In association with
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Speaker BiographyRoger Säljö, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
to use cultural tools, and how we acquire competences and skills that are foundational to living in a socially and technologically complex society. In recent years, he has worked extensively with issues that concern how digital technologies and the new media transform learning practices inside and outside formal schooling. Recent publications include: Lantz-Andersson, A., Linderoth, J., & Säljö, R. (in press). What’s the problem? Meaning making and learning to do mathematical word problems in the context of digital tools. Instructional Science, Ivarsson, J., Linderoth, J., & Säljö, R. (in press). Representations in practices: A sociocultural approach to multimodality. In C. Jewitt (Ed.), Handbook of multimodal analysis. London: Routledge, and Jakobsson, A., Mäkitalo, Å., & Säljö, R. (in press). Learning to reason in the context of socioscientific problems: exploring the demands on students in ‘new’ classroom activities. In K. Kumpulainen & M. Cesar (Eds.), Investigating Classroom Interaction: Methodological Choices and Challenges. London: Sense Publishers. He is currently the Director of LinCS, a national centre of excellence in research on learning and media funded by the Swedish Research Council, and he is also a Finland Distinguished Professor at the Centre for Learning Research at the University of Turku. Technology, mediation and access to the social memoryRoger Säljö Through learning people become familiar with what John Dewey refers to as the cultural capital of civilization. A significant element of the cultural capital of a society are the technologies available for storing past social experiences, i.e. resources which can be used for building up a social memory. Technologies with documentary functions, be they texts, data bases, images, formulae or narratives, rely on a combination of material and semiotic tools in the sense that the use of inscriptions requires that the individual is acquainted with specialized kinds of meaning-making practices. This implies that documentary practices co-determine how we use our intellectual capacities. Texts made it possible to document information and narratives, and printing made it possible to circulate such resources. An interesting feature of the current development of digital technologies is that they make it possible to document and distribute not just information but also the traces of human thought processes in the form of increasingly sophisticated procedures that are integrated into tools such as modern software and specially designed tools for organizing and structuring information for local use. Through such packaging of procedurally organized intellectual routines people are able to master complex activities without understanding the operations on which they build. This feature of digital technology is currently changing our conceptions of what learning is and what it should be. |
Location: Brighton, UK
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Roger Säljö is professor of educational psychology at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He specializes in research on learning, interaction and human development in a sociocultural and interactionist perspective. Much of his work is related to issues of how people learn