3. SOME PEDAGOGICAL NOTIONS FOR LEARNING WEB LITERACY

3.2.1 All learning as autonomy development

Let us begin the description of the pedagogical principles of the learning space Netro by thinking about a simple report of learning to ride a bicycle resembling what we understand as the aim of all learning.

When learning to ride a bicycle after hours of practice the two extra wheels supporting the bike are lifted higher and finally removed completely. The child learns to use the vehicle independently, first under adult guidance but later on, biking trips with siblings and peers may well be preferred to parents' company and new tricks are learned from peers. And eventually, after getting to know the routes of the neighbourhood it is likely that new quarters of the city will be explored, too.

The goal of learning in this case of riding a bicycle does not necessarily mean only the mastery of a number of specific skills, pedalling or braking, but a more holistic knowledge of being able to manage in various biking-related situations. And these situations reside in the lived-in-world. The optimal goal of learning thus is autonomy. Learning should support the development of autonomous individuals, who manage the in-the-world situations we are faced in our everyday lives. In the case of Netro, these situations are naturally the social practices that the web poses on us.

As was already discussed, the goal of learning on a larger scale can be regarded as managing the challenges of the knowledge society (Bereiter 2002). In this society change is a stable characteristic and there is an overload of information through various newer and older media. There are a number of characteristics education specialists use when describing learning that prepares us for this knowledge society. To mention a few, education should foster critical thinking, learning transferable skills, technological literacy, communication and negotiation skills, learning to learn, lifelong learning, self-directiveness and many more (see eg. Kohonen 1992:14-39, Scardamalia and Bereiter 1999:275, Ministry of Education 1999, 2003). All of the characteristics above share the idea of autonomy, the learner gaining more and more independence and becoming more and more capable of having control over his/her own learning.

Within the language learning research autonomy has been defined in various ways. According to Little (1991:7) autonomy can be defined as "a capacity for detachment, critical reflection, decision-making, and independent action. The various freedoms that autonomy implies are always conditional and constrained, never absolute." Benson (2001:47-50) defines autonomy as "a capacity to take charge of, or responsibility for, one's own learning." Van Lier (1996:12-20) discusses "the impetus for learning" coming from the learner, "who must want to learn" and argues for choice and responsibility being the central aspects of autonomy. According to van Lier, autonomous learners " have the freedom of choice, exploration, personal preferences but also responsibility for your own and your companions' journey".

If the goal of education is a person characterised as having the qualities above, the question is, how we can facilitate the development of such active lifelong learners. Education, thus, should foster learning. When striving for autonomy we need to support the learners so that they can develop their content knowledge but also their learning skills (see eg. Nunan 1992, Wenden 1998, Tynjälä 1999), that is, to familiarise them with the cognitive-constructive and social processes through which we construct new knowledge, learn about ourselves and the strategies used when learning. For if we accept the more holistic view of learning as striving towards autonomy and as educators facilitate this attempt, it can be argued that learners become not only better learners but also more active members of the communities to which they belong (see eg. van Lier 1996, Benson and Voller 1997, Benson 2001).

The learning space Netro can be seen to facilitate autonomy development in several ways. To mention a few, our aim is to create a learning space that requires a self-reflective and critical approach. Similarly to the biking metaphor in the beginning of this chapter, Netro also gradually challenges the learners to become more independent and self-directed, to learn more and more about the web, as well as themselves as readers and writers on the web. Naturally, many of the skills Netro can be seen to develop are transferable to other spheres of life and are not only bound to the context of the web.

Regarding autonomous management of the web as the optimal goal of web literacy development, and autonomy development as the goal of all learning, leads us to the question of how autonomy develops. According to Vygotsky (1978:57), any cultural development appears first on the social level and only after that on the individual level. In other words, autonomy is being fostered by social interaction. By adopting this view we want to integrate both the social practices as well as the individual minds into our pedagogical thinking. We begin with the latter, that is, how we as individual minds are understood to develop towards autonomy. Thus, in the following chapter we will briefly introduce a model of cognitive-constructive processes of learning.