique and unexpected “anthropological depth” that characterises escorting.