Contenu du sommaire : Le numérique : une illusion pédagogique ?

This article addresses the persistence of some myths related to digital technology in education : the very existence of « digital technology », its effects and the transformations it is supposed to bring about in training. After highlighting the existence of these three myths in a body of recent French institutional texts (parliamentary reports, ministerial directives…), the article explores the reasons why the much more nuanced discourse of research is struggling to be heard, despite research results which all converge towards the same conclusions

Touch pads are being used more and more as tools for mobile learning in educational situations. These tools have certain obvious advantages and seem to be well perceived by learners. Nevertheless, international studies into their acceptability show that these perceptions are heterogeneous and depend on different factors related to the task performed with the tool, to the characteristics of the tool, to the users themselves and to the context of the tool's use.

This article re-situates the role that technology plays in innovation in adult education. It examines the juxtaposition of materials at macro, meso and micro levels to adopt a multi-scalar vision of innovation. After a study of the factors favoring innovation in training, the article proposes a comprehensive model of innovation. This is the TSIA model, which describes the four dimensions – technological, social, identity and axiological – of an interactive system.

This contribution is presented as a case study of the use of machines for training in an industrial environment. The case is old – it concerns computer-assisted education, and goes back to the 1980s, we might as well speak of prehistory ! – but it is basically quite modern. Indeed, many ingredients are common to computer-assisted education and today's digital technologies : the elimination of school learning as the basic educational model, the disappearance of the traditional trainer, the presence of connected equipment and interfaces ; the flexibility of place and time ; the shared feeling of being engaged in a « modern » practice, in phase with one's time.

Digital is a artifact, that this, a symbolic and material human artificial construct that modifies human activity and environment in which it is embedded. But before being used, humans enter into a relationship with the digital artifact in an immaterial way involving representations of activity, values, ways of carrying out the missions entrusted to it within organizational and productive modalities in transformation. It is these different dimensions of the subject-digital relationship that we will deal with from the theoretical framework of socio-cultural affordance.

In the last twenty years, digital technology has entered the sphere of higher education and has profoundly modified the functions of support in research and teaching. If the forms of appropriation are mainly anchored in a permanence of values and norms, the question of the appropriation of digital technology by higher education institutions seems to be linked above all to the capacity to define a pedagogical project and to bring together the conditions for a systemic alignment of the structuring functions of the educational sphere between ends and means.

The exponential development of digital means of access to knowledge and of learning systems integrating ICTs needs to be analyzed with regard to the challenges faced by the vocational training system. The digital economy is often presented as a way of facilitating learning and as a vector of self-education and the programmed decline of human teachers, of communities of trainers and training engineers. This contribution aims to question the use of digital technology in the processes of skills and knowledge development, and in the context of the interaction between social relations and technological innovations.

After a brief review of how individual attention functions, and how digital technology contributes (or not) to developing our capacity for attention, this article opens up some questions about the methods of designing digital tools, and examines their impact on our free will. The author goes on to propose individual and collective paths to support the development of capacities for discernment and emancipation with respect to digital technology, in training and beyond.

While pedagogical thought is driven by utopian motives, the latter become insidious in nature when they are adopted by digital technologies. With examples taken from different pedagogical discourses, the author shows how such motives generate a type of communication which is deaf and blind to reality, leading to a dilution of language in which repetition becomes proof – the phenomenon that Sfez calls tautism. The article goes on to lay the guidelines of an attempt at « detautisation », by presenting the idea that philosophical empowerment would allow the advent of an emancipated episteme. The author concludes by questioning the ramifications that utopian motives might weave with the teacher's desire for timelessness.

This article begins with the epistemological definition of the anthropology of the uses, a presentation of the iterative buckle of construction of the use and a description of its internal processes : poaching, oddjobbing (do-it-yourself) and gathering (butinage). Then, it develops three powers of the uses of the digital technology (strengthening, unveiling, link). This mode of conceptualization of the uses has consequences on the definition of the processes of education and training which will feed the conclusive part.