As a follow-up to the first article:
6. How does a computer's memory work?
Computer memory assigns addresses to objects: it consists of a large metadata system that allows the search for information through the identification of an address.
7. How does human memory work?
Human memory is made as a system of appeals. Mental representations are all the more active, therefore able to be called to consciousness, the more they have been treated in perspective, reworked. In order to memorize infrequent activities, it is necessary to associate them with something.
8. What does it mean to learn?
Learning means creating mental representations that can be remembered if they are active in the system. We do many things in this sense empirically and elementarily: when we underline, summarize, copy by hand, read aloud, we give an extra treatment to the information. Deepening and live representation allow connections.
9. Is the fatigue of learning avoidable?
No. There is no data to support the idea that it is necessary to increase simplicity and playfulness in learning. Learning while having fun is a poorly founded concept. Learning can never be as much fun as playing a football game. The task of the school is immense because it provides for the modification of people's brains in a few years. Learning to read takes 2000 hours of reading; becoming an expert in something takes 5000 hours of dedicated activity. You have to know that you need hard work.
10. What is a digital ideology?
Digital ideology supports the unconditional transmigration of paper over digital, considering the latter preferable to the former. The spread of this ideology feeds the rhetoric of digital knowledge in which the real ways of building skills disappear, in the absence of effort and, indeed, in a playful scenario.
11. What is the main use of digital among adolescents?
Recent research suggests that the use of digital among adolescents is reduced to social networking and the sharing of entertainment materials; it is challenging to ensure that a playful use can serve something deeply more challenging and different.
12. Can you really learn to learn?
No, you can't learn to learn unless you learn something. We know what it is to learn because we have learned things thoroughly. There is no high-level deepening skills without specialism. Modern scientific research stems from respect for the fact that a certain mystique of digital and the happy random discovery on the net erases, as do the mediators and the expertise of the specialists.
13. Is there a difference between information and knowledge?
Digital is an exceptional and very powerful resource as far as access to information is concerned. But access to information is something different from knowledge: a more complex process of building knowledge that involves activities such as study, experimentation, demonstration, exercise, mastery.
14. What is creativity?
Creativity comes from having learned many things. Genes are hyperspecialized individuals who have sedimented an enormous amount of mental representations in their field: "in there" something happens. In this sense, creativity cannot be taught. Depriving students of the opportunity to specialize in something means depriving them of the opportunity to really learn.
15. What is the school policy in Italy in terms of the digital agenda?
There is no clear ministerial policy, each ministry has pursued different policies (interactive whiteboard, classes 2.0, etc. ...) changing program before the previous one was somehow completed. All this in the face of the very serious deficiencies of the necessary infrastructures and the cuts in funding. The present situation is often reduced to rhetoric without empirical support, which does not exclude that there are individual exceptions of happy experiences that cannot be measured.
16. What can a school do?
Adopt the precautionary principle with regard to the planned transformation towards an entirely digital scenario. Schools must protect in-depth reading - for the benefits, it continues to provide - from competition from the many stimuli that come from the world of digital connection. In the meantime, it should take the form of an active form of constructivism and action 2.0 research, supporting the design of active pathways into technology that involves students.