Learning ecologies in the digital era: challenges for higher education
Mercedes González Sanmamed, Albert Sangrà, Alba Souto-Seijo, Iris Estévez
Abstract
The immersion of society in the digital age has decisively influenced people’s ways of behaving, in the field of work, economy, entertainment and teaching. Higher education is undergoing a great transformation due to the technological development in which we are immersed, and these continuous changes have shown the need to keep us updated permanently, thus adopting the idea of life-long learning. Each person and each professional has a wide and diverse range of possibilities to be trained and to learn, which requires individuals to take more and more control over their own learning process. The concept of learning ecologies provides a framework of analysis to know how we learn, and what contexts and/or elements we use to train ourselves, in order to provide us with new learning opportunities. Being aware of the elements and / or contexts that make up our learning ecologies can be a very useful strategy to help us update ourselves in a self-directed and effective way. This has led us to carry out a bibliographic study aimed at identifying some of the aspects that characterize the new ways in which we learn, which will allow us to understand the role that the university should play in today’s society.