Various pedagogies, including the use of digital learning in education, have been used and researched for the past 40 years, but schools have little to show for these initiatives. This contrasts starkly with technology-supported initiatives in other fields such as business, health care, and the military. Traditional pedagogies and general digital technology applications have yet impact education in significant ways that transforms learning. This handbook posits that a primary reason for this minimal impact on learning is that digital technologies have attempted to make traditional instructional processes more efficient rather than using a more appropriate paradigm for learning. As there have been transformative applications in other fields, the book will identify suggested transformative applications that empower learners. As technology is used as a partner in other fields, transformative applications become partners with students (not teachers) to empower their learning process in and out of school.
This handbook identifies and justifies the paradigm of transformative learning and pedagogies in education, provides exemplars of existing transformative applications that, if used as partners to empower student learning, have the potential to dramatically engage students in a kind of learning that better fits 21st century learners, and provides pedagogical models to help teachers empower students to learn.
